AldenSchooner

I posted a couple of days ago about the death of my alcoholic friend. The kind responses were overwhelming, and eased my guilt about him. However, I'm still struggling with anger bordering on wanting to seek vengeance. I need help with that. For a TL;DR, the very last paragraph sums up where my head is at if you want to skip what has ended up to be journaling.

My adult relationship with my ABF (after a high school relationship 40 years ago) was more complex than I had initially laid out. I wasn't leaving out these details to mislead anyone, but I've posted on other forums and I've learned that if I give every detail, the discussion derails from the issues I was hoping to discuss. Here I'm going to lay out the things I did that I know were wrong, but I either couldn't help myself, or I was too cowardly to admit the truth. Here goes...

Mistake #1: As I said in my initial post, after a whirlwind wonderful two weeks of reconnecting with the love of my life, I considered leaving my husband for him when the time was right. ABF and I were both married when we re-connected. When the red flags started to appear, I knew it would never happen. However, I never told him that. He spent the duration of our relationship believing that one day, we would be together. I did love him - with all my heart. But I wanted the SOBER, funny, witty, smart man he was in those giddy first two weeks. That man started to disappear pretty quickly. And fortunately (for me), I never really had to admit to my change of heart. We both agreed that even meeting while we were both married was unacceptable. He stayed married for 18 months. After that, the question of my leaving came down to how we could support ourselves. If I had still planned to leave my husband, there's no way I could have felt right taking significant assets as part of a divorce settlement. My husband is a dear, sweet man and wouldn't have deserved this. ABF was unable to work due to his worsening physical disabilities. So for a long time, there was that. Finally, COVID came along, so any discussion about maybe just meeting was easily dismissed. I was wrong to deceive him, but I justified it by convincing myself that, per his words, our conversations were the only good thing in his life. And lots of them were good things in my life, as well.

Mistake #2: He had a really, really rough life as a child and a teenager. His parents' relationship was beyond toxic. His father was a heavy drinker and a cheater, and his mother was an angry narcissist. He was put into foster care briefly just before we met. When he graduated from high school, he had been offered both academic and athletic scholarships, but his parents were both so preoccupied with their problems that there was no one to guide him through the process of getting into college, and he was too proud (or defeated) to ask for help from anyone else. So he enlisted in the Air Force, with a ton of emotional baggage that couldn't be addressed due to the culture of the military. He retired as a Senior Master Sergeant (very, very difficult to achieve) when he was about 42. He also had 3 failed marriages, five children, and the death of a child as additional emotional baggage. For quite a while, I gave his drinking a pass because I'm no stranger to self-medicating, and I grew up with an AF who had just as many demons. However, this leads to a series of mistakes I'll just call Mistake #3. They're big, and I'm not proud of them.

Mistake #3: Because I was deeply ignorant of the extent of his drinking, I assumed that he was just a soul in a lot of pain, and I was extremely protective of him. Anyone who hurt or betrayed him was a target of my wrath. The first was his last ex-wife. After they had separated, she started a Go Fund Me in order to fund Christmas for herself, her adult kids, and her parents. If she had stuck to talking only about herself, there would have been no problem. But she described ABF's problems in detail (nothing alcohol or drug related), something he had forbidden her to do years earlier on any type of social media. I immediately cloned the Go Fund Me, but changed the wording which painted her in a different light. Example: She described herself as a good person who always tried to help people, even going so far as to taking a trip to Africa to help children there. This was BS. She flew first class to Africa (paid with cash, not points), spent a week doing some "voluntourism", which she paid for, and then went on safari, where she managed to contract chikungunya, which caused her to become too disabled to work for three years. Once I had finished the alternate version of her narrative, I leveraged ABF's famous nephew's Twitter account (which the ex-wife did as well) to a) cause chaos, and b) to get her to remove ABF's personal information. Obviously I used an alternate identity for all of this, so she never knew it was me. I let her know via messaging that if she removed the references to ABF, I would take down the cloned account. She resisted for a day or two, but ultimately complied. I kept my word and removed the alt Go Fund Me. After that, she got very few donations and was furious. ABF had no advance knowledge that I had done this, and when I told him, he was delighted. He said he never had anyone "go to bat for him" like that. Well, that released the beast in me. Over four years, on about 5 or 6 occasions, I acted as his attack dog. To this day, I'm confident that the subjects of my attacks deserved it (and nothing I did was nearly as elaborate as the Go Fund Me thing), but what I didn't count on was that they all lacked the self-awareness to consider that maybe they had done something wrong. But I still shouldn't have done it. If anyone wants more details, I'm willing to provide them.

