My ex-wife is dead.

The Raven Express #9 - 12/29/23

This is going to be a different issue this week, a deep dive into some of the most intimate corners of my life in the past few years, so please, feel free to skip this one. It’s not an easy journey to write about, but it’s something I’ve dreamt of exposing to air for a long time in hopes that it’ll help someone out of a similar situation.

I didn’t intend to write out a final issue of the year, but it felt vital to leave this in 2023 and move on in the New Year after keeping this bottled up for so long.

CONTENT WARNING: Various forms of severe abuse, DV, mental health crises, SA and more.

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I.

I took an Uber home from work rather than walk so I could get ready. I was really nervous for this first date.

I didn’t date in high school, so prom was a no-go, well out of sight and mind. I was a kid with undiagnosed anxiety who procrastinated on getting a job or learning to drive because they were big, complicated changes. I was insecure about ever finding a partner or starting a family and a few relationships in my 20s taught me what it was like to be taken advantage of. Ever since I’d lost weight and started running a lot in Arizona in 2014, I fell in love with the idea, for the first time ever, that I was attractive and wanted.

I hate dating, I hated dating, but it was the foot in the door to true love. I’d been on a couple dates in 2016 so far and it wasn’t great.

I met Cait online and we hit it off immediately. She had a cute smirk and ponytails and loved Harry Potter. We met at night in the cold and snow the first week of December at a small cafe downtown. I’d even bought cologne for the first time ever and learned how to use it so I didn’t smell as if I’d bathed in it. It was the best first date ever and I left her place after midnight. We’d already talked the previous couple days and we’d talk every single day thereafter for the next two and a half years.

By the third date, we had The Talk, in which she admitted that she had Bipolar I with psychotic features. She’d been married before and said her husband and mother-in-law had conspired against her to withhold her meds and she went psychotic. For months, she wandered the streets of Colorado Springs unhoused. She claimed she even took advantage of an unlocked Broadmoor lodge for a few days.

She was fine now and so long as we both kept track of her condition and tracked her meds, she would continue to be the cute, lovey-dovey Cait she presented as. As a pragmatic, logical person - usually - I thought I could handle that. She’d just finished up her second master’s degree when we started dating with her thesis based on building a care facility that would promote healing through “emotional math”, as if she were capable of objectively converting emotions into rigid ratings.

Our romance was passionate and fast. We saw movies in the theater, movies that I wanted to see, she bought me a ton of LEGO sets and we ate out a lot at our favorite restaurants. She came and supported me at the start and finish lines for my first and second half-marathons after we started dating. I’d discover much, much later that this was her love-bombing me.

I moved into her small one-bedroom apartment by May and we were married by June, just two days before my birthday. We drove to the top of Tava (Pikes Peak) — the first time I’d ever been up there — and I proposed to her. We went to Crave Burger for lunch and got married in Monument Valley Park in a small ceremony with a few of our friends and her parents that afternoon.

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II.

Not long after we got married, she began to panic about black mold under her kitchen sink. One thing led to another and we were quickly looking for somewhere else to live - that very next month, actually. I continued to work at Target on the northeast side of town, the one I’d Uber-ed home from, which was now considerably farther away. She transitioned to a new job in a professional capacity advocating for members of the community who needed special accommodations.

We picked a place in the middle of town in a neighborhood we were both familiar with. It was an apartment complex she’d lived in once, but nearly all her stories were about creepy neighbors. It was close to a bus stop so she could get downtown directly and I could use the car to get to my job.

The move was incredibly stressful. When I asked for a break, she insisted we continue working, continue packing, continue moving. Moved in and exhausted, she wondered why I didn’t speak up, why I didn’t stand for myself. I shrugged and said I’d do better. She knew I wasn’t good at speaking up for my own needs and took advantage of it.

She never took the bus and we had to share a car. She would become extremely irritated by nearly anything. She would melt down if getting home took much longer than I told her due to obscene traffic. It was my fault I wasn’t keeping her up to date on my location at all times.

Thanks to a bankruptcy, an inheritance from my deceased grandmother and a well-paying job, I’d become debt-free in 2016. Cait asked me why I hadn’t gone back to college after I had to drop out in the early 2000s from my Media Arts and Animation program at The Art Institute of Colorado. I told her that I had a bunch of interests and couldn’t decide which degree I wanted to acquire tens of thousands of dollars of new debt for when I’d worked so hard, even with help, to get rid of the debt.

