XVII. The Final Ending

XVII. The Final Ending

The last chapter is all I wrote in 2005. I will now telescope the next ten years into a few paragraphs, because everything that happened after the drama of 2004-2005 has been denouement—a fate pressing toward a single obligatory end. 

At the end of the last chapter, I still didn’t know where things stood between me and Tina. I spent six weeks that summer in Fairbanks taking education classes, and she spent the time in Eagle fucking Danny. She managed to total our new car on the Taylor Highway, and bought us a replacement with the insurance money—a little Toyota I drove for the next five years. When summer school was over we were together just long enough for the school year to steal me away from her bedside. She had made a secret pact with herself to try living with me for six months before leaving me for Danny. It wasn’t nearly six months because of the time I spent in Fairbanks and the time she had spent in Eagle, but who’s trying to be fair? 

In November she got on a bus to visit Danny for a few weeks and did not come back for three years. She was supposed to come home for Christmas, and every time I called her to find out when she was coming, she said she didn’t know. She-didn’t-know sailed past Christmas, and the most miserable time of my life was spent before a wood fire I had lit for Tina which she never felt. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. In my mind I had rehearsed dozens of scenarios of impending disaster, but Tina leaving me was the most unimaginable event I ever had to get my mind around. Convinced she was never coming back to me I started dating a local woman. During one of my suicidal fits, she actually saved my life—a debt I can never repay.

This was fine with Tina for a while—as long as she and Danny were hitting it off, what did she care? She had finally sold me on the idea that you could love two men at the same time, so why not love two women at the same time? It was quite an adjustment for me, but I was able to use my 60s hippie mentality to accept  it. Unfortunately, when the tables were turned Tina did not handle it so well.

To make a long story short, she lived in Eagle for about 2 and a half years, with several long visits back there, interspersed over the next several years, finally dying away to nothing in 2015. She found that her mental health could not tolerate isolation from doctors, and she had begun to become dissatisfied with Danny’s intellectual limitations. It turns out she liked my mind a lot more than I thought, and she missed having intelligent conversations about elevated subjects, as opposed to browsing with unbridled enthusiasm through Gun Magazine. 

By this time the local woman and I had carved out a life for ourselves in Bear Creek. This woman made me happy in ways I had NEVER been made happy. She gave me stability, peace, harmony (I have never raised my voice to her or had a fight with her), and great sex. When Tina came to live with us in Anchorage (Ambrose and Ellyn were both in Anchorage at the time), I was on a busy travel schedule commuting back and forth from Bear Creek to Ahnina; where I had one day’s class of students, and backing forth from Bear Creek to Anchorage. I was teaching in three different towns at once, and spent 4 night a week in Bear Creek and three nights a week in Anchorage.

Tina always had in the back of her mind the idea that we would get back together—that I would simply throw out into the street the woman who had saved my life and showed me what a sane life was like. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do that. I thought we had a pretty good arrangement. As I mentioned earlier, Tina and I always enjoyed short separations because it was hard for us to get along when we were constantly in each other’s face; so, three days a week? Cool! Of course she couldn’t allow herself to have sex with me if I were sleeping with another woman, but, again, I didn’t think this was a big deal: she had kept me sex-starved for years, so obviously sex with me was not a high priority—she had spent her autumn passion on Billy and there was nothing left.

So why stay together in any wise at all? I don’t think ANYBODY knew the depth of connection between Tina and me. I adore my common law wife, but, with her, there will never be the depth of emotional tie and sympathy that obtained between me and Tina. It is not just the twenty-five years, it is something about our souls tied together from many past lives. I suffered from practically every second I spent with her, because her pain was like a radiant beam that penetrated everything around it; and yet I craved the ability to assuage some of her anxiety, and support her in an open-handed way. The feeling of belonging to her was stronger than the repulsion. Anyway, we had developed routines and traditions—our dates to the movies, walks in wooded parks, certain TV shows we enjoyed together, and the Friday morning breakfast at the pancake place, where she had a strawberry soufflé, the highlight of her week. We shopped together, we cleaned together, we cooked together, and miracle of miracles we SLEPT together for the first time in our lives! This is not quite true, because Tina usually had a sleepless period of several hours a night, during which she moved to the daybed in the living room and listened to NPR; but we always went to sleep together and usually got up together. I think of these as “the good old days”.

