I'm not a person who says much about himself, but sometimes you just have to share something that changed you. 

This month makes twenty-five years since my first wife Vicki Brown took her own life in a hotel room in Bangkok.  We’d been divorced about three years or so at that point.  She tried suicide about three times before, include one where I had to drive to Tulsa to get her.  She gone to the Double Tree there and took Valium and alcohol but she survived.  This last time, however, no one was there to save her.

She was an amazing woman and what she had done in her life as remarkable—like making the trip on the Hippie Trail from Istanbul across Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan to India and Nepal.  She sat on the top of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which the Taliban vandals blew up.  That alone would have devastated her. She was a practicing Buddhist who knew the Dali Llama.  She spoke several languages and even learned Chinese to translate Buddhist works into English. 

But she was also a bipolar, with schizoid affect.  She heard voices in her head, and sadly she listened to them.  She had, however, been doing great while we were married, but first my father, who adored her, died, then her father, and finally her mother died. That left me her own anchor in the world and the voices came to control her and she cut the anchor chain.  I loved her passionately, but I finally couldn’t live with her anymore.  

After we divorced I suspected one day i would get a phone call from either her sister or her brother-in-law.  When it came, I wasn’t surprised, really.  I miss her, I really do, and she had an impact on my life that was profound.  I often think of her, but this month, so long after the fact, has made me sad for her. 

In every life there someone who so alters you, so moves you, so encourages you that you are forever in their debt.  I have no idea where my life would be if we hadn’t divorced and she hadn’t died.  I just know it wouldn’t be where I am now, which, oddly, is rather close to what I had imagined I would be when I was in high school.  Had I not met her, been loved so much by her, and then lost her, I would never have matured and grown and found who is was.  So, I’m sad and a little wistful and so joyful that I was ever so loved (and thanks to my lovely Nancy, I’m still so loved.)  So, I’ll raise a glass to my beloved Vicki and thank her her gifts to me and shed tears for what happened to one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known and I feel so humbled that she loved me and I loved her.  Sometimes you just can’t live happily ever after, but I still have the memories.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working on s novel about Vicki.  It’s really a modern, magic realism, urban fantasy work because that’s how I can tell her story and have other understand it.  It always gives me a little distance so I can remember the warmth of her without being maudlin.  I have a rough draft completed.  Now I just need to find that space where I can roll her story so she can live forever.