Mistake #4: When we were on speaking terms, both his brother and his son told me ABF was an alcoholic. I definitely thought this was a possibility, but honestly, their stories sounded like a series of isolated incidents rather than alcoholism as I understood it. He went on a few benders, and his drinking waxed and waned depending on what was going on in his life. When I confronted him about these revelations, he downplayed them, but he also said something interesting: That his father, who was very politically incorrect, told him that he was like an Indian - he couldn't handle fire water. This likely explained why his drinking was so much more problematic than his siblings' and his father's. He didn't drink as much, but when he did, he was exponentially more awful. That explanation flew until he was obviously drunk for days on end, and when I discovered that he was almost always drinking, but managed to stay just under the radar when talking to me. Also, his brother is an alcoholic, and his son has his own substance abuse problems, so I kind of discounted some of their warnings. And finally, never once did ABF ask for or need help financially or emotionally from anyone in his family. Quite the opposite. He was the one who took family members in, loaned or gave money, organized several terribly difficult funerals, etc. He promised his father on his deathbed that he would become the patriarch of the family, and that he would watch out for his stepmother and his alcoholic sister. Which from what I've heard, he did. So despite the suggestion that his drinking had been a burden on his family and that's the reason they abandoned him, I believe it's more plausible that he could be just as obnoxious sober and was perceived to be "less than" because of his failed relationships and the subsequent drama. Also, as far as I know, none of his divorces were due to his drinking. I can outline what I know about that if asked.

Why am I having a vengeance problem and what I fantasize doing about it:

1. His ex-wife was disabled for three years from what she said was chikungunya, but was never actually diagnosed. During that time, ABF took care of her. He was also sober at the time. She became addicted to fentanyl and took massive amounts of it. I've read up on chikungunya, and I've never seen a medical journal describe a case as severe as hers, or a treatment regimen that involved fentanyl. She was mostly bedridden, zonked out on painkillers, and wasn't receiving any kind of disability. ABF began to suffer from compassion fatigue. That's when his sobriety ended. But he still took care of her. When the tables were turned, she left him alone and unable to care for himself. This is actually illegal. She didn't have to do it herself, but in their state, she was obligated to facilitate care for him.
2. The ex-wife squandered almost $100,000 (source and amount undisclosed to ABF) before filing for separation, pleaded poverty, and overstated ABF's income by $100,000 per year. At the time of separation, he wasn't working and was only receiving his Air Force pension.
3. The alcoholic brother, who lived very nearby at the time, refused (at my request) to offer assistance in any way, even though ABF, over the years, had loaned him money for household items and even paid for his legal defense after a DUI and a child molestation charge. The brother's refusal had nothing to do with me - he just didn't wanna.
4. ABF's only daughter (adult) agreed to stay with him but ended up leaving (not sure why). While she was there, she stole his painkillers and some electronics, took his dog, ostensibly to care for her, but refused to provide updates for months on end, and used his credit cards without permission for months. Some history on her: She once accused him, out of spite, of molesting her. She was 13 at the time. She only recanted because she needed his financial help. ABF was a lot of things, but he was NOT a child molester. Not even close, not even when drunk.
5. ABF owned a pretty piece of land where he planned to live when he moved back home. In the interim, he allowed his oldest son, his wife, and their four kids to park an RV on the land and live rent-free. They trashed the property, got in trouble with the local zoning authorities, and rendered the cottage ABF planned to live in uninhabitable by allowing 10 or so cats to live in it for a year.
6. ABF's stepmother refused to allow him to stay at her large house while he arranged to salvage the cottage, while allowing ABF's alcoholic brother to live there rent-free. The reason? He was talking to a married woman. Alcohol never came up. The alcoholic brother had recently gotten divorced and moved back home, and suddenly found Jesus about marital fidelity after years of an open marriage.
7. ABF's son tried to stab him with a trench knife, and the entire family shunned ABF when he pressed charges. He didn't do it out of spite - he was genuinely afraid of his son. If he had been healthier, he could have defended himself, but after two serious back surgeries, plus a heart condition, he was vulnerable.
8. During the last few weeks of his life, ABF's estranged mother finally took an interest in his well-being, but wanted to do it her way. Yet she had no idea how to navigate the VA, which ABF was trying to use to get physical rehabilitation, mental health care, cardiac care, etc. That said, ABF's oldest brother, also an Air Force veteran AND working in an area related to veteran care issues, refused to help because of a family feud that occurred decades ago.

