Empire State of Mind

When I was about twenty-four, my younger brother gave me a blessing.  He laid his hands on my head, and he made a prophecy on my behalf.  He said that someday I would go on a mission without purse or scrip.  He said that I would suffer in my health while on this mission, but that God would heal me.  He told me that - in that moment - that I would remember this blessing.

I have never forgotten it.

Back then I was twenty-four.  I was young and healthy.

Fifteen years later, I would be suffering from out-of-control diabetes, venous stasis, blood clots (DVTs), a diabetic ulcer on the bottom of my foot, endless doctor's visits and hospital stays, home nurses, IVs, etc.  I was unable to work, not really able to walk long distances, or really do much of anything.  It felt like my life was over.

This project was born of this suffering - the desire to go out and be whole.  To walk the world again.  To make a difference.  After two years of poor health and after dealing with a failed marriage, I want to do something that will give me a purpose again.

So this year, I brought my diabetes under control through diet and exercise - whatever exercise I can do with a hole in my foot.  This month alone, I have dropped ten pounds.  The wound vac came off of my foot in June, and the ulcer was totally healed.  Things were looking good.  I even went on a few trial walks.  The foot was very tender, but it seemed to be holding up.

The question in my mind - will I be able to make a journey next year without purse or scrip with my health condition??

When I planned my anniversary trip/ reverse honeymoon to New York City with my ex-wife, Temple, I had the "Without Purse or Scrip" project in mind.  In particular, I wanted to know what it would be like carrying a backpack.

It has been in the back of my mind what I will take on my journey.  I have been making an inventory list in my mind of what I will take, and what I will not take.  And this because of the Bible.  In Luke 9: 3 it says:

And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.

My first Manhattan trip was in 2005.  The advice I was given was to travel light, since a person will do so much walking in New York.  So on my first excursion, I took a small satchel with one change of clothes and some toiletries.  But I wanted to look good for my first visit, and so I bought a new outfit, including new, shiny, black shoes.  My first day there, I walked 50 blocks.  When I took my shoes off that first night, I had blisters all over my feet.  The next day, we resorted to taking the subway instead of walking.

So the first vital lesson I learned about any journey on foot - wear shoes that are comfortable, not fashionable.

A few days before our journey to New York, I talked to Temple about my plans.  I was going to travel with the backpack I use for my laptop - but without my laptop.  I would take one change of pants, underwear, socks, three t-shirts, diabetic supplies, phone charger and wound care items for my feet.  I could take this bag as a carry-on on the plane, and carry it around easily with me around New York.  Temple bought a backpack as well.

Before the trip,  my foot was totally healed.  But I had been helping Temple move out the week before. Being mindful of my foot ulcer, I had not lifted any furniture, but I had packed and lifted many boxes.  And after Temple moved out, I helped Martha start to move into Temple's old place, as it is bigger and in better condition.  Once again, not a lot of heavy lifting, but a lot of constant activity.

One night, I took off my shoes and socks and noticed a spot of blood on my sock.  I couldn't help it.  Tears came to my eyes.  Was this never going to be over for me?  I started bandaging my foot, and I made sure that I stayed off of my feet.  But the wound kept opening up again.  I had this New York trip staring me in the face.  Should I go?  I already had tickets.  I already had a hotel room reserved.

So two nights before I left, I took some Super Glue to my wound.  It worked like a charm.  It stopped bleeding.

I went to New York with my diabetic shoes on.  In my bag, I took syringes with saline solution to clean my feet, petroleum gauze strips wrapped in foil, Q-tips, gauze pads, gauze wrap, cloth tape, and Ace wrap.  After two years, I know my wound care.

Our first day in New York, we did a ton of walking.  Using the backpack was perfect.  Temple's pack only had one strap, and she complained about that, because it was impractical to shift from shoulder to shoulder.  Of course, everyone I was with was mindful of my feet.  We took the Subway as much as possible.  We rested often on the many park benches.  But it was still a lot of walking.  My feet were very sore.  By the end of the day, I could feel something going on with my toe.

When we got back to the hotel, the moment came that I was dreading.  I took my shoes off.  The ulcer on the ball of my foot was fine, but the tape that I used to secure the gauze wrap had slipped over my fourth toe and kind of strangled it.  There was a huge blood blister on the bottom of the toe, and an ugly, purple hematoma all over the whole toe.  Temple was mortified.  There was also a huge watery blister on the bottom of my left foot.

Maybe this trip was not such a wise idea, after all...

