The past 12 months of my life have seen my highest high and my lowest low.

A year ago my wife Brianna and I were living in her mother's dining room. Our children were quartered in the spare bedroom that served as their study. We had lived in a very nice apartment with only one drawback: an upstairs neighbor with large speakers and a powerful amplifier. The management didn't do anything to force our neighbor to keep the volume to a reasonable level, so in January 2002 we broke our lease and moved out to the previously mentioned dining room.

Brianna and I had been polyamorous for some time, and we regularly attended the monthly social meeting of a local group, PolyCentral. At the March meeting (exactly 1 year ago now) I begged, I pleaded, if anybody knew of a suitable house for rent, please, please pass the information along to us! Later in the meeting TK, a member we hadn't had known previously, told us he thought he could help us. His brother's house was for rent, and not only did it have 4 bedrooms and a screened-in pool, it even came with a live-in handyman... him!

So after the meeting we went up to Casselberry to see the house. To say it needed work was an understatement, but it did have possibilities. To speed things along we pitched in evenings and weekends and moved in at the end of the month.

Now I'll confess, we had plans for TK when we moved in. Well, Brianna did, anyway. TK is from New Orleans and still has a house there, and we sort of thought we'd encourage him to return home after our house was completely shipshape. He lived in a large mother-in-law suite off the kitchen, and Brianna really wanted to replace his belongings with a nice pool table and accessories.

What happened was, they fell in love. Suddenly we were a truly polyamorous household, the three of us making a "V" with Brianna at the point. TK and I are about as opposite as two men can get, so between us Brianna could indulge just about any whim she had. Life was good. Very good. In fact, "Life is good" was our catchphrase. We gave the house a name: "Fortune's Home" because good fortune was in our lives and lived there with us.

It was the custom/tradition in PolyCentral that somebody would hold a gathering or party of some sort after the meeting. We hosted the July after-party, and we made some serious plans. We put up a privacy screen around the pool to allow skinny-dipping, we had chicken and hamburgers and hot dogs for the grill, neon spray paint for the privacy screen, Caribbean-themed decorations and lots more. I think over 40 people attended, and to say it was a tremendous success would be an understatement. It was the high point of the year. Brianna especially was riding high. Hosting this kind of party was a dream come true for her.

I had made an unexpected but very welcome and pleasant connection with serolynne, a woman from PolyCentral I'd known for a while. We began dating and it was wonderful. It seemed that life couldn't get any better.

Then one day later that month, it all fell into the pit.

Brianna had been wanting to do a "walkabout" of sorts for some time. Nothing specific, just going out on her own because she had never really been on her own before. She moved from her mother's house to our house after we got married so she never got that experience of total independence, and she craved it. "Self-actualization" the psychologists call it.

She decided to take a trip, and after looking into the possibilities decided on New Orleans. It seemed a good choice for a number of reasons. For one, it's someplace she always wanted to see. TK was from there and had a place where she could stay. And it's within reasonable driving distance from Orlando.

She left in the late morning of July 20th, after doing some clothes shopping and the 5 of us going out for a farewell brunch. She had bought some boots, and she modeled them for us before we went out. Her whole attitude was different. She was taller, but it wasn't just from the footwear. The confidence and excitement she exuded were visible and tangible. Already she was more than she had been the day before. It was amazing to see.

I walked out to the car with her to kiss her goodbye, and for some reason I walked down the driveway as she backed out and stood on the sidewalk watching her drive away. I stayed there until she turned a corner out of sight, and stayed there a moment longer staring at the spot where the car disappeared from view. I was feeling melancholy for some reason.

Later that evening I began feeling restless, out of sorts. I couldn't put my finger on it. I started drinking and continued on into the night. Brianna was supposed to call when she got to New Orleans at about 10 pm. By midnight she still hadn't called so I tried calling her mobile phone. It rang twice before going into voicemail, which told me it was turned off. I told myself there was nothing to worry about, that she was just meeting people and seeing things and wasn't interested in anything as mundane as checking in with the husband. I worked on being pissed at her for not calling instead of being worried that she hadn't called. Finally, I went to bed, taking the phone with me.

