March 2003 - The Runaway

I had been invited to a conference in Palm Springs, where I was to receive a major business honor. I flew there on Friday night with four of the top executives of the company that I owned. On Saturday night was a black tie celebration in our honor, something we had all worked hard for and were looking forward to celebrating. And then we would come home Sunday afternoon. I was worried about going, because my husband Dick and thirteen-year-old son Kevin had not been getting along well the previous week. Dick had been grumpy and yelling at Kevin over silly little things. But I needed to go and Dick wanted to stay home with Kevin.

On Saturday morning, I called Dick, as I did at least once a day whenever I was out of town. When he picked up the phone, he said only, "I... don't.... trust.... you," in a very strange voice. He was odd and scary and my only thought was that I had to get home to make sure Kevin was okay. So I got on the next flight home from Palm Springs, leaving my team in Palm Springs to accept the award on my behalf. Dick picked me up when I landed and acted as if nothing were wrong at all. He couldn't understand why I had come home early from the trip.

It was the next day, Sunday morning, when my world was shaken again. We woke up in the morning in our bedroom and could hear Kevin watching TV in the family room. Dick started that morning repeating over and over, "I just don't trust you." We were still in the room when Dick went into our closet, pulled out a suitcase, and started throwing random items from his side of the closet into the suitcase. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "I'm leaving and I'm never coming back." The things he was throwing in the suitcase made no sense for someone thinking of leaving forever; they were just random things from his closet. I went over to him and touched his arm to get his attention and said, "Dick, don't do this. Tell me what's wrong. If you walk out our bedroom door this way, it will be a moment Kevin will never forget. Don't do that to him, please."

I should point out that, in our 17 years of marriage, we had never had a fight, barely a disagreement even. Our marriage wasn't perfect, but we resolved our differences and moved on. We had a lot of fun, and we laughed a lot. We were so compatible. This incident of his saying, "I don't trust you," and his picking up a suitcase to leave were unbelievably foreign, unusual, unreal. But all I could think about was Kevin and the impact of his father's behavior on him. So I begged Dick not to leave our room holding that suitcase. He said, "I don't care," and he opened the door.

Kevin saw him immediately and ran over to him. "Where are you going, Dad?" Dick told him, "I'm leaving and I'm never coming back." Kevin started crying, begging him not to leave. But Dick just went to his car and left. Kevin and I didn't know what to think, what to do. I tried calling Dick's cellphone but he didn't answer it. I called his best friend DV and asked him to try to reach Dick and figure out what was happening and where he was. At this time, Dick had not been seen by a doctor and I had no idea whether there was something medically wrong. I suspected he might be depressed but frontotemporal dementia wasn't even a phrase I had ever heard. So what was I to do?

About 30 minutes after he left, Dick called me and said he was coming home because he'd forgotten his heart pills and vitamins. Thank goodness, I thought, he's not suicidal then. I told Kevin his Dad was coming back to get something. We had already noticed that Dick had forgotten to take his "DayTimer," the organizer notebook where he always kept every bit of information important to him. He never went anywhere without that DayTimer and he wrote down everything in it. In fact, he once told me that we HAD to do something because he'd already written in his DayTimer that we were going to do it. It was so important to him, and he'd forgotten to take it with him. That's the reason I'd been worried about suicide, when I'd found the DayTimer on the kitchen counter.

As soon as he heard Dick was coming back to get his pills, Kevin ran upstairs. He came back downstairs and put a picture of himself into Dick's DayTimer and wrote a note in the DayTimer for that day that said, "Dad, please keep this picture with you so you won't forget me."

Dick came home, grabbed his pills, and took the DayTimer that Kevin handed him. And then he left again, shrugging off Kevin's attempts to grab his arm and beg him to stay. That night I struggled to remain calm as I tried to keep Kevin's routine as normal as possible. I went online to check his cellphone records to see whether he was calling anyone, but he wasn't. I watched his credit card to see whether I could find a clue about where he had gone. Nothing yet. The next day was Monday. I took Kevin to school and I went to work, believing that maybe he had gone and not knowing what to do about that. His friend DV was also trying to reach him on his cellphone. We all just assumed he was depressed and that he would resurface soon. The previous Christmas Eve he had told us he was leaving forever, but he returned an hour later after buying light bulbs at Home Depot.

On Monday afternoon, Dick called me.... from home. He was back. He says he just went to a hotel room to watch the football game on Sunday. The hotel charge later showed up on his credit card. I still have no idea what really happened that day. But it changed our lives forever.