I remember telling my sister something about a month or so after it was confirmed that our entire life savings — as well as all of the money in our working trust — had been embezzled.
I was sitting on the bed in the guest room in that fancy waterfront condo I mentioned in the very first post of this blog. I never really went into that room — unless I needed to clean it after someone stayed the night. But I actually liked the colorful furnishings and the layout of that room very much. Out of every room in our house, the cheerful, more modern furnishings reflected who I felt like I was at that time more than all of Lou’s “man furniture” ever did.
But I specifically remember this call with my sister because I think it was the first time I came clean with her about what was really going on with our finances. I’d been trying to hold off telling her the whole truth because I didn’t want her to worry, and, I think I was also still trying to personally comprehend the bigness of our reality for myself. I knew once I told my sister the facts, then it would all become more real to me, too, and I think I had been putting it off because I didn’t know how I’d handle the bewilderment I was trying to shove down into my being.
I know for certain that I had just finished up my ironing before I decided to call my sister because the reason I was in that room in the first place was that I had just ironed the bright orange pillowcases of the throw pillows on that bed. They always looked so crisp and happy when they were perfectly pressed, and in a really weird way, that gave me the courage I needed to tell my sister the whole truth. I vividly remember pushing the wooden buttons on one of the pillowcases through the buttonhole when I was telling my sister the whole story.
I’m pretty sure that in the early part of that phone call, I probably just blurted things out to my sister — and, I’m sure I cried. And I know she must’ve asked me questions, and so I’m sure did my best to answer them — even though none of the answers I had to offer her made any sense to me at the time. My sister was always trying to find out how she could help, but as you already understand by now, everything that was unraveling in those very early days made it impossible for any single person to jump in and “save the day.”
But let me just confirm this: venting to my sister was memorably complicated for me.
On the one hand, I wanted her to know what I was going through, but on the other hand, I didn’t want her to put her worries about me back onto me in the form of her worries that I would then have to carry, too! (Does that even make sense?) How others “worry about me” has always been a tricky thing for me to unwind in my mind — even before my whole journey with financial loss. My experience with having cancer has always made me feel nervous about handling the pity or the fear others end up having about what’s going in my body, and back in the day, I recall times in my life where I felt like I had to try to come up with a way to make someone else feel better about the horrible thing that was happening to me!
Anyway. As is always the case, my sister was memorably solid on that phone call, and even though I’m positive she was really concerned and wanted to help her little sister somehow, knowing how much I just needed her to hear me must’ve been clear to her, too. So once I got through the details of our situation — including what Lou had just learned about our trust and how everything tied to our account was just plain gone — I could finally reach down into the layers of emotions I wanted to express to my greatest confidant in this world.
That’s when I remember telling my sister that I felt like I was made of glass.
I compared myself to a clear glass jar. You could see right through me — there was no way for me to hide anything from anyone anymore — but I told her that I knew I was also strong. And, I remember telling her I could hold things in my being, but I could also pour things out. I was still useful, even though I didn’t know what to do. And, I also told her I knew I could handle heat just as well as I could handle cold. I was tougher than I ever knew I could be…
“But…” I remember saying, “If you drop me, I know I’ll break into a million pieces and you might never be able to put me back together again.”
I wrote about this call in my journal. But the words I wrote showed up in my journal in the form of prayer. In that entry, I begged God not to drop me. And I pleaded with Him, in fact, to never hold me up too high ever again because the fall from a higher place would surely destroy me more than a fall from a lesser height if He decided to let go of me. And I told God in this entry that I didn’t know if I could ever trust anything ever again… and, I confessed to Him that I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help but at least try to trust that He was still holding the glass version of me in His hand.
I wrote, “I need to believe in you, God, because I honestly don’t know what else to do…”
As I try to start the process of wrapping up this memoir, I’m reminded of those words because they perfectly define me to this day. I’ve done my best in every post to be completely transparent, and in many ways, I have found a lot of relief in being the one to show you the flaws in me and my story that I already know you’ll be able to see on your own. And, I’ve also found great perspective in containing the brutal heat of my story, as well as the bitter chill of it, too, because I know none of the things that have happened to me have had the power to totally ruin me.
But when I think about the most transparent version of myself falling from a great height, I wonder if God truly took my written prayer in my journal to heart. Being so close to selling my pilot was an amazing feeling, and I honestly believed it was going to happen!! Finally. It was going to be “my turn,” and Eloise and I were finally going to have our day! But when I look at all of the things that contributed to that climb, I do believe if things had continued to unfold for me the way they were starting to…
A devastating fall from a height I was never meant to reach would have destroyed me.
After I got the news from Roy that Ira had passed, I got a boilerplate email from Ira’s office letting me know that I would need to wait for my contract with his firm to expire before I could make a move of any kind on my pilot. And the email also stated that Ira’s firm would retain the right to move forward with the project inside of that year — but Roy had already told me that wasn’t going to happen. It was really over, and now, I just had to let the clock run out on that dream.
The clock has run out — in fact, at this moment in time, three full years have passed, and I’m pretty far into a fourth. And even now, I’m not sure how to contain myself or the details of that experience anymore because it all seems surreal. It feels like I lost something I never really had, yet I did have it… It’s such a heady mix of emotions for me even with the passing of time — I guess because so many other things were mixed up into that period of my life, and with me, it never gets to be “just one thing.”
Of course, not long after I got those emails from Ira’s office, Lou and I had to shut down our wine company, too, and that’s when we found ourselves “imposing” all over again… We moved out of our sweet little cottage in the middle of a vineyard, and I shoved all of our stuff into the back of our car again — however, a few of our gracious friends allowed us to keep some of our “overflow” in their garages and storage spaces. Then, another spectacular friend allowed us to move into her little AirB&B apartment during the off-season, and in that tiny space, I felt like Lou and I both hit an all-new kind of rock bottom.
Eventually, we both kind of stopped believing in ourselves, I think, and I really started to lose track of a lot of things in my heart. I don’t think I knew how to be “me” anymore. I guess that’s mostly because I didn’t know who “me” actually was in the first place! The glass version of me was so transparent I could see straight through myself…
