I. Foreword

  The Third Flight of the Phoenix

I. Foreword

Let’s not bury the lead —Tina Louise Freeman(-Toole) is dead. She blew her brains out in October of 2016. This book is not about that—it is account of the crucial events, more than ten years earlier, that led to that fateful end. Louise’e last book Asylum in the Woods tells the story of this period (2002-2006) from her perspective—this is mine.  The few years between 2002 and 2006 were a fulcrum in time when everything we knew was pivoted, turned upside down, and everything we loved and believed in became jeopardized. It is important for any one who knew and loved Louise (mostly the family calls her Tina) to understand the depth of her mental illness, and to appreciate the distance she put between herself and her loved ones; without this understanding, Tina’s life and death amount to a constant tragedy—this is not a memory of her we wish to keep.

Furthermore, this book is only partly about her—it is I, telling MY story. Why? To help me through the grieving process, to be sure, and to contribute to the memorials I am leaving her on the internet; but there is another reason: when Tina was writing her book, she asked me if it would ok for her to make me more of a villain. I had no problem—it was only a book. But now I find I have become a villain in the entire world’s eye, and as little as I care about the people who think badly of me, there is an inner pressure inside me to see justice, if not done, at least expressed in print. Since Tina left me, barely three months before she took her own life, I have grieved continually; but I heard the news of her suicide without surprise or tears; it was news long overdue. Suicide was her rallying cry, her personal anthem, her constant companion, her breakfast of champions. Not once, when I could not get through to her on the phone for some reason, did I NOT think, “She’s finally killed herself.” So, when my son Emlyn called me to tell me, the news rolled over me like tonight’s sunset—the shoe that finally dropped.

I always thought that the two books together, Asylum in the Woods, and The Third Flight of thePhoenix, might make a nice pair, because together they tell a fascinating story that I would love to read and weep over, if it were not that the people and the feelings are real to me. I suppose that is a project whose time will never come.

The first part of this book, (not given here) is a more or less straight chronological auto-biography, written two or three years after I came back to Idaho after getting my fancy, worthless doctor's degree.  It was a time of intense pain, the pain of disappointment, the pain of dissolution, the pain of poverty and the pain of an intensifying sense of failure.  In the first version of my story I hid behind the  pseudonym J.  Harker,  because I thought a slight fictionalizing of the subject would give me a greater distance, objectivity, and that particular irony of delivery which I have found attractive in literary works of high art.  The conceit, for those who didn't get it all ready, is that Jonathan Harker is the hero of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula; Harker first becomes a victim of Dracula, then in the end, with help them, overcomes and vanquishes the monster.  I thought the idea of vanquishing the monster, which was a symbol of the complex of my asperger's symptoms, was a clever idea.  I am now tired of cleverness.  I choose to tell this last part of the story in first-person, up close, in your face, with my heart on my sleeve, because this last part of the story is a  long love poem to my wife, the love of my life, my best friend, my worst enemy, my deliverer, the fire from which the Phoenix of my new self has arisen.  Also note that Tina was still very much alive (weird expression) when this tale is told. The final chapter deals with her final days.  

So, to begin: 

My wife Tina has always commented on my ability to, as she says, reinvent myself.  The first reinvention, I suppose, dates from my arrival in the Northwest where I tried to create a solemn citadel of high art among the tangled sagebrush of Idaho; this reinvention involved coming to see myself as a success  not only in the artistic world, but within the social strata of the academic world.  The climax of this redefinition took place at the Big U, where I thought I had become one of the educated elite, entitled to all the rights and privileges afforded thereto.  The disappointment of discovering that I had actually failed to enter the ranks of that elite after all, that is to say, get a job at a University, led to the dissolution of all the elements of the ego which I had used to build my concept of myself this second time.  The third redefinition begins in the ashes of this crashed and burned academic self, and ends in the snows of Alaska, where I lost the love of my soul mate, I disintegrated into a pile of river silt, and arose again yet another new man.