Her heart was broken,
She had pushed him away,
Said, yelled really, “ I hate you!“
She hated him drinking, the depression and anxiety that weighed on him, and then the rest of her family when he drank.
He fixed that.
He made it so his little girl, the apple of his eye, would never have to see him like this again.
His life was in shambles anyway. 1967, he was divorced, and back with his parents.
The railroad job was getting harder on his body, so he drank. He wasn’t going to last much longer, and what skills did he have besides drinking wasting his pay on booze.
He was losing his teeth like his father, and his ex-wife was grossed out by the way his dad ate. He didn’t want to end up like that for his little one.
He put the gun to his temple.
Pulled the trigger.
Her heart was broken.
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To her dying day, my mother refused to allow my soldier father to keep his service revolver in their home. I remember her frantically screeching, “No guns in the house,” when we lived on post in 1985, or so., and she had found my dad’s safely stored gun in the cabinet above the refrigerator where no one could get at it. It disappeared from the home, and I don’t know what happened with dad’s work life for it.
