I Will Never Be a Widow

Reflections on the Death of a Sociopath

Last Monday night I had a brief but intense nightmare. My first ex-husband appeared in a garish suit. I yelled at him, “You’re so fat!”

That was it. End scene. 

When I awoke, I was shaken enough by the vividness of this unbidden haunting that I wondered if, perhaps, he was dead. A quick google revealed my psychic powers intact. I was delighted to discover that a few weeks ago he dropped over dead of a heart attack. 

Delighting in the death of another might sound mean spirited but I don’t care. At the foundation of my delight was something deeper, something comforting. Pure relief in knowing that, nightmares notwithstanding, there is no longer any risk that I might encounter him again. 

We met early in 1996 when the internet was just becoming a popular thing. I had a weekly newsletter, underwritten by Prodigy, in which I wrote about my life as a young single mother. I was brought to his attention by a mutual online acquaintance. Soon we were engaged in a fever pitch email exchange. Six weeks later we married after meeting in person less than three days before. 

Feel free here to pause, note what an idiot I was and, if you’d like, blame all that happened next on this stupidity of mine. If you do, I promise you that any condemnation you summon will pale compared to the self-condemnation I carry to this day. 

What was I thinking, you might ask. I can actually answer that. I was thinking, and this was discussed between us, that this new-fangled way of communicating rapidly across the ether was somehow evolutionary. That we could and had, over those six weeks of correspondence, cut through the bullshit known as dating, revealed our true selves swiftly, and were totally compatible. I was also thinking—and this was something we both voiced—that if it didn’t work out we could just get divorced and, perhaps, even laugh over the folly of misplaced optimism. 

I did not understand until after legally binding myself to him that he was a sociopath. I use that term clinically. Only hindsight allowed me to understand that with each sincere letter I sent him, he replied with fabrication, spinning tales in which he created fictional accounts from his life that mirrored actual accounts from mine. I didn’t question these amazing parallels. My mindset was very X-Files. I wanted to believe.

Additionally, while I don’t give a rat’s ass about one’s perceived “status” in society, on paper this guy presented as accomplished and stable. He had a very good education, a very good job and seemed to be respected by his peers.

If you’d like to torture yourself with the longer version of this story, I invite you to hunt down an out-of-print copy of my first book, All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy (Simon & Schuster 1999). Today I’ll just give a few examples. First let’s discuss why I yelled at him that he was fat in that dream. In real life this is nothing I would ever say to anyone, save for myself, a habit I thankfully have dispensed with. Body shaming is not my bag. 

My best guess is that the dream barb I hurled was a subconscious attempt to get even with him. A few hours after we married atop Mount Bonnell and had an informal reception at Thundercloud Subs, we went back to my place. We were lying in bed when he asked me when I would start losing weight. Not that it matters what size I was at the time, but for context I will tell you I weighed about 125 pounds. He weighed about 250. He also noted that I had a light lip fuzz and that this, too, would need to go. 

I should have filed for divorce then, or sought an annulment. In fact, one of the two witnesses at the hasty wedding had been my friend Marty, a family law attorney who, signaling his doubts, gifted me with a Free Divorce Certificate. My groom found no humor in this, though in the end that gift would save me at least ten thousand dollars. 

My new husband did not spend our first married night with me. He flew back to San Francisco and we conducted a long distance marriage for the first few months. The number of red flags he unfurled during this period could have fully draped the Golden Gate Bridge several times over. But I had been conditioned to believe that—despite my jokes about using divorce as an escape hatch—I must stand by my man. 

He moved to Austin in November that year. It is far more difficult for a sociopath to disguise their sickness up close. Things did not improve. In January 1997, a positive pregnancy test had him literally jumping up and down with joy. Not me. I panicked and wept. I understand now that his glee came from feeling that with the pregnancy he had me all locked in. And so the physical violence began. 

For all of the foolishness and naïveté I had exhibited up until that point, nearly having both of my wrists broken simultaneously woke me up. I grabbed my kid, fled my apartment, filed a protective order, went into hiding and scheduled an abortion. In a rage, he swore he would legally find a way to stop this termination. The morning of the procedure I discovered that he had tracked down one of my religious anti-choice sisters in New Jersey. I discovered this because she called me to read me the You’re Stopping a Heartbeat Riot Act. 

Consider this—my sister and I had different last names. My husband had never met her. She lived far away. We did not have google or cell phones. He had given her the number of the friends he correctly guessed I was staying with. All that tracking took persistence on his part. 

Oh he was so persistent in his torture. 

I will never forget the day I had to pick my son up from kindergarten and inform him we could never go home again. I will also never forget being allotted a very short window of time by the court to clear my things out of my apartment. And I will never, ever forget that when I arrived to take on this task I discovered that the sociopath had murdered my son’s pet gerbil. 

I had a permanent restraining order against him baked into the divorce decree, paperwork he refused to sign for months. The judge—I can still see his face—shook his head as he read this part of the document and wished me good luck. He knew the truth about restraining orders: they are pieces of paper that cannot actually stop sociopaths from carrying out violence. 