In part to humor her and in part to study the idea, we stayed up late one night going over programs and ranking my interests and I decided to enroll in a creative program with Pikes Peak Community College (later, State College). I went through all the paperwork, met with the counselors, took the basic skills tests — which mandated remedial math — and realized that the enrollment date was coming too quickly. We sat in front of our apartment in folding chairs and I told her I wasn’t willing to start so quickly and that I would plan to start in the next term the following year.

She quickly became irritated, explaining that she was used to a certain level of comfort financially. We needed my student loan refunds to ensure we could accommodate that. Her parents were well-off, living in a huge house in the foothills that we visited often, requiring a long drive each way.

Seeking both to validate my own curiosity and make her happy, I re-enrolled in college and did well in my general education classes, the first time I’d gotten good grades since freshman year in high school.

But Cait was clearly no longer love-bombing me as she had before the marriage, she was now consuming all of my time. She would insist on giving me time and space, but then need my attention for something that would wind up taking hours. This would happen repeatedly over the years as she would tell her stories and air her grievances over and over again. I stopped running nearly as much and would only participate in two more half-marathons during our marriage.

She loved her friends when they came to visit, but criticized them with deeply rooted remarks when they left. If she asked me to speak with one of her trans friends to learn about discrimination, she would be mad when I did so independently without her being part of the process, as if I were stealing her friend, even though that’s what she advised me to do. Several times, I orbited the aisles of our local grocery store as she yelled at me over text after work. Only after calming her down, sometimes over the course of nearly an hour while pushing a cart going from aisle to aisle, was I able to come home.

She also insisted during this time that I was cheating with any female friend that I had a conversation with. Or that any woman I did or didn’t notice was someone I was potentially romantically interested in, even if I’d just caught the corner of their shoes as they walked by. She would create the problem for me, but then offer a solution, as if providing some kind of grace.

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III.

Before summer ended, we learned that her father had cancer again, this time the terrible Stage 4 kind. After her psychosis years prior, she’d practically re-built her existence on worshipping him, his military service and his taste in 60s movies and American literature. Despite his money, her parents still watched movies on an ancient, failing tube TV.

During this time, Cait was diagnosed with a rare allergy in which her immune system attacked the food she ate. As someone who didn’t cook as we began her elimination diet, we ordered a lot of food, spending a lot of money. It was my fault she was gaining weight — we both were — but I needed to eat exactly what she ate, exactly when she ate it, too.

This served as the beginning of a terrible spiral in which she began to gradually cut me off from the friends I knew and loved, the ones who had been my support system, by carving deep into them with diagnoses based on minute observations. My friend’s wife was giving me slutty eyes. The host was an alcoholic. My friends offended her, so they were gone.

One of our last peaceful milestones came in October 2017 when we attended her cousin’s wedding in Washington D.C. I’d never been, so it was really an exciting trip to see the Pentagon and the White House and how close everything was to each other, but it wasn’t without its hitches. We left the ceremony early because she was having an allergic reaction in the same way we’d left the restaurant the night before where the family had come together. On the morning we left town, I’d gotten locked inside our hotel room as she went downstairs for a cigarette. As hotel staff worked to break the door open, she asked if there was something I was hiding as I sat there patiently on the bed. We laughed about it later, but it was a red flag of how easy her mind drifted to conspiracy. Her parents were supposed to come out with us, but her father’s health had declined too sharply.

During this time, she took control of our finances after I’d screwed something up making payments for the increasing number of bills we were acquiring. Since she didn’t take the bus as she said she would, we ended up buying a second car. The monthly payment was roughly at the limit we’d set, but the interest was astronomical: roughly 30% because of our poor credit. We took it. We also adopted a second dog (she had a small terrier named Roxie after the Chicago character) who we named Jed after the President in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, which I was watching with her for the first time. He was too big and too wild for our apartment, so we surrendered him after a few months, replacing him with Tinkerbell, an anxious Chihuahua-Jack Russell Terrier mix who hovers around my feet today.

I’d taken up the role of her Personal Care Attendant so that I could work from home in a part-time capacity and less at Target, so she required that I interview her thoroughly about her conditions. As an untrained medical professional, with rare time to enjoy on my own, many things began to slip through my grip, like a sense of control. Her conditions were complex and unknowable by any one person without severely abusive repercussions. In this case, if I didn’t abide by her whims, medical or not, she would insist that I was being abusive and call CSPD’s Adult Protective Services to lodge a complaint, which would be a mark against me professionally. She held that swift and harsh punishment over me as a means of control.