The next day, I wrapped both feet very well, for extra padding, and I made sure that the tape would not slip around my toe.  It was still a lot of walking.  We took  the subway often, but my knees were starting to get stiff from going up and down the stairs.  In the evening, we were in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that was the worst.  The constant standing in place while looking at art was murder on my feet and legs.  I could feel that all-to-familiar feeling of pressure as my legs and feet swelled up.

The night of the second day, I cleaned the ulcer and re-bandaged it.  Then I quietly took the shoe and sock off of the left foot.  My entire sock was covered with blood from the newly-developed blister.  I didn't want to alarm Temple, so I discreetly bandaged it and hid the bloody sock in my shoe before I went to bed.

The next morning, I had a rude surprise.  My extra pair of socks that I had packed in my bag was somehow not there.  They must not have made it into the bag.  I went to get my dirty pair of socks.  But they were missing as well.  It must have got tossed out with the laundry when housekeeping had cleaned our room the day before.  So I had one dirty sock, and one bloody sock.  There was no way that I was going to put the bloody sock back on, so it went into the trash.  With one sock on, and the other foot with no sock, Temple and I walked around Midtown on a Sunday morning, trying to find a store that sold men's socks.  No luck.  We found a women's store and bought a colorful set of women's ankle socks.  I put two socks on my left foot, and we spent our last day in New York.

At this time, I was starting to get worried.  I have had deep vein thrombosis (DVT) before, and I know what blood clots feel like.  Both of my legs were swollen.  As long as I was sitting or walking, they felt okay.  But the moment I just stood still, the feelings of pressure and pain in both legs were tremendous.  I started to wonder if I had blood clots in both legs.  I didn't show Temple, but I was very worried.  Did I kill myself coming on this trip?

We didn't do as much walking, and, in the evening, we took the train back to JFK.  Temple and I went through security.  They require you to take your shoes off.  I had a suspicion, and I waited until the last possible moment to take my shoes off.  When I did, Temple gasped.  Both of my socks were blood-soaked.  As I walked through the metal detector, I was leaving bloody footprints on the tile floor.  I was humiliated, but no one said anything.  I put my shoes right back on and walked straight to the bathroom.  In a stall, I stripped off my bloody socks, put fresh ones on, tossed the bloody ones in the garbage, and then joined Temple at out departure gate.

The flight back to Phoenix was bad.  Sitting in one position for five hours was almost unbearable. My legs were so swollen I could hardly bend them, and yet I had to jam myself into a cramped airline seat. Then, upon arriving in Phoenix, we had to make the three plus hour drive up the mountain back to our home.

By the time I got back home, I had walked all over New York, flown back to Arizona, and driven across half of the state.  As soon as I got home, I stripped out of my bloody socks and changed my bandages.  The socks, again, went into the trash can.  Then I collapsed into a feverish sort of sleep.  I had hallucinations.  I kept waking up Martha, because I could feel mice crawling all over my feet.  I just knew they were mice, and I had Martha pull back the covers to expose them.  There was nothing there, but I swore there were mice, drawn to the blood on my feet.

After two hours of sleep, I went to the ER.  I had to see if there were blood clots in my legs.  Much to my relief, an ultrasound showed that my legs were free of clots (although both of my lymph nodes were swollen).  The swelling was caused by my venous stasis.  The valves in my veins don't work properly.  Blood goes in; blood has a hard time coming out.  The ER doctor also determined that my INR was astronomical - 4.6.  Due to my history of DVTs, I have to take blood thinners for the rest of my life.  But my blood was too thin.  That was why the blisters on my feet were squirting out blood and filling up my shoes.  From the ER, I went home and slept the rest of the day.

The next day, I was so sore that I could not get out of bed.  So I stayed in bed and added up the miles we had walked in NYC.  Over the course of three days, we had walked a total of 19.6 miles.  The day after that, I went to the doctor.  He didn't have to say a word.  As I told him that I had walked all over New York, I could see the accusation of "stupid" written all over his face.  He looked at the blister on my left foot, took a scalpel and cut off a callus from the bottom of my foot the size of a small pancake.    Then he trimmed away at my right foot as well.  When I left the doctor's office, not just one, but the bottoms of both of my feet were a bloody mess.  He bandaged me up and sent me home.

I went home and propped my feet up.  I was so depressed.  I texted Temple about my whole experience at the doctor, and she answered me, "I feel bad.  I feel responsible.  If I had known this would happen, we would have never gone."

"Don't you dare, Temple," I answered.  "New York was important for us.  We needed to go on this trip.  I know that I'm going to be okay."

As I write this, it is two weeks to the day that I left for New York.  My feet have healed remarkably fast.  Within three days, the ulcer on my right foot totally healed up again, and there is a layer of tender, new skin growing on my left foot.  I am still very tender-footed.

