He died about a month later of "SIDS."
The police were polite but did nothing.
I must say I was floored by this article. This is nearly an exact reflection of my situation with my ex and my daughter.
The loss of my only child has been the most difficult thing I've had to deal with in my life outside the complete financial homicide my wealth ex perpetrated against me with the help of our so-called legal system.
Every time I tell my story to someone, they think it's a fluke. I assure them that it is not only common, but epidemic.
Thanks for sharing this very deep hurt so that the rest of us can share our pain with you as well.
I was diagnosed with ------- disease.
Very advanced… My wife expected me to die… She started dating….I somehow
survived….Came out of the hospital, went to ---------, and recovered
there. Came back….[A Southern US State’s] judges---not just one, mind
you, but several of them---said I could not see my kids because I was
dating a black woman…..
It took years…I refused to give up…..I finally nailed one Judge for
evasion of income taxes.
AFTER THE DELUGE
The voices you hear are your own, of course, a tiny fraction of them, grabbed at random.
In 2001, I went an entire year without saying much of anything, to a single soul. I exchanged pleasantries, of course, streams of meaningless chatter with grocery cashiers, salesmen in CD stores, waiting staff at coffee houses. I lived downtown in a high rise. Many old people lived there---very old people. I made a special point of engaging them. Often we would talk in an elevator. After the door had just clanged open, I would hear a faint click, and the door would lunge out again, barreling toward people who were eighty, ninety, and a hundred—small, fragile human beings with bones as delicate as disintegrating chalk. But if I were on that elevator, they would be safe. Needless to say, this was simple enough. I held out my left hand, the rubber bumper touched it, and in an instant the door lurched back. But I also knew something with absolute certainty. As long as I was there, I would protect the person whom I guarded. If the door became faulty, if a circuit failed, I would have attacked that door and did whatever I had to. Once again, I was of use. Once again, I was a protector.
I did not know something until last night, when I read your letters. It quickly became apparent. Twenty minutes after the column I wrote yesterday went on line, the E-mail started. By midnight it was a torrent. The number hovers around fifty this morning. Fifty, and rising. Of much greater significance, however, was the intensity of feeling. Rage, tenderness, yearning, pity, tenderness, grief—you name it and I heard it last night. Whatever the emotion happened to be, you spoke to me without a single exception in a voice that was impassioned, unwavering, courageous, and true. And brimming with love. Love was an ocean washing over a seawall, water flowing where it was needed, and where it was determined to go. You can’t stop running water.
As a writer, understatement has never been my greatest achievement. I get carried away. I get so carried away that sometimes I scarcely notice it when an editor has to throw his body across my blabbering mouth. But having said this, I say to you without any exaggeration: this was the second most overwhelming and important experience in my life. The first was the birth of my son. I can see his face as clearly as I did twenty-three years ago when he gasped and became a beautiful living spirit (and like his old man, inclined sometimes toward being a blabber mouth). With that exception, nothing has ever moved me more.
I am tired. I haven’t slept. I had wanted to integrate this experience and play it back to you. I wanted you to hear your own enormous power. And gentleness. I couldn’t do it. But I will. I’m beat. As in “tired.” Not “defeated.” I want that entered into the record. I know you understand.
I learned several things (say—two hundred?). Here are four:
We will prevail. Sooner than I’d ever
dared to dream.
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