I know the first question on everyone's minds is how do I know that all of this is true? I knew the man and his family as a teenager. I spent time with his mother, who bad-mouthed him constantly because he openly disapproved of the way his parents had raised him. He lived with his father for his senior year, who was so busy wooing ABF's future stepmother that the refrigerator was empty. My parents liked him (and fed him). We had the same teachers in high school. They all loved him. His coaches loved him. He didn't drink in high school, and he was pretty open about his emotions and his family issues. During our adult relationship, his brother and I were on very friendly terms for almost two years. He told me a lot about ABF. I was also friendly with two of his sons, who also filled me in. His ex-wife's Facebook page spoke for itself. Finally, during ABF's last divorce, I had to help with discovery (financials), so I saw everything.

What I've tried to do is paint a picture of a man who may have been an obnoxious, toxic, non-violent drunk, but who was also surrounded by an awful lot of toxic people. In the last few months of his life, had they all been a bit less selfish, petty, violent and/or self-righteous, could have removed some of the barriers he was facing and made him feel less hopeless. The shunning was particularly hurtful, and had nothing to do with his drinking. That was likely blamed on me. Because of this, I want to punish all of them. Their dislike of his relationship with me was far less important than his life. I go to sleep every night planning and plotting. I know hanging on to this anger is harming me (although thinking through logistics is oddly sleep-inducing), but I so want to avenge the role I firmly believe they played in his death.

SparkleKitty

Acts of vengeance won’t bring him back, ease the pain of your loss, or erase the pain he endured while he was alive.

I understand the desire to attempt to control the story of his life, to save him somehow, even though he is gone. But these people, whatever they did or didn’t do, whatever they are or aren’t—that’s between them and their higher powers. It literally has nothing to do with you.

What if you harnessed all of that time and energy you spend fantasizing about taking revenge on people whose lives are obviously already so full of pain, and poured it into your own life and relationships? What if following your bliss is what your friend would have wanted for you, instead of spending your days mired in the dysfunction that he himself was never able to escape?

Dee74

Sometimes people, regardless of the love we feel for them, end up dying from addiction.
We have to accept that, but it's not always a short or easy process.

A lot of the time we search for reasons/excuses/blame why things ended the way they did or possible ways they may have been saved.

Its a natural thing to think and part of the journey of grief.


The tough reality is none of us (including you) know for sure that anything would have made a difference.

I agree with SparkleKitty that thinking about vengeance is really wasted energy.

D

sage1969

@RIPSteve What a xxxxshow! No wonder you feel so much anger, especially if this was a close friend. The others have had some very good feedback that this is an anger stage of grief. One doesn't always go through the formal stages of grief in order, and sometimes one skips a stage entirely.

My best friend who'd I'd grown up with and confided in often betrayed me in a way I never thought I could recover from. Now I know because it was an extremely unhealthy friendship, but in the thick of it, I couldn't believe it all, and I vascilated between a debilitating hatred and an equally debilitating sense of loss.

I think it's very good for you to journal this all out. Keep it up. It's hard work to get through all this ****.

trailmix

I can understand how hearing all of this - in relation to him, would be anger inducing and frustrating. I can understand that you might feel anger because him passing away seems so very unfair.

The truth is though that this was his life, these were/are his family members, these are people he chose to have in his life, for better or worse. He wasn't a child, he did have the option, if he wished to, to remove them from his life or remain incredibly low contact, but he didn't. I'm not saying that is wrong or right by the way, it was totally up to him to choose who he allowed in his life.