When I left on this trip, part of my reason on going was to gauge my physical abilities for the whole "Without Purse or Scrip" project.  And I am forced to admit - New York kicked my ass.  And that is just walking around one city.  How am I going to handle hitchhiking across the country?

However, I am still going to do it.  Call me stubborn.

When I told my daughter Sophie (who is going to college for physical therapy), she told me that I needed to use the time between now and my departure to get in shape and train.  I know that the key to getting over my propensity for feet problems and diabetic ulcers is to lose weight and control my diabetes.  I will have to develop strategies that will be prevent New York from happening again.

Why am I doing it?  Part of it, I am sure, is that I refuse to admit that, at 42, my life is over.  And I also remember the blessing that I received eighteen years ago.

There has to be some sort of healing in all of this.

My failed marriage is a part of it.  For years, the purpose of my life was to represent plural marriage.  That is gone from me now.  As I watched my relationship disintegrate, I tried to find a purpose to my life, and this project came to me overnight.  So whether she realizes it or not, Temple is my muse.  It's all about her.  I will try to make something of my life.  I will live the rest of my life to make her proud of me.

Reverse Honeymoon

So I am going to talk a little bit about the breakup between Temple and I.

The first thing I will emphasize - I will not talk about specifics.  Because I love and respect Temple.  And she loves me.  I am not going to say anything that would embarrass her.  I don't blame her.  I don't accuse her.  And if anyone carries the burden of this failed marriage, it is me.  There are a ton of things I could have done better, as a husband, to prevent it from happening.

It is not about plural marriage.  It just shows that plural marriage is like any other marriage, and sometimes marriages - polygamous or monogamous - come to an end.

For many months, Temple and I slept at opposite ends of the bed.  We rarely talked, and if we did, it was to argue.  I tried to stop it, but it was like holding back the tide with your hands.  You can grasp at it it and try to prevent it.  But in the end, all you have are handfuls of foam, and the current slides around you.

She needed space, and so she took the kids to see her family out of state.  I tried my best not to call her, text her, bother her.  It was a tough two weeks, not knowing what was going on.

Martha stood by and watched all of this with concern.  She didn't know what was going on between Temple and me.  But she knew something was up.  Hell, I didn't know what was going on.  Neither did Temple.

"I don't understand what's happening," I said.

"I don't understand, either," Temple would say.

It all went back to that black time when I was in my bed with a wound vac stuck to my foot, and the IV in my arm.  That dark hour when I had dark fluids running into my veins, changing my moods, saying things to my poor wife that I could not take back.  Depression - chemically-induced, or not - does some real damage to people, and those around them.  Whatever the case, the bubble was burst, and there was no bringing it back.

Earlier in the summer, Martha had come to me and suggested that I take Temple out of town for our thirteenth anniversary.  In fact, she insisted on it.  So I secured tickets for New York City and found a room.  We have friends who live in Philly, and so I invited them along.

In the meantime, Temple called me from her getaway.  Even though she was out of state, she had secured her own house in town.  She had been talking about finding her own place in town for a while.  Living on the ranch is spartan.  There are few comforts.  "Town" is closer to her job.  And then there is the mud.  Few people realize that Arizona has a monsoon season that dumps rain nightly for about six weeks.  And when you have five miles of dirt road, rain becomes mud.  Mud, mud, and mud.  It is hard on vehicles - if you can even get out.  Temple was tired of the mud.

So she called me to tell me that she had found a new place, and that she would be moving immediately upon coming home.  I asked her a question on inspiration:

"Will I be moving with you?"

She hesitated.  "I didn't want to tell you this on the phone.  But no.  Not for now.  I need time and distance to think about things."

So she came home on a Sunday, and on Monday, her friends were loading her stuff into a trailer for her new place.  Of course, I helped.  It was strange to know what to think or how to feel.  I kind of knew what was happening.  But it was hard to process.  She moved out on the day before our thirteenth anniversary.

The next couple of weeks, I adjusted to life without Temple.  The boys went back and forth between us, between the two houses.  We were separated, and yet we had this trip coming up to New York, this anniversary celebration.  One day, she met me at the highway with the kids, and we talked about it.

"Are we still going on this trip?"

We decided to go.  I mean, it's New York.

So on Thursday, she got off work, and we drove down to Phoenix.  I had decided that I would not bring up anything negative, or talk about our separation.  I would just go and have fun.  She slept much of the way, because she was exhausted from work and from the move.  We took a red eye to JFK and took the Long Island Railroad to Manhattan.  There, at Penn Station, we met our friends.  When that shooting took place at the Empire State Building, we were one block away - on our way to the Empire State Building.