As the weather cooled, she lost sleep entirely and went manic, sending me to the local Walmart to buy hundreds of dollars in groceries we didn’t need. She searched far and wide for any kind of treatment for her father’s rare cancer, but even the most promising one said that his condition was too far along to be useful. She quit her dream job to pursue this role, a role she was not even slightly equipped to handle, running herself and everyone else ragged in the process. She informed me that her colleagues and leadership were trying to have sexual relationships with her.

We got matching Mickey and Minnie Mouse tattoos just as her favorite artist was about to set sail for retirement.

At this point, she began burning bridges with her family who had been coming into town to help with her father’s gradual demise. It was initially “fuck them for not recognizing how hard I’m working” and then eventually my fault for allowing her to become so enraged.

In a caring gesture, Cait hosted a tea for her mother and her friends at the cafe we’d met at for our first date. It was her hope to provide some relief from the ongoing decline of her father’s health. But Cait spent every dollar we had on it and when several of the attendees didn’t reimburse her, we were forced to go to a food pantry in Widefield on New Year’s Eve so I’d have something to eat. We went to King Soopers afterward so we could get her food that was less likely to trigger her allergies.

Her father died in March.

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IV.

In April 2018, after acquiring my Certified Nurse Assistant license, I became Cait’s PCA full-time. I quit Target after nearly two years so that I could be at her beck and call at all times. Our sleep schedule was chaos and eventually mine disappeared entirely. We never left town, we never went anywhere, we never did anything.

Cait insisted that I switch from a creative college program to business administration, but we finally settled on a paralegal program. It was what our late-night calculations demanded of me. She made sure I was on the phone often to make sure we knew exactly when my student loan refunds would come through.

Over summer break, she would hold impromptu workshops to rebuild our relationship because she knew what she was doing and I was a repeating abuser. What that abuse was still confuses me all these years later. She had all the therapy tools and could even teach therapy to others. In fact, her therapists insisted they had nothing more to teach her and she really didn’t need any more professional help. When I wasn’t performing to her precise demands, she would download the Tinder app in front of me and ask me which pictures she should use in her profile, which hurt me deeply.

She introduced me to therapy and helped me find a therapist. She would demand to hear what we had talked about in each session and it turned out it was the therapists who were planting the idea in my head that she was being controlling and that Cait had me on a short leash, so she had me switch therapists regularly.

She identified as Christian, but she was really into a variety of forms of pseudo-science and other nonsense. It was hard to nail down any consistent ideology or rational through line to keep track of what she believed because she believed in lots of things. She even claimed she became Jewish during her time at the state hospital during her most recent psychosis. She even spoke in tongues.

I learned to cook basic stuff with her help, like burgers, but if I screwed up something even slightly, the whole thing was a waste and we’d have to order out at great expense, which she blamed me for. I was losing what felt like days of sleep a week and put in charge of her medley of medications. When I messed up a quantity one day, she required that I write an apology letter to put on file with her case worker to show that she had disciplined me. Nothing in my CNA training had prepared me for any of this.

She cut me off from my family in the same breath that she cut me off from working on any creative work, including the YouTube channel I’d spent years building. Since I wasn’t making any meaningful progress on it, there was no sense in continuing it, she insisted. Because of the psychological damage that came from cutting me from my family, she insisted I change degree programs again, this time to actual digital filmmaking at UCCS. She was incredibly angry when orientation took twice as long as I said it would. Our shared calendar became populated with appointments down to half-hour increments, including chores, a calendar that would change weekly as it became impossible to maintain with her random demands and inconsistent scheduling due to her failing health.

She had fallen into the habit of kicking me out of the house and insisting she take my car keys so I was on foot away from home with nothing to do. She kicked me out one time because she accidentally de-selected hundreds of photos in the Google Photos app. When I came home and showered, as to not cause an allergic reaction to my sweat, she kicked me out again after I prepared lunch for her. Sometimes she would kick me out just to write lengthy angry letters to her family and I would sit in her cold car in its small seats.

She tormented me. I was always at home, she was always at home. We watched her movies and listened to her music but never mine. At one point I’d prepared a lengthy intro for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, because I wanted her to see Kim Cattrall as a Vulcan when we’d just watched the entirety of Sex & The City where she played the sex-crazed Samantha. But I never had the chance to.

After everything we watched, she would insist on an in-depth media discussion like she and her father had. In the end, all of her criticisms were valid and accurate, all of mine lacked context and were inaccurate. She got halfway through Blade Runner 2049, one of the few movies I got to see with friends, then left, Googled the ending and chastised me for enjoying it at all. She hated my favorite musicians. I didn’t understand the world the way she did because graduate learning over the course of two master’s degrees had changed how she saw the world. She’d done work for the city of Greeley, so she knew that any of my ambitions were useless — including simple things like blog and web site management — without an education like hers. She knew all my flaws and she alone could concoct solutions.

