Sylyia would later say it was Annika’s treatment of her that caused her to become “rotten.” But blaming Annika for the ways Sylvia treated Rick and Jenny seems rather childish and an easy way to relieve guilt. No matter the sins of the parents, everyone ultimately has to choose right from wrong. And the truth is, Sylvia rarely chose right when it came to mothering.
The family grew up on a farm in Washington State, where Hank had retired from the army. They were a typical low-income family—not extremely poor, but no room for extras with five children on the prowl.
In Washington, Sylvia became a bit of a wild child, gradually developing the behavior patterns that would eventually define her life. Never one for following rules, she would stay out all hours without letting her parents know where she was. Of course, they had other things to worry about—like ensuring they could pay the bills and keep the other four kids alive. All the while, Hank and Annika were drinking regularly themselves, contributing to that unhealthy generational reliance on alcohol that seeped into everything they did.
It’s hard to pinpoint why Sylvia was the one of the five who became trapped by mental demons, just as it’s hard to know how the family dynamics in that home contributed to what she became. Rumors can run rampant in families, and they’re hard to confirm because problems are often considered “family business” and aren’t talked about afterward. In families like Sylvia’s, there were certainly no counselors or therapists involved to shed light on the issue.
The truth is, the most loving parents and supportive family in the world might not have prevented Sylvia from going off the rails, though it is certainly a positive that Annika met Hank and spent the rest of her life with him, bringing this stable figure into the lives of their children and grandchildren. In her younger years, however, she had clung to relationships in an almost addictive manner. That’s not necessarily a sign of bad character, but it is evidence of trying to fill a hole within herself with another human being. And it modeled for her daughter a way of relating that would become a big problem for Sylvia.
Unlike her mother, Sylvia never found stability in one person. Instead, she took on a series of her own addictive relationships like it was her job, going from one man to the next, year after year after year. And this way of relating didn’t stop with her. Rick, too, would develop the tendency to hold on too tightly to women in order to feel loved and fulfilled.
When you’re attempting to fill up the place in your life where God belongs, you’ll try anything. We all have that longing because it’s how God created us. We’re not meant to be fulfilled without Him. Human relationships are the closest thing we can get to a relationship with God, but they can never satisfy our innate desire for heaven. That’s not an easy lesson to learn, especially when you have no models for healthy relationships.
At age fifteen, when the family was still living in Washington State, Sylvia became pregnant. Regardless of how the pregnancy happened, it was clear that she couldn’t keep the child. Her parents had no intention of raising an infant, and she had no way of taking care of a baby on her own. She ended up choosing adoption. The father was a nameless, faceless guy that not one family member remembers. So somewhere out there, Rick has a sibling who is six years older. It would be nearly impossible to find him or her now, though, having no records, details, or even clear dates on when the child was born.
After the adoption, Sylvia’s family moved to Colorado, and she joined them. Her parents were hard on her, emotionally abusive she would claim in later years—but they were all she had. She had never known her birth father, after all, and never seemed overly concerned about who he was. She did know he’d been in the military, and she got the idea he’d been a singer and a dancer, with dreams that didn’t include a baby.
According to family lore, he lost his dreams to the bottle. So the family propensity toward addiction may well have come to her from both sides, from every angle. The alcohol in Sylvia’s parents’ house made itself known through fighting and outbursts no child should be witness to. The path her life followed, with multiple men and chronic alcohol abuse, is such a cliché that anyone could have written it before it happened.
Why didn’t her siblings follow the same highly destructive path? It was years later, at Hank’s funeral, that Rick was able to talk to Sylvia’s brother and ask how he had managed to live successfully while Sylvia went the wrong way. The brother had few answers. He had managed to find a good job and work hard at it—an exception to the rule, it seemed—and was disliked by some members of the family for it. He was reserved and didn’t say much. It was clear he had escaped the family as quickly as he could and never looked back. Somehow he had recognized the dysfunction in the household and gotten out before it killed him.
Clearly, then, what was wrong with Sylvia came from something more than her dysfunctional family. Mental illness doesn’t distinguish between good parents and bad parents, rich or poor, beautiful or unkempt. And without the proper diagnosis and treatment, the illness can manifest itself in ways that harm both the mentally ill person and those around him or her.
That seemed to be the story of Sylvia’s life, especially once the family arrived in Colorado. Having dropped out of high school in ninth grade, the year she became pregnant, she had little on her mind besides surviving the next day. With little interest in school or career—women were still mostly caregivers and housewives in the 1970s—she gravitated toward relying on men. And despite growing up as a child seeing a marriage that stayed intact, she tended to pick unreliable partners.
She never cultivated a desire to take care of herself either—or perhaps she never realized that was even possible. There was never a transition to adulthood or an introduction to religion or faith that could give her some sense of direction either. With no real sense of right or wrong, she was prone to follow just about anything—or anyone—that she felt could make life easier for her.
