by Amy Newmark
Our respective worlds of invention were for our own survival. Growing up in an Italian-Catholic family in the Seventies, to be gay was a worse sin, a bigger crime, than being a murderer. You were hell-bent for sure. I was different than my sisters and friends from a young age and it wasn’t going to change. All I could do was hope and pray that God wouldn’t punish me for how he made me.
My father spent more than two decades feigning mental illness to stay out of jail. In the West Village neighborhood where he mostly lived, he put on daily street performances. Dressed in pajamas and a worn-out robe, he’d meander the one block from his apartment to “the Café” — a small room with windows painted black, where he’d meet a bunch of men to play cards. Sometimes he’d stop and talk to a parking meter on the way. The New York tabloids dubbed him “The Oddfather.”
Once in a while, I’d see glimpses of the father he could have been. He’d put on Elvis and dance around the living room in his boxer shorts. He’d kiss his mother on the cheek and stuff her apron pocket with one-hundred-dollar bills. He’d kneel at his bedside, eyes shut, and pray the rosary.
By age nineteen I couldn’t sustain my lie any more. I’d dated boys and worn a frilly prom dress, but living a double life was making me physically and emotionally ill—for real. I was plagued with mysterious pains and anxieties, so I decided it was time to come out to my parents. I hoped and prayed they would accept and love me as I was.
“Mom, Dad . . . I have something important I need to tell you,” I said to them one night when Dad was staying over at the family house in Jersey. My throat started closing up, but I pressed on. “I like women, I’m gay.”
My father was silent — deadly, scarily so. I expected yelling, but this was worse.
“It’s a phase,” he said, in a cool and controlled voice that made me shiver. “I don’t want you to see any of your girlfriends anymore.”
In that moment, I realized he wanted nothing to do with the truth; he wasn’t willing to accept the real me. And so, I continued pretending for a while longer. Until three years later, when federal agents broke down my father’s apartment door with a battering ram and arrested him, charging him with racketeering and murder, among other crimes. He was put on house arrest to determine if he was mentally fit to stand trial, and he revved up his act as feds watched him 24-7 from across the street in parked sedans.
Seven years later, in 1997, my father was sentenced to twelve years in prison. But even then, on the inside, he stuck to his elaborate ruse in case it would get him out. While he continued his lie, I embarked on a search for truth. I went into therapy to unravel the confusing layers of my childhood and get clarity on our father-daughter relationship. I studied the art of Reiki and other healing techniques to find health for myself, and help others. In the process, I discovered I had an ability to sense spiritual energies around me.
With my new understanding of the power of energy, words, and intent, I wondered if I could mend something between the two of us, even as he sat in a dreary jailhouse 500 miles away.
I wrote him a long letter, and here’s a small portion:
Dear Dad,
I am writing today to tell you who your daughter really is . . .
Before I begin —first and foremost, I forgive you. I forgive you for all the things you couldn’t do; for the father you couldn’t be; and for anything that was said, done, not said or done. I also forgive myself for all the anger, rage, and resentment—and for anything I said or did that hurt you in any way . . .
I told you previously that I am a healer. I am committed to helping people find their way.
I see miracles every day, small and large, in my life and in the lives of my clients . . .
Dad, I know that when you read this, you will understand what I am saying because it will resonate with your soul. I will continue to pray for you and send you good energy. Thank you for being my father and for helping me learn my lessons in this life.
In gratitude and love always,
Rita.
I mailed the letter, and hoped and prayed one last time that my father might accept and love me as I was.
Two weeks later, he called my mother looking for me.
“His voice was shaking,” my mother told me, shocked. “He said, ‘Tell Rita that I love her very much . . . tell her I understand.’ ”
My heart raced; I was ecstatic. I could feel something monumental happening within my father.
Not long after that, he was up for parole after serving six years and he desperately wanted to come home. But there was a new problem.
In an effort to keep Dad in jail, federal authorities wanted to charge the family with obstruction of justice, saying we helped him lie all those years. He didn’t need to hear any more.
My father made an admission shortly thereafter, shocking both the family and the public.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: April 13th, 2003.
An enduring urban mystery was solved last week when Vincent (The Chin) Gigante, the Mafia leader who spent decades slobbering, muttering and wandering Manhattan in his bedclothes, admitted in a Brooklyn federal court that he had deceived the teams of psychiatrists who had evaluated his mental competency . . .
My father died in jail two years later. But in that time, he was a freer man than he’d been in decades. He loved me without judgment and he told the truth—those, to me, were miracles both small and large.
When I married the love of my life, Bobbie, in 2013, I know my father was at the wedding in spirit — walking us both down the aisle. After the ceremony, we put on an Elvis tune for him—“Jailhouse Rock”—ha! As Bobbie and I danced, we both could feel my father take our hands and spin us around on the dance floor. It wasn’t the traditional father-daughter dance, but then again — we weren’t your everyday kind of family.
But prior to this, and shortly following his passing, my father appeared to me in my treatment room. He came with an unlikely offer of love, healing and redemption, communicating to me that he wanted to make a pact with me to assist in my healing work from the other side. To say the least, I was overjoyed and embraced this wholeheartedly.