We had a great first day.  We toured the New York Public Library.  Then we went to Brooklyn Heights and walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.  The Staten Island Ferry gave us a good view of the Statue of Liberty.  And we finished off a perfect day with tandoori at an Indian restaurant.

It had been a great day, and we enjoyed ourselves.  But the whole separation thing was like a monkey on our backs all day - the proverbial elephant in the room, and other animal metaphors.  When we got to our (tiny) hotel room, we sat down and talked about it.  Temple brought up several of her complaints about me over the years.  I listened to her, and they were legitimate.  Any one of them were grounds for leaving me.  I take full responsibility for our break-up.  If anyone wants to know what I did, they can contact me.  I am not hiding my fault in this.

I could see where this was going.  And I could see that nothing I was going to do or say was going to change it.  So I knew what to do.  I told her that I felt like I needed to give her a blessing.

She said something like, "Why?  So that you can 'bless' my feelings away?  So that I can get the same answer as you?"

I told her, "I don't know what I'm going to say.  I just feel like I need to give you a blessing."

And I didn't know what I was going to say.  But the minute I laid my hands on her head, I knew.  I quoted Jacob 2 from the Book of Mormon, where it talks about the daughters suffering at the hands of the men who abuse plural marriage.  And then I gave her a release.

The next morning, I woke up and thought, "Moroni, what the f*** did you just do?"

But in that moment, I knew it was right, and, in that moment, I knew it was what I had to do.

A "release" is the Mormon concept of letting a woman go from the marriage covenant.  In Mormon vernacular, there are no divorces, only "releases".  And I felt to release my wife.

Thirteen years of plural marriage ended in a small hotel room in New York City.

She started sobbing and saying that she was a failure.  I took the woman who was my wife in my arms and comforted her.  We talked for a long time that night.  I had been fasting and praying for several weeks.  Each time I fasted, the answers and thoughts that came to me did not seem to relate to what I was going through.  But as we talked, everything made sense.  The puzzle came together. 

For some reason, it was supposed to happen this way.  This experience is unfolding exactly the way it is supposed to, and it is for our own growth.

I have never understood nor loved Temple more than I did in that moment, and I know that she felt the same way.

Temple told me that she knew that I would have a claim on her in the next life, that we would be together.  We vowed to be the best of friends in this life, and to still be a family, to raise our children together.  The only difference - in this life - we will no longer live together as husband and wife.

It was a deeply spiritual experience for both of us, and it is hard to for us to make other people understand what we experienced that night.

From there, we went up to a party on the rooftop of the hotel where we were staying.  Temple was wearing her pajamas.  We ordered a round of drinks and toasted to our thirteen years and kissed beneath the bright lights of the New York skyline.

The next day, our friends must have thought we were crazy.  They kind of knew that our marriage was in trouble.  But here were Temple and me, acting like a lovesick couple on our honeymoon.  Holding hands, kissing, hugging - except that it was as friends, and no longer as lovers.  I felt such a deep connection to Temple.  We thoroughly enjoyed our last two days in New York, as well as each other's company.

I told my friends, "If you are going to break-up, this is the way to do it, right?  Holding hands and taking a trip?  A sort of reverse honeymoon to celebrate your marriage before you end it?  It's a good way to say goodbye."

On Sunday, we flew back to Phoenix, and, from there, made the three hour drive home.  Temple dropped me off at home.  I got out of the car and gave her a tight hug and whispered, "Goodbye."

Then I went into my house to Martha, who was asleep and waiting for me.  And Temple went home to her life.

I did ask her that we take about a week to think about it before we made it public.  I didn't really think that one week would change anything.  But I wanted to know that, after thirteen years, I was worth praying one last time to God and asking, "Is this really what you want?"

But in truth, both Temple and I knew that this was the right thing for both of us.  I still love her very much.  And I miss her every day.  But the understanding that we gained in New York helps me get through every day, one day at a time.

Announcement

After 13 years, Temple and I are ending our marriage. It may seem cliche, but we really love each other and are still the best of friends. We will continue raising our children together, just no longer as husband and

 wife. It is a very sad time for us, and yet I wish her the best. There are reasons for it, but I won't discuss it on a public forum. I won't tolerate people badmouthing Temple or dragging her name through the mud. There are reasons for the split, but honestly I have to take responsibility for this. If it is anyone's fault, it is mine. I will likely blog about this in coming days, but without embarrassing her. My thirteen years as a polygamist are over, and I will still defend this Principle until my dying day, as I will defend Temple. This photo was taken the evening it became final. I LOVE YOU FOREVER, TEMPLE!! ♥