Eventually she met and married a military man and moved with him to Germany, where he was stationed. She later told Rick that he had rescued her from the aimlessness of her life in Colorado. But while they were in Germany, Sylvia’s husband introduced her to drugs like opium and marijuana—the first step toward her lifelong love affair with drugs. It wasn’t long before the marriage started to go south. Eventually she and the man broke up, and after the rocky child-marriage folded, she began searching for someone else to save her.
Not long after returning to the United States at the age of eighteen, Sylvia met the kind, round-faced, nice-looking Donald Sylvester, the man who became Rick’s father. Not surprisingly, he was in the military. That fact alone always flipped a switch in Sylvia—probably because her stepfather had been in the military. To her, there was something familiar and comforting about such men.
Sylvia met Donald through her father. At the time, Hank was working at a Robo gas station as a mechanic, and Sylvia sometimes came to visit her dad. Donald brought his car in for some work and ran into Sylvia there. Their attraction was instant and obvious, and Sylvia was sure that Donald was what she wanted. In those days, before the drugs and alcohol took over, men were her go-to drug, and she was always itching for the next high. In her mind, enduring the day-to-day without an escape was painfully boring, a torturous, unending pattern. She just knew there had to be something better—and she decided that Donald fit the bill.
It didn’t hurt that he had some money, because she was looking for someone to take care of her. She also had a profound fear of being alone and never allowed herself to truly be alone.
Oddly, Donald was not a drinker, which was a bit of a problem for her. But she loved the fact that he was head over heels in love with her—and not without reason, because Sylvia was a beautiful young woman in those days. Her eyes were a light marble green, her skin flawless, her personality sparkling and vivacious. Men flocked to her—a fun, fearless, spontaneous party girl who did whatever she wanted.
Unfortunately, the sparkle soon dulled under the influence of alcohol and dr
ugs. Opium hadn’t been enough. Once you turn the corner of addiction, it’s extremely rough to turn back, especially if you don’t have much to live for anyway.
It wouldn’t be long before Sylvia’s fearlessness turned to fighting anyone who dared cross her path. She wouldn’t think twice about pulling a woman’s hair out of her head or punching a man in the face. It would be hard for any man to stay married to a woman with this level of rage.
The stories about Sylvia’s tangles with other women are legendary. Give her a dirty look—or make her believe you did—and she was quick to make something of it. It was white trash hype at its finest—you do not “disrespect” someone or you will regret it. What “disrespect” means is anyone’s guess, but just like in other lower-class cultures, looks, words, and intonations can reap brutal consequences.
And Sylvia was the queen of consequences.
CHAPTER 3
THE FATHER HE NEVER KNEW
Donald Sylvester’s father was an officer in the US Marine Corps and an alcoholic, often getting drunk and taking it out on his kids. After surviving that traumatic childhood, Donald enlisted in the army, serving overseas during Operation Desert Storm and then spending some time in Colombia, where he was promoted to Sergeant First Class and shot three times during drug raids.
These tidbits are something Rick takes pride in. The man who left him when he was only a toddler is, oddly, still someone he can look up to. At least he fought for our country. At least he passed down some kind of honor in his bloodline.
When Donald and Sylvia married, they moved to Germany, her second stint in that country. Things started going downhill quickly, though, especially when Donald received orders and went overseas. Sylvia started going to bars and picking up men, cheating on Donald with his friends and, allegedly, his own brother, who was visiting Germany just before Donald left the country.
Soon after Donald returned, Sylvia became pregnant with Rick. We know little about any substance abuse that may have taken place during her pregnancy—Rick can’t imagine she was able to last nine months without a fix—but mercifully Rick seemed to be born without significant damage. Rick was named after his father, and that name was one of the only things he ever gave to Rick. Sylvia later unofficially used Rick as a nickname, for no other reason than to spite Donald. A little more than a year after Rick was born, his sister, Jenny—also Donald’s child—came into the the world and the two siblings were bonded for life.
Like other men who came and went in Sylvia’s life, Donald loved her passionately, but she didn’t know how to reciprocate that love in a healthy way. She sucked men in and then she hurt them, breaking hearts everywhere she went.
Though Sylvia was attracted to men in the military, there were other types of men she gravitated toward if the first selection wasn’t available. After her marriage to Donald ended and they had returned to the United States, the string of relationships and one-night stands continued—most often with men who were vulnerable and naive, unable to immediately recognize her destructive ways. It usually started in a bar, usually in a rundown area where there wasn’t much going on. People don’t have a lot to do in places like that, and when there are no spiritual foundations to hold them, they break.
These places where Rick spent most of his young life—small towns in southern Arizona and Colorado—are far from the Bible Belt. According to Pew Research, Colorado is one of the least religious states in the country, with only 30 percent of residents claiming to attend church weekly.1 Arizona isn’t much better. Add to this the fact that people are likely to lie when asked about attending church regularly, the number may be even lower.