So we watched her movies and then she would lecture me for hours about random things because she was smart and I was not.

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V.

By 2019, she had alienated herself from nearly everyone she knew, including her own mother while I served as her scratching post. By now, she was bed-ridden and furious all of the time. She was always heavier-set, but she had gained well over a hundred pounds as her health declined.

On two separate occasions, she insisted I give her my phone so that she could spend most of an hour each time examining its contents in front of me, searching for whatever she needed to justify her jealous rage, which she never found, to the relief of both of us. These were tense episodes because her typical responses were unpredictable as it was.

She woke up screaming often and in anger, she told me to sleep on the floor in the living room where Roxie would come to rest next to me. She encouraged me to get into arts and crafts I had never experimented with before, but would destroy the handmade gifts I gave her as emotional retribution. She ripped up the love letters she sent me before my eyes. Over our relationship, she would admit that so many things she did lovingly while we were dating were just tools to manipulate me.

One day, exhausted and with seemingly nothing to lose, I told her I didn’t want to do something she wanted me to do. She leapt out of bed, naked, and charged at me with scissors. I made it out the door before she could strike me. I spent the next few days in a hotel by the airport.

At home, she required that I take an elaborate series of photos of our closets and our kitchen, documenting where everything was at before she would have me move things around. I would then have to take new photos to reflect the changes. I easily took a thousand photos of our apartment and the things in it. We did this every other month. Any time she wanted a meal, I had to take photos of the entire contents of the fridge and freezer because she couldn’t recall what we had. This often resulted in trips to the grocery store, the rare sleep-deprived peace I’d ever get.

She dreamt out loud of me deleting all my old emails and old photos of people I’d once had romantic aspirations for, just, anything that might trigger an improper thought. She asked me to trust her as she had me delete all of my music and playlists and rebuild them around emotions I felt. I’m still recovering lost tracks and rebuilding playlists from that, half a decade later.

During this time I felt desperate and alone. The only time I got to enjoy my own entertainment, my own shows, my own movies - which she called misogynist and awful - was when she slept. She often woke up screaming, putting me on edge. That’s sort of beside the point: I was already on edge when she slept, hoping even the slightest sound or movement wouldn’t wake her up. When she was awake, she yelled at me for help. I wrote a list of things I accomplished while she napped because taking my time to relax was out of the question. Waiting for an appointment at UCCS, she was furious that I spent my time at the library reading periodicals rather than researching how to rebuild our relationship. Because I was an abuser.

One night, she woke up and an argument escalated so incredibly that the police became involved. Afterward, the officers let me know that Cait was clearly familiar with therapy speak, but it was me who was in the right, something I didn’t believe because Cait wouldn’t let me believe it.

We got a second apartment for me to stay in afterward so we could have a kind of distance and hopefully rekindle the romantic relationship we started with. We were just too intense as people to be in such a small space together. Not that it mattered: even after I’d set up in the second apartment, she would call me over at any and all times of day or night to help her.

It takes me a while to fall asleep, typically, so I would climb into bed in my quiet, dark apartment and hope to fall asleep quickly so hard that it produced an anxious response that kept me awake. When she called, I would drag myself over and spend 4-6 hours listening to her rant or watch a movie with her that she had a lengthy diatribe to go with about a family member.

Sleep-deprived and with her in the bathroom late one morning, she took her walking cane and pushed me into the corner along the bath tub, yelling at me the entire time. I screamed at her to stop: please, stop, please. She eventually relented and had me get breakfast from the nearby Village Inn. It was a lesson I had to learn, she said.

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VI.

I couldn’t see a way out. I called CSPD and they couldn’t commit her when she was clearly demonstrating psychotic behavior. TESSA wouldn’t accept me because I was a man. I looked across the courtyard at our ground-level apartment — her apartment, really — in fear, waiting for the Facebook Messenger call chime and then her screaming to fill the room, something that still triggers me years later.

She let me have a few of my friends still, but what could they do except sit on the periphery and observe? How many times did I want to reach out to them and tell them the whole story? What could they have done? If it didn’t involve me booking it the hell out of there, how impressive would Cait’s anger have been? But I was tethered to her financially and logistically. I was stuck there.

After class at UCCS one day, she yelled at me at length when I didn’t place a heating pad close enough for her to reach while she was in bed. After hours of verbal lashing, I wound up sleeping on the floor. In that cold, dark tension, waiting for her to get up and yell at me more, I dreamt of chugging the bottle of bleach we kept nearby for the laundry we ran in the apartment. I got up and wandered to the bedroom in the dark to tell her I was going down to the Lighthouse for a psychiatric hold. She told me to drive safe.

