Butterflies Are Free To Fly

Entry 1

"Part of surviving smear campaigns, part of it is knowing what it looks like. .  . The narcissistic person will have no problems telling bold-faced lies about you. It's like a gaslight. . . but you will be gaslighted by a massive group of people who will come up to you and say, "Whoa, he told me what you did, that wasn't cool."

                                        -Dr. Ramani Ursuvala

Last week I had to get on Jenny's mac to find an old tax return to submit for the request for Abby's FAFSA. I knew that screen captures with relevant passwords from Jenny's phone were on the laptop. I just had to read through the jpgs to find them. I need to spend a day with the

laptop and 
remove all the material on there not related to Jenny's affair and the programmatic disinformation she spread to people about me. This will spare me the pain of seeing in writing the terrible things she said about me (interspersed with contradictory statements--aka the truth--to others). It breaks my heart into tiny little pieces every time. 

Did she know she was telling terrible untruths--even in the mundane day to day ways she described me at times? Did she understand how cruel and hateful her words would come across to me, whether she believed in their truth or not? It feels better, somehow, to think she actually believed them. Her contradictory statements and audience dependent sliding scale criticisms of  me belie any claim that she wasn't aware she was spreading nutrient-free fertilizer. 

One of the many strange happenings on the way to the denouement of our life together was the emergence of Jenny's obsession with me providing her with a list of each person I told about the affair. She felt it was a grave affront, as if it was the ultimate betrayal that one could have committed against her. She went so far as to steal my phone and read my texts, emails and Facebook chats and then reaching out to people to pitch her story. She would confront me and say things like, "Apparently you never told them about Sonia." Sonia, the woman I dated after Jenny and I separated in 2011 because she had an affair. Her ability to engage in moral equivalency -- to convert my behavior into the ultimate transgression was a gift. Of this I have no doubt--she convinced herself that whatever she did or wanted was just and correct. Her moral goodness was her get out of free jail card--or perhaps it was what she portrayed as my moral bankruptcy. Mind you, she carried out this disinformation campaign BEFORE she was diagnosed with PDAC. After diagnosis, any issue I had with any part of her lying and cheating, stealing time from our kids or money from our savings was treated by her as an unreasonable concern. Her malady became a shield, to protect her image as the one true moral arbiter--that required clean hands to perform said duties.

It was baffling. I wasn't allowed, for the most part, to talk about the inevitable end of a person with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I would be called too negative, or wishing she would die. But, if I raised issues with her inability to be honest with me about the affair--she would justify her lying (she didn't need to justify her seeing el pinche vis a vis me, I was grown and she could make her choices, with or without my vouchsafing) by saying I should just let her do whatever she wanted to do because she was dying. She would do the same for me, I was assured, even though such claims fell on my increasingly tin ears.

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I feel good that some of the people to whom Jenny had lied about me to and with whom I had the fortune of speaking with during her illness or shortly after her passing (especially those who perused this journal while she was living), understood she had been lying to shape their views of each of us. To a person, they had believed the stories she told them about me being emotionally abusive to her, angry about a passing affair (for some, others were spin a story that I was angered she had found the

love of her life). She painted a picture of a small man who neglected her or, where he did pay any attention, it was to emotionally abuse her or tomore than you would be at a Catholic wedding (also, why is stubbornness spelled with two  act in such a petty manner it was unconscionable. My family, my kids, my sisters and in-laws all can report how counterfactual such denouncements were. It doesn't help me against the pain that she would spread such bullshit. She made it seem like I was mistreating her, even as she was sick. For the millionth time, because it hurts me to the marrow, I beg the world to know the truth about how gently I cared for and loved her--even as she cast me aside and cast aspersions upon me. 

There are many people who have nothing but Jenny's version of the world the two of us occupied, never knowing the axis of that world was tilted upside down.It was so opposite, after reading it the first time, I should have grown a goatee and called myself evil Spock.

I am not a victim. I knew some of this before she died, and I stayed and cared for her. That she couldn't understand why I would lose my shit at the ER when she was texting el pinche, or my anger when he was calling her in the car after the visit to the UW to see if the liver clinic could help her couldn't really have been real, right? I was watching the woman I loved for 30 years and who was dying, rejecting me in front of me and acting puzzled when I called it out. This is the experience of being an American boor, I expect she would explain.

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A few  months after Jenny died, one of her myriad groups of friends from over the years, traveled to Montana (where one of them resides), to get tattoos in honor of Jenny. One of these people, just a few weeks earlier at Jenny's memorial had proclaimed she was Jenny's best friend--if I could have raised a single eyebrow, in Spock-like skepticism, I would have. As we are just over a
week away from the second anniversary, none of these people has ever reached out to my kids to see how they are doing, to make sure they are ok. While Jenny's ACTUAL  best friend Amy hates me, as Jenny had woven such a tale that no one who heard and believed it could feel anything other than contempt toward me, still, she loved Jenny and cares about the kids. I may hate Amy for the things she said about me to Jenny in reaction to Jenny's lies, but I respect she genuinely cares for and about my girls and makes every effort to show it. It is a mitzvah, a blessing, a gift. If I were religious, I would call it something holy.

Publicly mourning for someone on Facebook is not uncommon. Doing so in such a shallow manner, by displaying your butterfly tattoos of two attached Js made to look like a butterfly

is treacly and cloying to me, especially where it means nought without follow-through. Say what you will about Jenny, and I have, she would have been up in the business of each of those women's children's lives if the cancer diagnosis had been on one of their mothers. That  is genuinely who Jenny was. Genuine and not. Loving and Hateful. Posturing and Abjectly Truthful. A bundle of contradictions. I don't know how to reconcile it, won't try other than to note nothing is neat about life. 

I should be clear that I did get a message via Facebook in December from one of these tattooed ladies. As you can see, it was the first message I have received since a month after Jenny was diagnosed. Huh. I have never responded. 

One other thing, that a few of us discovered during Jenny's sickness. She had a tendency to tell people that she was their best friend. What's more, people she told this to never doubted her when she said it. Before I discovered this behavior, I had only known of Amy and Amelia, Amelia and Jenny had been best friends since birth, or as soon after birth as one can form such an attachment. Amy and Jenny became best friends when Jenny moved from Lake Oswego to Kirkland when they were 12 or so. When our mutual friend Diana stood at Jenny's memorial and told the assembled that she was Jenny's best friend, the first thing that entered my mind is, "WT actual F?"
 I thought, not incorrectly, the narcissistic drive to demonstrate one's self-importance is boundless. But then Becky believed she was Jenny's closest friend. And Sheila. And Heather. And Murray. And Kim. And likely others. How did she do this and how long had she been playing this game? The ability to make another person feel heard, the ability to make another person feel like they are the only important person when surrounded by dozens of others is a master skill. You don't just develop it when diagnosed with terminal cancer. It isn't a side effect of the chemo. I had no idea that she was doing this until she was very sick--close to death. So, Diana's proclamation at Jenny's memorial was only partially driven by her own narcissistic drive. The interesting thing is that, except for Kim who gave herself to help Jenny--she was the definition of self-abnegation--in my estimation all of the people above had some tendency toward narcissism if not full blown NPD. So, maybe it feeds their need for narcissistic supply to believe they are so important in Jenny's eyes. That she could out buffalo her fellow travelers, well that is a gift, isn't it?