~Rita Gigante with Natasha Stoynoff
Recovering Together
You’ve gotta have hope. Without hope life is meaningless. Without hope life is meaning less and less.
~Author Unknown
We have learned that when life brings tragedy, you must search for that speck of light, that speck of hope within it. It may not always manifest itself right away; you may not be in a place immediately to see that light. Sometimes we need to let ourselves hurt, to grieve. And then sometimes that speck is more like a boulder when you come upon it.
Our story starts on January 3, 2010. Mike was on a routine patrol in Afghanistan. He and his Air Force teammate were assigned to an Army unit to call in air strikes. On this day they were ambushed and shrapnel from an improvised explosive device (IED) hit Mike. Four of his brothers lost their lives and many others suffered injuries. Mike was left completely blind. He faced an unknown future in a pitch-black world.
January 3rd was a hard day for me too. My whole world turned upside down when I was informed that my husband, Sgt. Joshua Lengstorf, would not be coming home. The grief was overwhelming and I prayed I would be strong enough for our fifteen-month-old daughter. I felt so lost and the world felt like such a dark place. I was struggling with my pain, my anger, and trying to understand. I learned that it was okay to just let go and feel all the emotions. It was okay to ask, “Why?” Letting it all out helped me to start healing. And then I learned that I had an inner strength I never knew existed.
I met another young widow at a memorial for our husbands. Her husband had lost his life in the same attack as mine, while helping with the chaos from the first explosion. He had been Senior Airman Mike Malarsie’s teammate. And that’s when I learned about Mike, whose family was chronicling his journey of recovery on a blog. I began to read it. A few times I felt that I should reach out to him, but quickly sq
uashed those thoughts. He was probably coming to grips with his new life and I was trying to cope with Josh’s passing. But one night I couldn’t ignore the prompting and I contacted my friend about meeting Mike. A few weeks later my young daughter and I were on a plane.
Mike was in California learning to live his life blind. His dream growing up had been to serve in the military and now he was on a new adventure. Since learning of his four fallen brothers, he had dedicated his life to living with purpose. He had lived and they had not, so he was determined to avoid feeling sorry for himself. Mike pushed himself to get through blind rehabilitation so that he could give back and begin again. He remembers being a little lost. He didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t know anything about blindness.
Josh’s outlook on life had been to just get out there and do it. I realized the best way to honor his memory was to be brave enough to live again. I know it sounds clichéd, but something happened when Mike Malarsie and I met. It was like soul recognized soul. We both felt it but were confused by it and a bit afraid. Eventually we had to discuss it. The timing wasn’t the best, but we put our trust in Heavenly Father and took a leap of faith.
Fast-forward four years, and we are married and that young daughter is a big sister. We have moved several times, and most importantly, we have learned amazing lessons about life and ourselves. We have had ups and downs but we are strong. We have learned not to take life for granted and to live life to the fullest.
Mike has attracted a lot of media attention and has been interviewed on TV shows all around the country, spreading our message of hope and faith. He even became part of the Chicken Soup for the Soul family when his guide dog, Xxon, won the seeing and hearing guide dog category on the American Humane Association’s Hero Dog Awards nationally broadcast TV show. Chicken Soup for the Soul’s pet food business was one of the sponsors of the Hero Dog Awards and as a result Mike and Xxon have appeared at Chicken Soup for the Soul events and our family has expanded again to include those new friends.
Now Mike has a wife, children, a guide dog who has given him back his freedom of movement, a new career motivating other people, and friends all over the country. As a couple and as individuals, we have learned that there is always hope. Our whole story is about hope—hope that each of our futures could be good again, hope that we could continue to grow as people. We each had our dark moments, but we saw that speck of light. Hope is right around the corner for all of us. We sometimes have to put in some effort to get there, but there is always a light. Just keep looking for it!
~Jesse Malarsie
Much More than Hope
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
~Elie Wiesel
I’d driven the route to the old church the night before to be sure I wouldn’t lose my way. On the actual meeting day, I had invented a migraine and left work a half hour earlier than necessary.
It seemed foolish to care so much about punctuality—surely being late wouldn’t exclude me from the meeting, I told myself—but we are what we are, and I was determined to be on time. I pulled into the church parking lot with thirty-five minutes to spare, more than enough time to change my mind, but not quite enough to chicken out.
It was early October, cool to the point of chilly, well dark by 6:30. The church, sitting high on a hill overlooking the grimy city, was buffeted by wind. It whistled around me, crooning it almost seemed, reminding me of the loons that used to call to each other eerily after sundown when I was a child spending summers on my grandmother’s farm. A school-sized milk carton skittered roughly across the pavement, a newspaper page flew directly in front of the windshield. It all felt foreboding and I badly wanted to turn the ignition key and head my old Volvo wagon back to the empty apartment on Dead Horse Hill. I told myself it wasn’t a good night to be out—I was hungry and headachy, had forgotten my gloves and was wearing only a light jacket. So I gave the key a hard twist and the engine roared to life. Home and safety were twenty minutes away.
