I had to change the previous version of Tom’s story, because when I wrote that version, I was unaware that Tom had been the victim of sexual abuse. In the previous version, I condemned him for being too weak to face his past. Knowing the truth that his mother had to some degree sexually abused him, makes it all too clear why he couldn’t face his past. Perhaps blinding yourself to your past is sometimes the only way to go on with life.

Two psychic incidents confirm my belief that Tom really was a victim of sexual abuse. The first occurred before Tom’s first cheating confession when I happened to consult a psychic acquaintance with a minor and unrelated question. She gave me an answer that was helpful and correct. Then she said something that really puzzled me. She said Tom was coming through and telling her that he forgave his mother. I was very surprised by that. I asked her if she was sure that he’d said he’d forgiven his mother. She assured me that was what he’d told her.

At the time, I knew his father had been abusive, but I thought his mother had been a battered spouse. Why Tom should need to come back and make it clear to me that he forgave his mother was a complete mystery. Now, I know why that forgiveness was so important. She destroyed his life and sent him to an early grave due to her abuse. He had every reason to hate her for all eternity. That mystery has been solved by knowing the truth about Tom’s life.

The second incident occurred while I was writing a first draft of Bedeviled, after I knew of Tom’s infidelity, but not about the sexual abuse. I get a lot of psychic messages in dreams. But verbal communications are usually telepathic; that is, I get the message silently. I am not often clairaudient. This visitation is one of the few times I have actually heard something out loud. Tom spoke to me in his recognizable voice and urgently told me, “There’s something you need to know.” At the time, I hadn’t the slightest idea what it could be that I needed to know or why it was vital that Tom speak this aloud to me. Now I know. The next year, I learned from a visiting relative about his problems with his mother. Yes, that was something I definitely needed to know.

This new understanding of what Tom’s life had been has greatly altered my feelings toward his infidelity. I haven’t made a study of childhood sexual abuse victims, but from witnessing Tom’s life, I can see that for him it was a fatal mental problem. He was a successful actor, a pretty good husband, and pretty good father, but nothing was enough to free him from his bedeviling secret self.

For a long time, I was very angry at Tom for being a cheater. I wanted to know that he repudiated his actions and felt sorry. In light of the new facts, I feel even sadder than I felt before. He struggled alone against a terrible violation for his entire life but eventually lost the battle against bad Tom.

When all I knew was that Tom had been constantly cheating, I had, with great sadness and regret, doggedly wiped away all my happy memories, cancelled my faith in the love of my husband, and just accepted him as a tragically flawed person. My great romance was a flop. Our marriage was just a convenience for Tom.

Now, it seemed a more nuanced situation. There really was a good Tom who probably was often happily married. That Tom was plagued by a secret-self created in childhood which had enabled him to survive the abuse. I had half a husband, a tragic husband, whose secret self was too powerful for him to overcome. This secret self drove Tom to his death. Tom died from a combination of smoking and constant acid reflux, brought on, no doubt, by repressing his angry secret self.

Tom’s dual self has left me angry and hurt; were all our happy days were fake? Had we ever shared the same joys or dreamed the same dreams? Probably not. Looking at old pictures of him only reminds me that not only had we never been on the same page in life, we’d never even been reading the same book. It was such a tragic waste. True, we’d had quite a lot of fun, on a day-to-day basis. He hadn’t been ‘depressed’ all the time. This explanation left a great hollow place in my heart and an emptiness in my life.

All his life, I believe he’d justified his cheating by telling himself he was just hanging on to his marriage out of loyalty, because he was such a good guy. Ever since our long ago Puerto Rico vacation, he’d been hoping to find a way to divorce me. Had he become a big success, he wouldn’t have shed a tear when he left me. He didn’t shed a tear for me when he knew he was dying and leaving me all alone for the rest of my life. But he didn’t shed a tear for himself, either.

I have a note he wrote in his shaky, drugged handwriting from near the end of his life, where he once again says to me, “I love you more than are stars in the Milky Way. Always have, always will.” It was what he had often told me, from the first days when we fell in love. He had even made a little framed picture of two elves holding hands and staring up at the stars on which he’d inscribed those words for me.

But now that I know his mind better, what a revealing metaphor! He compares his love to the stars in the Milky Way, the splash of stars across the nighttime sky. Tom’s love was somewhere far above, where dreams are born; only there would he find what his heart aspired to. And there his love remained for his whole life, a distant, starry dream, unattainable from the sad world he was stuck in. Because of his mental problems, he preferred to keep love way up in the stars, unreachable, fixed, unchanging, and something he could dream about, without actually making it a part of his life.



Now that I know the full truth, I’m no longer angry. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to change, there was no way he could ever bear to open the door to that painful, humiliating past. He could never face it; not in life, anyway. I’m sure he spent huge amounts of emotional energy trying to keep his mental problems under control and function. As he got older, there was less and less energy for daily functioning. But there was another shocking twist to his story that came to me via his son. Tom had gone to Hell.