About the last decade of Tom’s life, it became more and more obvious that there was something wrong, something that gravely disturbed him. He was only rarely happy, and even then, only briefly. He took little or no interest in our growing up son. He took little or no interest in our life and our future. We did very little together. No real vacations or trips. No private happy times except the required holidays, then Tom would recede back into his solitary misery.

When he didn’t have an audition or a job, which was most days, his practice was to stay up drinking and smoking to all hours of the next morning, falling asleep around 5 am. I got up around 7 to get our son off to school and to go to my job. He would take himself to the corner for breakfast and spend the time until Preston or I got home reading the paper and bored to tears.

We tried to try everything to cure his depression: therapy, quitting smoking, teaching acting, working at the mall, anti-depressant pills, and just trying to get him to talk about what was driving him to smoke and drink himself to death.

 The only answer was the same one I’d gotten for years every time he didn’t get a job he wanted. He said he was depressed because he couldn’t get anywhere. He wanted to work more often as an actor. I’d heard that so often and rejection is so much a part of the life of an actor, that I believe I’d been indoctrinated to think his depressions were simply passing moods of disappointment. He denied that there was anything else bothering him. Questioning him further never got me any different answers, so I eventually just gave up.

 The recurring image I have of him at that time is sitting next to him in his beloved old 1992 Cadillac as we drive somewhere, and he is smoking. Every time he finishes a cigarette, he takes one last deep pull on the cigarette, one last, angry blast of tobacco, and throws the cigarette out the window with an expression and gesture of complete disgust. As per my indoctrination, I interpret this as disgust with his career. But at his age, when that part of life is ending for almost every performer, that justification doesn’t fit. But I am too habituated to blaming career disappointment to think otherwise.

 But it’s not just the cigarettes and the booze, it’s the constant acid reflux. He has heartburn all the time. I can’t wash any pair of pants or shirt without finding Tums in one of the pockets. He lives on Tums. Much later I read theories that Tums only worsen acid reflux. But perhaps this acid reflux is exacerbated by the raging emotions he tries to ignore and suppress.

 Now, I can look back and see how utterly foolish I was to accept that his career hopes being dashed as the cause of his depressions. No one commits slow suicide, smokes three or four packs a day, and has constant acid reflux because he isn’t a big star. Tom had a pretty good life at the end. We had a good pension with the Screen Actors Guild. Our son had finished high school. Tom had worked every year for the Law and Order shows and did other small, but interesting roles. He wasn’t a big star, but he had been a steadily working actor. That in itself is a major achievement.

 And yet he sank deeper and deeper into depression. Why? What was it that he so desperately yearned for? What deep, unsatisfied hunger seethed in him and filled him with self-disgust? No, I should have realized that this slow suicide had nothing to do with his career. This was a deep, raging passion, a mania, an unconquerable rapacity that devoured him whole. And when the cancer came, it was the result of the devil inside him who’d finally come to collect the bill for years of hidden rage.

 Why didn’t I guess that only a sexual disappointment could be this profoundly destructive? He had smoked and drunk himself to death from some insatiable sexual appetite. He had pretended up until shortly before he got sick that he loved me. But there had been that one night several years ago when he didn’t come home from his part-time job at the mall until well into the morning. And all night long I was left worrying like crazy, wondering where he was because he never called. Nor, when he came home, did her provide any explanation, as if I didn’t deserve one. When asked the next morning, he angrily tells me I have ruined his life.

Ruined your life? I'd never expected a constant stream of gratitude from Tom, but it's shocking to hear after over thirty years that somehow he believes marrying me was a huge sacrifice which ruined his life. Later, it will turn out that exactly the opposite is the actual truth. This was the devil side of Tom acting a speaking out. The devil side which had become bolder as his sense of failure deepened.

Later, he says to forget it. He didn’t mean it, but he still won’t say where he was or what he did. What was this all about? I never did find out. At least, not while he was still alive.

 Sex and death. If you don’t get the sex part right, death looms large on your horizon.