But the door to the church was only a few steps away across the parking lot. I was almost there. “God, give me strength,” I said out loud. I turned off the engine and headed into the wind.
The meeting room, as plain vanilla as the church was gingerbread, was tucked away at the end of a long, fluorescent lit, maze-like collection of corridors in the church basement. Hand-lettered signs and arrows were tacked at each intersection and turn of the carefully neutral, non-threatening walls. The threadbare carpet was beige. The ceiling, which needed painting, was beige. Beige bulletin boards hung on beige walls and there were no windows, making the atmosphere even less inviting. Nevertheless, I followed the signs and arrows. And then without warning, I was at the last set of beige double doors.
“Al Anon” the hand-printed sign read. And underneath, “AA” with a smudgy arrow pointing back the way I’d come.
I hated new things, unfamiliar places, first times. I hated doing things I’d never done before or feared I couldn’t do well. I had no gift for small talk with friends, let alone strangers. I’d forgotten what a genuine smile even felt like. I was afraid of crowds. All things considered, it was some mild form of insanity to think that some old, sorry, clichéd self-help group would be of any use to me. I had my pride, my privacy, three cats who depended on me, and a husband locked up in a sterile and unfriendly alcoholism treatment center. I wasn’t about to admit or advertise my troubles to a bunch of losers or religious do-gooders. I was thinking I’d go home to the little apartment on Dead Horse Hill, forget all this nonsense and crawl into bed when the door suddenly swung inward and open.
“Welcome to Al Anon,” a pretty, young, well-dressed blonde carrying a tray full of coffee mugs said to me. “I’m Alma. You can sit anywhere.”
And for no good or comprehensible reason, standing there in that lonely, windowless hall with its harsh lights, the smell of coffee, and this sweet-faced stranger, I began to cry.
“Please,” she said gently. “You’ve come this far. It’s only a few more steps.” She balanced the tray with one hand—it trembled slightly and on sheer reflex I reached out a hand to help her steady it—she took a step back and leaned toward me with a confidential smile. “Besides,” she stage whispered, “we have cookies.”
“Oh, well,” I somehow managed a shaky smile. “If there are cookies . . .”
The room was as beige as the hall, with a wide circle of what my grandmother would have called card-table chairs lining the walls. A table just inside the double doors offered an array of books, pamphlets, T-shirts. Another was neatly laid out with Styrofoam cups, paper napkins, plastic spoons and a chirping coffee pot. The promised cookies were there too — chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin. Hung above the tables were brightly colored, if tattered, posters held in place with tape, the Serenity Prayer crookedly centered between the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. Above them, a sheet of poster board proudly proclaimed the name of the group, its meeting times, and in heavy black script an invitation to “take what you like and leave the rest.”
“Your first time?” a voice at my elbow asked quietly.
A woman about my age, holding a chocolate chip cookie in one hand and a small blue book in the other, smiled at me. She had kind eyes.
“I’m Denise,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know the first time is the hardest. You’re welcome to sit next to me.”
I hesitated, not at all sure I could handle this much kindness. She smiled again, nodded to the round clock on the wall.
“I’m sitting right under the clock,” she told me, then added, “It gets better, hon, it really does.”
I don’t remember most of what was said or who said it. I do remember that there were very few empty chairs, that there were mostly women, that there were horror stories I’d never imagined a person could live with, and that somewhere along the way, the knots in my belly untangled and I began to chip away at the walls I’d built around myself.
Hope is a fu
nny thing, sometimes elusive and hard to hold onto, sometimes hiding in plain sight, just around the next corner. I’d gone to the meeting hoping to learn how to make my husband stop drinking. Instead I learned about detachment, patience, boundaries, self-esteem and faith.
Hope blindsided me with a lot more than I even knew I needed.
~Barbara Beaird
Our Silver Lining
Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future.
~Robert H. Schuller
Life for our family was as close to perfection as I ever imagined. I had four healthy sons, secure jobs for both my husband and myself, a nice home, and good friends. I mean, what else could you ask for?
Jason, our oldest son, was in the Army. He was getting ready for deployment and while my heart was heavy with worry, I had to believe that he would return home safe and sound in a year. I knew I had no control over what was happening in the Middle East and, as he reminded me over and over, this is what he was trained to do. I had to accept his words and believe that my nineteen-year-old “baby” would come back to me as perfect as he left.
On March 2, 2003, just days before he was to leave for Iraq we got a call that would forever change our lives. “There has been an accident . . . .” I will never forget those simple, yet crushing words. Even now, eleven years later, my eyes fill with tears and my heart aches as I recall the moment that our world came tumbling down.
Within hours we were on a plane to Kansas City where Jason had been airlifted to a trauma unit. As we stood vigil at his bedside we listened as the word “paralyzed” echoed in the room. The doctor spoke, we listened. I wanted to scream but I was frozen in place. My perfect “baby boy” was now confined to a life far from what I imagined for him in the delivery room nineteen years before. His neck broken, he was “dead” from mid-chest down. At that moment I was paralyzed with him. My limbs could move, but my heart was broken and I knew I would never recover from this darkness.