They let me in and I explained that I had ideated and had a plan, but not committed. They held me for three days, but insisted I could leave early. It’s difficult to tell someone that it’s not safe at home when your wife sounds so wonderful on the phone, knows exactly what to say and you have no place to go otherwise. There’s no real healthcare going on there when the overworked staffer is pencil whipping people in and out to meet quotas. Those three days, the first of a few visits, provided incredible, silent peace and mirrors that were not mirrors, but dull metal plates on the wall. I hope to visit Portofino in Italy some day after spending most of a day assembling a 1,500-piece puzzle featuring an aerial shot of its harbor.

After Cait kept me up past sunrise watching Patch Adams one morning, the movie with Robin Williams being a goofy doctor, I went to the closet in my apartment, found one of my ties and attempted to hang myself. It was too easy for me to bail out, so I did, but I explored that idea over and over, hoping some survival instinct wouldn’t kick in and I would be able to leave that hell.

On a July evening, she insisted I record an hour-long rant involving her mother so we could send it to her. After falling out with her mom and family, it was a lesson or long piece of information she clearly hadn’t learned or something. Cait had me return to my apartment to make notes and I gleefully took longer than advertised just so I could be away. Afterward, we spent another hour reviewing it, then another hour listening to it again to write up the email. After nearly five hours of delusional effort, her mother emailed back the next day to say she didn’t have the time or energy to listen to it.

I listened to some of the other audio recordings from this time that I still have and she would obliterate me into a dribbling mess. She tells me over and over again that I’ve abused her - not how I’d abused her - and that it was my fault that my 35th birthday was ruined. Recording me on her speaker phone, I sound like less a person and more a battered, twitchy creature who is barely getting by.

The next day, after she yelled at me about how I put her wheelchair in her car and insisted I fix it before we eat the still-warm dinner I’d just brought home, I ran to my apartment. She messaged me, asking if I needed a hug in the same breath she announced she had called CSPD to lodge a complaint because I had abused her.

I ran to my car and turned off my phone so she couldn’t track me. I went to Walmart where I bought a bottle of sleeping pills, a sandwich and some Vanilla Coke. I retreated to Black Forest and found a parking space in the dark. All silent. I downed the pills and wrote a note, which I placed under the soda. I found it under there undisturbed days later. Red spots filled my eyes as I became sleepy, hoping I wouldn’t have to wake up.

I came to in a dreamy warm haze. The groundskeeper of the nearby church had found me and alerted the sheriff, who sent me to Memorial North hospital. Naturally, they put me in contact with Cait first, who guided me to Cedar Springs, the mental health institute or the “looney bin” for the painfully ignorant. Because I was still hallucinating coming off the sleeping pills, they put me in the strictest ward where I slept for most of three days. When I came home, she was happy I was there, but she didn’t apologize.

She never apologized.

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VII.

In retrospect, it’s hard to determine when she began losing her grip on reality. Maybe it always trickled through her fingers.

She had bumped us between phone carriers to save money and get new phones, which required me to lose the phone number I’d had for over 15 years. We would overdraft at one bank and then start accounts at another. We surrendered my car, which we were upside down on, and she never paid for the internet at my apartment, so that went to collections as well.

She would buy things on Amazon that she thought would be nice for either of us to have, to help alleviate the stress she caused on a permanent, ongoing basis — or the stress I caused being an abusive partner, from her perspective. Then she would have me go from store to store to pawn them for a quarter of their value or less. She bought me a particular LEGO set I’d wanted — Ship in a Bottle, 21313 — and I kept it in its box, unbuilt, knowing we’d have to send it back when she couldn’t find any more money elsewhere.

(We did send it back, as I suspected. I re-bought it a year and a half later and building it was such a triggering event that I had to call out of work the next day.)

She bought me an Xbox One X console when I’d had to pawn the Xbox One I’d bought years earlier to buffer her financial mistakes. We got half-value from that, which she promptly spent on Carrabba’s for dinner. She loved that place because her father loved it. She would send me to second-hand clothing retailers where they would offer a few bucks for a few selections from the mountain of her clothing I brought in.

I hate all pawn stores now and I can see the cruelty they inflict on the less fortunate.

