Words from a friend....

"Seriously, God has given you more than your share."

These words were posted to me on another board that I have belonged to for 5 years.

And when I see it echoed back to me from someone I don't really know, but who has also been there for almost as long (and followed my story all this time), I cannot help but hang my head.

Yes, God or whomever reigns in the heavens has either given me more than my share, or I have simply been so unfortunate as to only know what loss and struggle are. And not just of my own, but of those I love dearly, (my daughter), and how those things have torn away at my heart, and weakened me.

I could write a list a mile long of the things that have hurt.

It gets old for me to keep talking about them here.

Nothing in this life. And I do mean nothing...has gone easy for me.

Some would say that it is my own fault. That it is the way I behave, or act, or speak, or think.

But those same people are only just now seeing me.

They didn't know the man who used to believe.

They didn't know that somewhere along the way, I lost the light in my eyes. That I could no longer see happiness and good clearly anymore.

That I had become jaded, and cynical and lost my faith.

There was a time, I think, where I still thought that anything was possible. That it would all work out.

The turning point?

I think if I had to pick one particular time where I could say that it was the beginning of hell, it was on May 23, 2006.

On that morning, with my ex-wife in a full blown affair with my next door neighbor, she went to the courthouse, filed a temporary restraining order against me, and the police showed up at my door to escort me from my home. (I did not see this coming).

That the woman I married, now 20 some odd years later, would be with another man, and throwing me out with the garbage, from the home I built for her and my family....

That sealed it for me.

People are capable of such extreme cruelty. Even the people we once trusted more than anyone in the world.

That one act seemed to propel me down a series of losses that would not relent.

Each time, I would pick myself back up and try again.

Today, sitting at the kitchen table in the last home I have on this Earth, a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of NY, it has been over 4 years since that day. And in just 4 years, the changes and losses and pain have been almost non-stop.

God has given me more than my share.

I don't think God had anything to do with it.

I think sometimes, Hell is right here. Right now.