There is your side of the street and his side. I think you would find that a lot of this need for vengeance will fall by the wayside when you realize all of that was on his side of the street, not yours.

Once you start to focus back on your life and maybe what you would like to work on for yourself and you see yourself making progress, that will give you more of a feeling of contentment. What do you like to do, what would you like to be doing?

AldenSchooner

I had a long conversation about this with my therapist and actually managed to persuade him otherwise about the easing of my pain. Over the course of my life, I've spent time in cultures that strongly believe in vengeance. And the sanctity of family. I identify with those values - I'm not sure why. I wasn't raised that way, but I was bullied a lot as a child and as a teen. It was painful and unfair, and I was proactive about seeking justice for myself without becoming a bully as well. I was never able to witness bullying without intervening, either. I got enormous satisfaction out of putting bullies in their place. At the moment, I view his family as bullies. They bullied him, they bullied me, and they bullied him because of me.

I'm not discounting the wisdom in your words - it should work that way. Had I seen evidence that he had been treated with dignity after his death, perhaps I would feel differently. But there was no obituary or funeral/memorial service. As far as I know, they had him cremated and let the crematorium dispose of his remains. I know he wouldn't have wanted an elaborate sendoff, but I also know he wouldn't have wanted to just be thrown away.

Also a topic of discussion with my therapist, who is an atheist. So he used the word karma, which is also appropriated from religion, but whatever. You're right. How God or karma decides to sort them out, I will never know. But I'd like something a little more concrete. I want to sort them out first.

My therapy session this week took me back to a dark place. Last week I was doing a lot better, and I'll likely be better next week. COVID is making a comeback where I live now, and my bliss has always been travel. So I guess I'm dealing with a double-whammy. I am working on it, though. I very much appreciate your thoughtful response.

AldenSchooner

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

He ultimately did go no contact with everyone after the arrest of his son. Not one person supported his decision, which, by the way, was correct, according to all that I've read about family violence. Again, I ask: In what universe is it OK to attempt to harm someone with a trench knife? If you've never seen one, Google it. They only have one purpose. To gut someone.

He spent the last 5 and a half months of his life entirely alone. Not because of his drinking, but because he had broken the code of the clan.

I'd love to return to my interests - swimming, film, and travel. But the club where I swim is renovating the pool, which was my #1 happy place. COVID has gotten in the way of travel in a major way, but hopefully I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving in Switzerland with my husband, mother, and son, and we also have trips planned to Scotland and the Maldives in April and June of next year. Film festivals and movies in general are still pretty iffy. I enjoy my job and just got a great performance review. My current escape is TikTok. My feed is curated mostly of dramatic huskies, feuding farm animals, and the occasional Karen takedown.

trailmix

Oh I agree that the whole "clan" is incredibly dysfunctional - no question about that. I just think that perhaps it may be a waste of your time to seek revenge. Revenge is to inflict hurt or harm on someone, is that the person you want to be? (It may be, I don't know!). Seems to me that within that dysfunction there was a lot of revenge seeking (and probably mental challenges), is seeking revenge a healthy thing really?

There are other ways to vent those feelings, your choice of course.

Anger, resentment, frustration are not particularly helpful things to have in our lives, generally (although they all appear). When I'm angry about something like this I try to use that anger to move myself forward, it's energy to be used, why not use it for the good of myself.

California123

I may be confused, but wasn't he married with a sick wife when you came into the picture and began this emotional affair? And also, married yourself? You seemed to wonder why/how his mom could be angry or mean towards you, but I would think that would have been an understandable reason for them to not just be angry with you, but with him as well----

I could have read the details wrong about the timeline, pardon me if so

velma929

He picked those awful wives. He raised those dysfunctional children. He chose to continue associating with his frankly miserable family instead of developing and maintaining more normal, sustaining relationships. His h-ll was largely of his own making.

I've known at least two people whose home lives propelled them into the category of 'emancipated minors,' both doing well, in long term relationships and both raised children that didn't try to kill them.

The months he spent alone could have been spent getting help in AA, which would have benefitted him emotionally and physically.

