Snippets of a Single Father V

A Life Going Up in Smoke

I used to be a smoker, a cigarette smoker. Amongst the reasons I smoked were just for the enjoyment of it, inability to break a habit and the false belief it calmed my nerves. It didn’t calm my nerves.

Towards the end of my marriage and family, when something particularly awful would happen, I would sit on the back stoop in the total darkness of my backyard at 3am and chainsmoke three or four cigarettes. Inhaling so darned deeply and rapidly that a cigarette would only last me less than a minute.

I remember one night was so awful I took four cigarettes together, held them in a clump in my fingers, lit them and smoked them all at the same time. I didn’t do this to be funny or to experiment. I truly thought the more I could smoke the calmer I would get. It didn’t work of course. It just made me sick. And the pain and terror were far too intense and deep to be relieved by almost anything.

I didn’t drink alcohol, which had been a decision I had made that I believed would help one of the deteriorating aspects of our unfortunate family situation. I had never really enjoyed it so avoiding alcohol was easy. Cigarettes, unfortunately, were my only source of relief or distraction and a much harder nut to crack.

My mind was going absolutely wild with dark and negative thoughts for a few years. Cigarette smoking didn’t help. It seemed that when I let my imagination go wild while smoking, it would go places I wish it had not.

At a certain point of the divorce, after having been brutally beaten down by the incredibly biased family court system for months, I reached a particularly low bottom. It was a point in which I was forced to accept that the whole system was stacked against me. There was absolutely nothing I could do. All the good intentions in the world could not help me. My desire to protect and shield my daughters was irrelevant and ignored. I was considered a nagging buffoon who wouldn’t shut up. Nothing about me or what I thought mattered to the judge or court.

The trigger to that bottom occurred on one typical morning when we had a 9am court date and the judge would not show up until sometime before noon. To distract myself I made the awful mistake of sitting in a courtroom. The proceedings began and a man, the husband, had taken the stand. It was like watching a 50 car high speed pileup crash that included 2 exploding tankers of caustic chemicals.

His wife’s attorney was grilling him about God knows what and he was answering with what seemed like the last drops of life he had in him. He looked dead to me. Pale, weak and slumped over. Shabby jacket and tie in a weak effort to look presentable. I remember thinking he resembled a captured American spy who had been beaten down by the Russians in an isolated Siberian Gulag. I didn’t have any idea of his situation, but I immediately identified with him. After the system was done with me, I would be as dead as this man. A zombie, barely clinging onto life. It became so overwhelming that I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of that courtroom as soon as I could.

It also just so happened that day that some big decisions had been made by the judge that basically spelled out the end of my life, family and relationship with my daughters in every way. I walked to my car in a numb haze feeling like I was floating off the ground. I smoked about six cigarettes while leaning on the car considering any of the ways my mind could conjure up to end all of this. When I realized I didn’t have the courage for any of the suggestions, I left for the station to go to work.

My mind was racing all day and my imagination had used the dead man on the witness stand as a fuel to make it much worse for me. I didn’t know what a panic attack was back then, but I would start to feel my chest tighten up like someone had placed an anvil on it and my breathing became rapid and short. The only solution my damaged brain seemed to trust when this happened was to step out and have a cigarette.

Manhattan was in the process of outlawing cigarette smoking at the time so standing on the sidewalk would only be shame piled upon shame, which was the last thing I needed. There was an alley next to my building where I would go. In that alley, for whatever reason, a masterfully created film of what my life was about to become played in my head.

The divorce was over and I had lost everything. I was living in a tiny rented studio basement apartment somewhere in Queens. The apartment was too small for the girls to stay over or even visit. They were ashamed of their father and didn’t even want to see me. I had lost my job and had to take something that didn’t pay as well, so the little money I had was drained away to satisfy all the court orders.

My parents had aged enormously as a result of the decimation of my family but were willing to do whatever they could to help me. I had grown too skinny and pale to see them often as I didn’t want to worry them as I was withering away. The final scene of that movie was my walking in a neighborhood where my daughters were living with their mother and I glimpsed them having a wonderful time, laughing and singing. I was just smoking and smoking, wondering what I had done to deserve this.

I shook my head violently, tossing the movie instantly out of my head. This was not how I would end. I knew there wasn’t much hope, but I would still do everything I could. At this point nothing was for me, it was all for the girls. Including quitting smoking. That was the day I decided to quit. It took me a few times over a few years, but that was the first step. Looking down into that dark bottomless chasm, a tiny twinkle of hope had emerged.

*******

…At the very last minute, all the determined aspects of the divorce that had been decided completely changed. Many were the opposite of what I had expected. I still can’t explain it to this day. Many people have theories of their own, I personally believed God had taken mercy on me in that alley, standing next to me, watching the movie together, looking down that dark chasm. It was the only reason that made any sense to me.

As dark, fragile and hopeless your path may become, He will always be part of the darkness as an invisible light, part of the fragility as the unseen force that keeps it from falling apart, part of the hopelessness as the miniscule spark that lights the tiny wick left on the dying candle.