And such was the case. He stalked me for years. He tracked down my mother. He especially went after me online, using various pseudonyms to besmirch me on the regular. This cost me a high-paying job. It also cost me my mental health. Eventually I fled the state for months, desperate to feel safe, and, far more importantly, to keep my son safe, for the sociopath had threatened him, too. 

The stalking continued when I returned to Austin. I happened to be friends with Ronnie Earle, the DA at the time, who expressed sympathy and interest in my situation. He had his assistants sit down with me and look into possible legal repercussions. One of these assistant DA’s, Rosemary Lehmberg if memory serves, told me directly that my only real hope of shaking the guy was if he found a new victim. I was horrified. I wouldn’t wish him on my worst enemy. She said she understood my feelings but reiterated her truth.

When I took him to court for violating the restraining order—this was one of the first ever cases in the country regarding cyberstalking—the judge, a woman with a reputation for going easy on perpetrators of domestic violence, threw the case out. The implication was that we could not prove that just because a violent, threatening online post had come from this guy’s computer, located in his office, that he had sent it. 

I must have read his short, pathetic obituary ten times the day I discovered it. My mind was trying to process that the 28 year-old living nightmare was finally over. I thought about all the Buddhist philosophy I have studied which counsels compassion for all sentient beings. I thought about how my ex-husband had been raised by a father—a Harvard professor—who punched his mother in the face and how his mother put up with it or, maybe put more kindly, did not know how to escape it. And how his violent upbringing combined with my violent upbringing contributed to what went down in our marriage. 

Still, I have no compassion for him. I have no interest in even trying. Instead it is my younger self I try to find compassion for and this is difficult enough. When I think of the grave danger in which I placed my child, self-forgiveness eludes me. 

I would like to write an obituary for my blind young self, for the parts of me that took way too long to die off but which, thankfully, did depart after decades of therapy. I look back at young me and see that my greatest flaw was allotting trust freely, to seeing the best in people who did not and would not ever deserve that trust. 

I wish I could say that the error of stepping into it with that terrible man provided me with enough knowledge that I learned my lesson and never stepped back into the fire. Not even close to true. Again and again I repeated variations on the theme, again and again I wound up destroyed. Until finally, in my early fifties, the last man I ever chose to be with sexually assaulted me, hit me in the face on more than one occasion. 

Only then, and only with the support of friends I wouldn't have blamed if they’d given up on me, and the additional support of intensive therapy, could I put to rest the perpetual optimist who somehow thought she could love her way toward a stable relationship with an unstable man.

A couple of months ago I went to see I Am a Noise, a documentary about Joan Baez. Reflecting on her own failed relationships she noted that while it was easy for her to create intimacy with a large crowd, this was not something she could do one-on-one. She acknowledged she had been crazy—her word—in partnerships. This resonated with me and not in a comfortable way. But it’s a truth for some of us, and though the truth really does hurt, it also really sets us free. 

I wholly believe now that the childhood trauma I experienced meant that I never, ever would find a way to function healthfully in partnership with a man. That I would forever be drawn toward trying to recreate that trauma with the false belief I could fix it and live happily ever after. How painfully long it took me to clearly see that was never going to happen. On a bright note, better late than ever and all that, once I accepted this truth, I was at long last able to step into the life I now have, full of peace and the love of so many incredible friends. Full of gratitude that I lived to tell this horrible tale. 

I will continue to seek ways to be more gentle when I reflect on who I was as a young woman, to remember it was not all foolishness and stupidity. That there were—are—wonderful, valuable parts of myself, too. That for all the poor choices I made as a parent, I also made plenty of good ones. I’ll work to factor in that I came up during a time when mental health was not the ubiquitous topic it thankfully is today. I’ll take into consideration the profound effects of intergenerational trauma, and what a set up it was to watch my mother—also raised by a violent father—endure what she endured while acting like that’s just the way things were, with no clue offered that there were other ways to be. 

I don’t expect to ever make lasting peace with my nightmares—the ones I’ve dreamed and the ones I actually lived in waking life. But I’m thankful that with aging I grow slightly less harsh with myself, and that I have been able to use my experiences to help others escape their own hell.

NOTES:

Thanks for subscribing y’all. If you can fit it in your budget to subscribe for $5 per month or $50 per year, I hope you’ll consider it. You might prefer to subscribe to my other substack, WriteWithSpike.substack.com, a sort of online writing workshop. If doling out dough isn’t your thing, you can still help by sharing this substack with someone you think will dig it. One-time tips also gratefully accepted via Venmo: @spike-gillespie. 

My next FREE in-person writing workshop at Hampton Branch Library in Austin is next Tuesday, 2/20, from 5:30-7:30 pm. It helps us if you REGISTER.

My next six-week in-person Memoir Writing Workshop for Women starts Tuesday, 2/27. Held at the ranch from 11 am - 1 pm. $150. Email me for more details. 

If you are experiencing domestic violence, please remember NO ONE DESERVES THAT. You can escape. Here’s the website for the Domestic Violence Hotline. You can also CALL 911 if you are in imminent danger. For mental health crises the number to call is 988.

Thanks for reading, y’all. I really appreciate it.

Love,

Uncle Spike