That doesn’t mean there are no religious influences, however. Native American and New Age spirituality, for instance, make their mark. People make pilgrimages to places like Sedona, Arizona, to experience healing retreats, and it’s common for those with terminal illnesses to give their bodies one last shot at places with names like “The Earth Spirit Center for Healing” and “An Oasis of Healing.” In Colorado, people climb mountains like Mount Elbert to get closer to God and seek out spiritual restoration on high.
Another side of religion in the West is Mormonism, which dominates the religious landscape in Utah. The influence of Mormonism has reached small pockets of Arizona and Colorado. Rick knew quite a few Mormon families growing up, and such religious families tend to bring a conservative, family-oriented focus to their surroundings. But the numbers weren’t significant enough in either Arizona or Colorado to make a difference in his community. Besides, the families he did know didn’t live in his neighborhood. In fact, hardly anyone he knew personally attended a church of any kind on a regular basis.
Though Sylvia occasionally took the children to church during a period of years where she would try and fail to clean up, Rick remembers it mostly as an empty gesture that eventually petered out. This contributed to the brokenness of Rick’s family, and they were part of the ranks of many families caught up in the cycle of poverty and addiction in the Southwest.
And while the government offered support such as welfare and food stamps and other programs aimed at preventing people from being unintentionally ignored or neglected, there was very little the government could do in the way of instilling moral character, a sense of honor, and the ambition to build better lives.
There’s so much more to rescuing people than big government aid programs doling out money. And it’s far more complicated than issuing a pamphlet on making better choices. In reality, people like Sylvia simply cannot be rescued unless they are also part of their own personal rescue team.
Sylvia wasn’t alone in her unwillingness to help herself, of course. The neighborhoods where she lived when Rick was growing up were full of people clinging to their government checks and high-interest credit cards, seemingly content to get by on loads of debt, but never finding a way to climb the ladder of success.
Outside of that, Sylvia’s many mental and character issues seemed to create a hole in her world that allowed a darker force to enter. The idea of spiritual warfare is highly controversial and too complex to fully tackle here, but something evil did seem to be at work in her life at times. Most Christian theologians believe that true Christians cannot be possessed by evil spirits, but Sylvia never claimed to be a Christian or expressed much interest in getting serious about religion.
There were times when Sylvia was high or drunk and would claim a demon was inside of her. She would shake and rock, scream and hallucinate. It’s a haunting memory that even today makes Rick shudder and that pushed him far from God for decades. During one of her short-lived bouts of churchgoing, she attempted to manipulate the pastor of a church whose son had passed away. That situation ended with trauma for the pastor when Sylvia called him frantically in the middle of the night, claiming Satan was attacking her and threatening to kill herself.
Respected pastor and author John Piper has this to say of possible possession: “The New Testament, it seems to me, pictures the devil not mainly as doing something extraordinary, but doing very ordinary, deadly, horrible arrow-shooting at our hearts.”2
This seems like a helpful description of Sylvia’s life, evil invading the ordinary. While some “extraordinary” events did happen, far more pervasive were the “ordinary” perversions of the Devil that have affected her and hundreds of thousands (if not more) over the centuries. And while it’s hard to say if these instances were truly the Devil himself, it’s safe to say they were fueled by Satan’s evil intentions for God’s children.
Christians believe demons are real and that unseen hosts of angels and demons are duking it out in real time next to us. Ephesians 6:12 expresses it this way: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
That’s not to say that God let Sylvia lose this battle. She is His beloved child, too, and not even those who know her well c
an truly know her heart. But unless a person opens her heart to Him, to the free gift of love all people are offered through Jesus, His Spirit cannot take root in the deepest places of her soul. In that respect, Sylvia left herself at a disadvantage, and the results in her life proved disastrous for herself and her children.
On top of her many problems, Sylvia never had a single girlfriend. She was the kind of woman that other women hate—the kind who strings men along and relies obsessively on romantic encounters to feel fulfilled or happy. Other women were a threat. She couldn’t keep a long-term relationship, but just moved from one to the next, reeling in the next victim as the rest of the world watched.
It was an emotional problem compounded by her likely mental illness, one that could have been helped with the right kind of counseling and support. But drugs, alcohol, and destructive behavior patterns spiraled into abusive relationships that ended and began again.
Maybe there’s a type of guy who latches on to women like Sylvia. Or maybe she was just that good at manipulating men, masquerading her crazy just long enough to get them hooked. It’s been said that love is a drug, and some people are very good at dealing.
But here, too, there was surely a spiritual component. Without God as a source of guidance and comfort, people like Sylvia turn to imperfect substitutes as a source of hope. So men and relationships, drugs and alcohol became her gods. And her children—pulled in and out of her home because of neglect—were just pawns in her religion of choice.
CHAPTER 4
PICTURES
Suprisingly, somewhere beneath the booze-addled fog of her days and nights, some of Sylvia’s God-given gifts survived. There was no doubt that she excelled at a few things, particularly drawing. She could look at a photograph or a scene and copy it with lifelike reality. That’s one of the good things Rick remembers, one of the calming, normal things that resonate from his traumatic, chaotic childhood.
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