Eauchiche

@California and Velma
I will refrain from commenting on any of this, lest I be accused of arson.
Wow. Just WOW.

AldenSchooner

You’re not wrong. I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times that we were both married. We had been chatting casually on FB for a few years before we actually spoke on the phone.

His birth mother was not in the picture until the last few months of his life - they had been estranged for years. It was his step mother who had the problem, and not until the last year of his life. And it was that he was talking to a married woman. His ex and their divorce never came up. Kind of not really her business, no? He was a 59 year old man. Not a kid. Oh, and his younger brother, who was cheating on his wife when ABF and I were first talking. Plus, he was in an open marriage for years. He suddenly had a problem, too.

Don’t misunderstand - I wish I had never gotten caught up in all of this. I was mentally done after two weeks! But his physical decline was incredibly alarming (his heart, then his back) and I was ignorant as to the extent of his drinking.

The last six months of his life is really the focus of my own significant guilt and my anger. He was literally dying. If someone, anyone, in his family had stepped up even a little - they were all nearby - I would have gladly walked away. But they didn’t want to help, and I think that using the excuse that he was talking to me rang a little hollow. A lot hollow. His ex had been happily in a relationship for two years at that point. He had no children with her. His kids weren’t attached to her.

There is a lot I don’t know, but the total abandonment had more to do with the arrest of his son than anything I did. I even told him that he could mitigate the consequences by speaking to the DA. But the courts were not operating due to COVID, so the case had yet to move forward before his death.

Hawkeye13

I agree with this as both the truth and ultimately your best response.

That and forgiveness of yourself, him, and others as you move through the grieving process.

That’s your quickest and best path to peace and healing—revenge can be a detour that lasts a lifetime.

AldenSchooner

If I tried to address this in any kind of complete way, it would be the longest post in the history of SoberRecovery. But:

1. Yes, he sure did know how to pick 'em. And have unplanned children with them. And then be totally unable to co-parent after every acrimonious divorce.
2. I don't think becoming an emancipated minor ever occurred to him.
3. He wouldn't admit to being an alcoholic. Of course I suggested AA, inpatient treatment, or even just a therapist to start. Sometimes he was slightly open to the idea, but nothing ever came of it. As I've said time and again, our relationship was strictly telephonic. I never really knew what was happening on the other end. I know his family history, I know what members of his family told me, but as to the day-to-day - I was in the dark.

Looking back, the day it hit me that yes, absolutely I had been dealing with an alcoholic all along, was the last day I talked to him. He joined the American Legion on a Wednesday. He went every night until the following Monday. In those very few days, he had also started drinking vodka in his motel room. That same Monday, when he admitted all of this to me, I said "oh my God, you really are an alcoholic." He hung up on me, we exchanged some nasty texts, and...that was that. I know he lived until sometime after Wednesday afternoon. He was found dead on Saturday, cause of death - heart attack.

I miss him, I wish I could have saved him, I wish his family had been there for him...and I wish I had never started talking to him in the first place.

AldenSchooner

Go ahead and burn it down. There was nothing good about any of it, including me. I wasted four + years of my life, I behaved badly myself...I just wanted so hard to believe that he was the same smart, sweet, brimming-with-potential person I fell madly in love with as a teenager. I could never have imagined any of this. He got me good, and I fell for it.

Eauchiche

l’m sorry about your pain and loss, I really am. The good thing is that this is a place that can help us all start over.
I had many things to regret in my life too. Thank God for recovery and new beginnings.

edoering

It sounds like the vengeance impulse is ultimately about control. Rewriting the “ending” of his story. “Saving” him. And that is a totally natural impulse!

But I will admit, I myself have fallen into the trap of secretly believing on some level it’s my job to BE the higher power and enact “justice.” And it’s taken a lot of humbling to realize it’s not. I’m not a higher power. I’m not in charge of ensuring karma happens in the way I want it to when I want it to. I’m not in charge of punishing or rewarding—or even judging in the first place—anyone else.

No matter what anyone else did or didn’t do, your life is your own. No matter what you did or didn’t do, you are here now. So what do you want to be next that is just for you?