I really tried to imagine moving back to Pullman, but I just couldn’t do it. As Tina said, “A sourdough is someone who has soured on Alaska and has no dough to leave.” I was stuck in Alaska. Financial disaster would have haunted my last miserable days, trying to re-establish my long-abandoned dynasty, and fighting not only prejudice against Asperger’s Syndrome, but prejudice against old people. No. I couldn’t do it.

Then she pronounced this fateful sentence, “This life is not working for me.” I thought she had a fine life—an inner circle of friends, nice apartment, editing work, welfare money, doctors up the wazzu—perfect. But it was never enough. 

We got a divorce that spring. NOW LISTEN: the divorce was just supposed to make it easier for her to get welfare money—there were too many occasions where my income might be added to hers, in figuring out welfare benefits, so we were going to get a LEGAL divorce. It was never intended to be a real divorce—to me nothing was going to change. But Tina took the whole legal ceremony to heart, and without planning it, she started really divorcing herself from me.

She also began to fixate on my Bear Creek wife, and became more and more angry about that. She had a destructive episode in June of 2016, and decided to leave for Idaho—home. She realized our whole relationship was a sham (to her). This was when she started thinking of herself as abused. She had imagined that my voice had been gradually rising in decibel level over the past months, an accusation I flatly deny. To be sure, we had our normal squabbles (for the life of me, I can’t remember what a single one of them was about), but I know that my voice was not raised to anything like the pitch it had been in Pullman—she had just become more sensitive to it, such that normally appropriately subtle inflections came to be perceived as torrential storms of emotion. I know I did not sound that torrential storm because I did not feel anything that intensely anymore; the pain of losing her in 2005 had numbed me to all similar stimuli, and I was pretty much just floating emotionally.

But she felt betrayed AGAIN, and decided she must separate herself from me totally. (I have my doubts about that—it sounds like some psychiatrist’s bad advice.) 

The Anchorage apartment became a torture chamber of memories, and I felt I had to act to exorcise Tina from the place so I could stand to live there. I wrote to her, (through my son—she had blocked me from her own email) that I was going to start sending boxes of stuff down to Idaho at my expense. She took this as a threat that I was going to throw out her stuff. She then arranged, without my knowledge to have a moving company pack up her stuff and send it to Idaho. She never thought it through—she can’t possibly have thought she could move her stuff as cheaply as buying new stuff—and the personal stuff I was going to send.

And this is surprising, because often she had been quite canny at devising these complicated little plans. But her mind was going. These violent emotional episodes were frying her brain, and her decision-making programs were even more corrupted than before. She was going blind. Nobody would hire her. Her dream of coming home was dashed. She hated me and blamed me for fucking up her life. Her last phone call to me reminded me of the fit she had in June—she sounded like a demon from Hell screaming obscenities.

The next day my son called me and told me she had committed suicide. There was not the slightest possibility of my attending her funeral—I was sure she had so besmirched my reputation with her siblings that they would surely look on me as the murderer of their sister. She had really been playing up the abusive husband theme song—she had to, she lived the first month in a home for abused women. And anyway, most of the Freemans inherited their mother’s personality trait of always needing to blame someone. I’m sure she came to consider me more and more abusive with repetition of the text in her mind, but I was not even there. I admit that the SITUATION we found ourselves in could be easily construed as abusive, because it proclaimed her failure as a wife, but I took no active part in this abuse, and I resent the implication that I was anything other than a man in a complex situation trying to do the right thing for all his loved ones. In her last phone call she tried to get me to admit that I had ruined her life. I would not take responsibility; however, I did NOT say, “You ruined your own life.”

The final suicide of Tina Louise Freeman(-Toole) has left me hollow. However, I have been in psychic communication with her, and it is my pleasure to report that she is doing well. There was very little guilt to work through, on the other side, because she really had no choice at the end—she had to put a stop this pain that was never going to get any better, only worse. Her body was decaying at such a rate, that she might not be able to take action if she waited too much longer. Suicide was her obsession, and she couldn’t risk not killing herself by living a little longer. 

As always, I admire the class with which she did the deed. I had always assumed it would be pills, because that was going to be the method in San Jose, but recently she had heard that some 15% of drug overdoses fail, and she wanted to be sure that this BULLSHIT IS OVER! To blow her brains out in a field after calling the sheriff—that is so cool! so classy! so totally determined. What I can’t handle is reliving her pain. I know what she was thinking because her mentor, suicide David Foster Wallace has laid it out in his book; a suicide is a person in a burning building who has two choices: be consumed by the fire, or jump out the window. Tina finally jumped out the window, and our lives will never be the same, but I think all will be happier, especially her.  

Love eternally,

Your husband,

RFT