At her insistence, I got a cat, who became my best friend. She waffled on whether or not I could get him due to her allergies, but I went to pick him up at the end of July. His name is Kirby and he’s stretched across my lap now, all grown up. She grew up with cats and so the question fell, as it often did, about whether her conditions were psychosomatic and entirely in her head. She eventually defeated this by concluding that the term had been rendered obsolete years ago. Despite demanding I use peer-reviewed research for evidence when I made a factual claim to her, she never provided any for hers.

She insisted I try new anxiety and depression meds, and she would serve as the judge of whether they were effective or not. The doctors would put me on medications like Latuda that made me physically uncomfortable unless I got an adequate amount of sleep. Since I never got an adequate amount of sleep, I became physically uncomfortable a lot. When she couldn’t get the medications she needed, she would send me to my primary care with a fictional ailment and a needed medication, which she would take for her own needs. When we did get her to her appointments, it was my job to echo whatever she demanded from the doctors based on research she had done beforehand, to be a true advocate for her.

Our neighbors would come knocking to ask if we were doing okay when they heard her screaming at me as I sat on an uncomfortable gym bench she’d bought while she sat in a big, comfortable chair her mom had bought. Every time I hear one of my current neighbors arguing, it reminds me of this.

Our upstairs neighbor had a big vibrating alarm that woke up Cait, so I went up to ask him about it one day. He admitted he had meant to stop using it, but before I left, he asked if I knew about a couple who were in constant shouting matches. It was always the woman yelling at the guy, though and he felt sorry for him. I told him Cait and I did have passionate disagreements from time to time, short of admitting that it was us he was hearing night after night. When I reported this conversation to Cait, she told me not to talk to the neighbors anymore.

She had taken my last name in marriage and citing my “abusive” behavior, insisted I take hers. When The Gazette wrote about our story the next year, they insisted on highlighting that fact several times, as if I were a carnival freak. When people would call me by that last name, one I’m still legally transitioning out of, it was brutal for a long time.

By Christmas, she was re-telling me old stories but with delusional twists. These new versions involved her and her father working together on secret operations in Northern Colorado — he had been a military intelligence officer — and she believed she had a comm link in her tooth to communicate with the President. I spent the 10 minutes leading up to midnight on New Year’s Eve and afterward watching her scream in emotional anguish as she believed the sound of illegal fireworks popping up around the neighborhood were triggering her memories from an Iraqi warzone - a warzone that only existed in her mind.

It was during this time that she insisted she no longer had Bipolar and had, in fact, been misdiagnosed.

We moved back together as her mental condition and our finances disintegrated. She bought me a ticket to see The Rise of Skywalker at the theater, then demanded the car keys when she thought I was unpatriotic. I walked and ran three miles to see the movie, missing the first 15 minutes.

She was calm when I told her I was coming home, but upon arrival, I found my running medals strewn about the couch. I was concerned she was going to cut them to ribbons as she had coerced me to throw away most of my LEGO sets that morning in a sleep-deprived haze. She threw a water-filled thermos at me and I scrambled out the door, calling a friend to pick me up from the Walmart nearby. Cait fired me from my Personal Care Attendant job that night, which left us scrambling for funds since I was our primary breadwinner.

In her delusions, she insisted I couldn’t leave the house without operational security’s approval, granted to her through her imagination. I had no idea what to do. Living with Cait had done what my father could never do: made me enjoy driving a car. Each task she sent me on brought me peace and served as the only time I could listen to podcasts or my own music.

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VIII.

On March 8, 2020, I had run around town trying to cash a very small check from AT&T. We were running low on money and running out of things to sell and running out of goodwill from her mother who kept us afloat financially, often at the business end of Cait’s fury.

I sat down on the futon opposite her when she dropped a cigarette on the floor. I took out my phone to get a photo, the one you see above, and she insisted on confiscating my phone for national security purposes. When I tucked it in my pocket, she hit me in the head. It was not the first time she had physically abused me, but it would be the last. I pushed her away and ran out the door. I reached the car, where she couldn’t see or hear me, and I called 911.

A pair of officers arrived, attempting to get into the apartment, which she had locked, at first through persuasion and then through force. Untrained in any kind of mental health aid, they spoke louder and louder that she open up. In the ruckus, she texted me to ask them to leave because it would cost us money to replace the door if they had to break in. They called in their supervisor and the three of them eventually breached the apartment. Cait panicked and began hyperventilating. An ambulance came and they took her away while I remained hidden around the corner. No one came to inform me that they had left and I walked back into the silent apartment alone.

I sat back down on the futon and tried to track her through the system, but mostly, I sat there thinking, as I had for years, that maybe this is the point where I would get the Cait back that I had fallen in love with. This would be the breaking point that would reset the whole thing. She would be better again.

Three years later, she filed to have the temporary protection order dropped as she had completed the court’s requirements. This request came to me via email and I replied sharply, describing the events that followed:

To the presiding Judge,

I am issuing this statement to protest any potential relief of my Temporary Mandatory Protection Order against my wife Caitlin Louise Pfeifer. As of this writing, I am compiling my divorce documents and filing fee(s) with the aim of having a Permanent Mandatory Protection Order issued against Caitlin.

Over the course of our marriage — specifically, the three years that we lived together before she was arrested — Caitlin was emotionally, psychologically, financially and then physically abusive. Her arrest only came after several incidents of physical abuse.

Caitlin Louise Pfeifer obsessed over grudges with every person she had ever known, every family member she knew, to an incredible extent. She spent hours a day, days a week, weeks a year, obsessively decompiling and re-living memories in her never-ending pursuit to manipulate and control others, including myself, with me as captive witness to it all.

Caitlin Louise Pfeifer is a destroyer. She has a history of alienating friends, family and acquaintances while crafting delusional falsehoods and conjectures about them. She inflicted such demoralizing and destructive abuse upon me that I attempted to take my life twice and went into mental health wards twice as often for suicidal ideation while we lived together. She is only considerate of others to the extent that she can research them and eventually manipulate them to her own destructive whims. I only took her maiden last name under severe psychological duress.

I want her to be far away from me. Forever. Upon the conclusion of our divorce proceedings, I never want to hear from or communicate with her for the rest of my days. I do not even want to invite the opportunity that she be capable of doing so. Additionally, Caitlin Louise Pfeifer should never, ever be trusted to purchase or possess a firearm for any reason.

When I spoke with the district attorney’s office in regards to a plea bargain and probation, it was in the spirit that our criminal justice system was completely inadequate to handle Caitlin Louise Pfeifer and her severe Bipolar illness while in a county jail setting.

On March 17^th, 2020, I pleaded with the Court to have her psychologically evaluated following her arrest for calling in a fake bomb threat at a public library. The Court, as well as her public defender, were completely incapable and entirely unwilling to understand this request and did not do so. As a result, on April 14^th, 2020 she barged into my residence under delusion, was arrested and received an additional Trespassing charge in addition to her Domestic Violence charges. Caitlin Louise Pfeifer is intelligent, cunning and clever and she will deceive anyone given enough leeway.

As I write this, I am reliving these severe memories from three years ago as if they just happened. Caitlin Louise Pfeifer is a local threat to my well-being with a history and habit of obsessive thought. She has demonstrated her willingness to inflict physical harm on anyone she cannot control. I have countless pages of self-documented essays from her describing her disturbing motivations.

I plead with the Court once more: do not allow this Permanent Protection Order to lapse. I am doing my diligence to ensure my work is included so the Court may consider a Permanent Order. I realize this is my opportunity to inform the Court as to why it should NOT rescind the Protection Order and I am making my statement known.

After the district attorney called me to confirm the note above was still an accurate collection of my thoughts on the matter, they recommended a denial of her request, which the court subsequently did.

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IX.

While the world went through COVID, I had to navigate joblessness in a time when everyone had furloughed or laid off their workers while dealing with Cait’s journey in and out of jail. While she continued to run into problems with a justice system that wouldn’t give her a psych evaluation and place her in assisted living, I slept. For the week after they took her, I slept nearly 12 hours a day.

I regained my bearings, reached out to friends and family - but not mine, not yet. There is a three year hole of pop culture where I have little memory. I only listened to a handful of new songs, watched a handful of new movies. 2017-2019 is a period where I may as well have had blinders on. I have memories of that time, but they are burned and brittle at the fringes. Nearly every time I left the house to hang out with friends, she kept firm track of me and was insistent I return home as soon as possible for no urgent reason other than she could control me that way.

I restarted my YouTube channel and began working on the art she thought was worthless without her education and guidance. I took a call center job that summer and was fired after eight weeks because anxiety prevented me from coming to work. At the subsequent awful warehouse job that followed, I would find places out of view of my manager and break down in tears randomly. My bosses didn’t give the slightest shit about me, even after I wrote a lengthy e-mail to the head of the company. My emotions swung wide, up and down, hour to hour, day to day. I reconnected with old friends and connected with new ones. I eventually reconnected with my mom, too, but many relationships are still strained from the weight Cait put on them, warping them.

I was emotionally and psychologically broken, but now also saddled with nearly $45,000 in debt. When I asked UCCS about relief for a smaller bill just shy of $5,000, caused by Cait the last time she coerced me into dropping out of school past the withdraw date, they recommended I take out another student loan to cover it. Only another bankruptcy will clear much of it out at this point. Collections agencies call me at least twice a day, every day, to this day.

There are many, many things that I’ve learned about mental health, feminism, advocacy, misogyny and more in spite of Cait. I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder during our marriage — something I’d like to retest for — which helped me understand and identify the emotional troubles that caused me so much grief and made relationships so difficult for me.

I’ve learned to engage more quickly in an emergency and how to immediately empathize with someone in a crisis. My expectations of society and law enforcement specifically to handle people like Cait in a crisis are much higher. People are no longer “crazy” to me, which is a terrible term, and I empathize so much more deeply with those who truly need the help and are incapable of getting it. I understand much better now people fall into psychological traps, become tempted by cults, become brainwashed through systematic, psychological tampering.

Cait was born different. She could not punch through her delusions. There was no way she could strong-arm her way to mental health. Medications were mere bandaging that could fatigue and slip away. She could not workbook her way out of this. She had trained her therapists and psychologists alike to believe she was just fine when she was not. She was a clock with 13 hours on its face, ticking to an entirely different beat. She did not need a partner to grind to dust, she needed a full-time staff to manage her needs, which she eventually received.

I filed for divorce and was awarded it in May 2023. I had held off for so long because I had no money for a lawyer and I feared she would seek legal assistance to burn me all the way to the end. Instead, she made several mistakes doing things on her own and filled out too much of the wrong paperwork, which made me finally doubt her reputation as an intellectual when I was having to clean up everything and send in all the right forms on her behalf. Over several sessions, I got my Mickey and Minnie tattoo covered up — even I can barely tell it was there at all.

In the years since she was removed from our apartment, even knowing where I moved afterward, she never wrote me the long, emotionally violent letters that she would spend entire days concocting for her loved ones. In retrospect, I feel relieved. She never wrote her ex when we were married, either, but through others, I know she spoke poorly of me afterward, just like she did about him.

After the divorce decree, I got notes from the court saying that she had declared bankruptcy and changed her name back, perhaps in response to me changing mine. Just recently, I discovered that she had died, courtesy a flowery Instagram post by her cousin, a cousin that Cait had slayed for her “sins” multiple times in front of me over the years.

Maybe I can give myself permission to forgive her, but I don’t know. So long as she existed, knowing that she could maliciously attack me through a variety of means, I felt threatened by her. She almost had me take my life. She was a house of constantly whirring saw blades that I always had to be mindful of and sometimes she would get me. I don’t know what’s there to forgive.

I am not happy Cait is dead, but I am not sad. Learning about her passing was an oddly-shaped piece of information to digest, coming the day after I graduated as a 2023 Colorado Springs Mayor’s Civic Leaders Fellow. It was a fellowship that Cait would never have believed I would be accepted into and she would have sabotaged me at every possible moment to drop out and give up so I could be at home to hear her screeching about whatever random thing came to her mind for hours on end.

Her passing is not sweet revenge or retribution. I do not owe her peace or welcome. I am alive and she is not. My abuser is dead. Her family’s abuser is dead. Her friends’ abuser is dead.

If there is a hell, she is there.

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X.

When they took her away, our bank account was overdrawn and I had little money, so I had to take inventory of what food was left in the house.

She had gotten into carbonated drinks, so there were some cans of peach-flavored Bubly in the fridge as well as random items like hot dogs and cottage cheese. In one of her many instances of exacting perfection, she had plastic trays with handles labeled big with who the food was for and what kind it was.

Down on the bottom shelf was a multi-pack of guacamole dip cups. Somewhere, deep in her delusions, she still thought of things that I would be interested in.

I spent many years wondering what I did wrong, what I did to deserve the brutality she unleashed on me on a daily basis. I wondered how I was the abuser she kept claiming I was and my doubt took up what precious little space I had left that wasn’t committed to simply surviving. I’m not a perfect human, but I never cheated on her, I never lied except out of preservation. I was afraid of her until the very end. Even as I heard of her passing, I was procrastinating getting that permanent protection order. The last time I saw her was in a virtual WebEx window during our divorce conference. She was bigger than I remembered with long hair, barely recognizable. Her passing didn’t surprise me, her staying alive did.

Cait adhered to what she called the “Platinum Rule” in which you don’t do to others what you wish to be done to you, but rather what the other person wishes you would do to them. It requires the extra step of empathy, of understanding what someone needs, rather than projecting your own desires upon them.

Cait never asked me if I wanted guacamole dipping cups, so I ignored them until I eventually threw them away.

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