I was woken up around 9am the next morning by a very loud knocking on the front door. It was repeated more than once as I struggled to simultaneously pull on pants and dash to the front of the house. I took a quick look thru the peephole before opening the door. The lens was foggy so I couldn't make out detail, but I did make out two people dressed very much alike. "Great, Jehovah's Witnesses," I thought, and prepared to deliver a scathing lecture on the virtues of observing and obeying the "No Soliciting" signs posted at the neighborhood entrances.

I was shocked to open the door and discover not solicitors, but uniformed Casselberry Police officers. I was even more shocked to learn they were looking for somebody who knows Brianna. When I identified myself as her husband, he asked me to step outside for a moment. I began to get a very bad feeling.

He told me that the previous afternoon, Brianna had been driving westbound on I-10 just west of Tallahassee when she lost control of the car. It rolled, he said.

"She didn't survive her injuries."

My world shattered.

I went on autopilot. I couldn't fall apart now, I had responsibilities to attend to. Two of them, ages 6 and 8, were curious who was at the door. I sent them to play in their rooms while I invited the officers inside and got as much information as I could.

Unfortunately, they didn't have a lot beyond a phone number of a Florida Highway Patrol Officer I could call. They had gotten a message from the Orlando P.D., who had in turn gotten the message from the FHP the day before. Her driver's license and the vehicle registration still showed our old Orlando address. They found me by back tracing the owner of the car (me) and checking my driver's license info.

All the message said was where the accident happened and that the car had rolled. That didn't sound right to me. I had seen the aftermath of single-car rollover accidents, and they seemed survivable, if the occupants were properly buckled in. Brianna always wore her seat belt. And the Ford Taurus was a solid mid-size automobile with a good safety record. That was a principal consideration when I bought the car. I couldn't understand how she could have died. I tried contacting the FHP officer, but he wasn't on duty. I left a message.

I needed to deliver the news to Brianna's mother and stepfather. And I needed to tell the kids. I would rather have severed my own body parts than tell them their mother died, but that news had to come from their father. I did decide that I needed help, so the 3 of us went to my in-law's house. The kids watched TV in the bedroom while I delivered the news. That was hard, but I knew it wasn't as difficult as what was to come.

Telling Caleb and Melissa that their mother died is the hardest thing I'll ever do in my life. Caleb cried out "No, Mommy!" as they both burst into tears. I almost lost my grip on myself at that point. But I couldn't allow that. I had to stay functional.

The rest of the day is pretty much a blur. I remember calling lots of people to deliver the news. A few people came over. My mother said she'd fly out from California.

Eventually, I went to bed. Sometime after that, I slept.

The rest of the week is also pretty indistinct, but one day stands out. serolynne drove TK and me to Tallahassee to see the car and the crash site, and to recover Brianna's belongings. I had to know what really happened. I couldn't believe she died from a rollover.

After reading a draft of the accident report, seeing the car and viewing the scene of the crash, I did get a pretty good idea of what happened. According to witnesses, she was in the left lane when she drifted left into the rumble strip. She overcorrected to the right and lost control of the car. The car had wanted to spin and while she corrected enough to prevent the spin, it wasn't enough to keep the car on the road. The front wheels were pointing in the direction the car was actually moving instead of down the highway. She veered across two lanes of traffic, over a wide shallow ditch and hit the trees. She probably had the cruise control on and it didn't look like she hit the brakes, so she was going about 75mph when she hit. The car became airborne at least 6 feet and landed on its roof in the middle of the ditch. She died of blunt trauma to the head. Her other injuries were relatively minor. Had the car not slammed down on its roof, she would have survived. If she had turned the wheel a little bit more, or a little bit less... If only....

Since then I've been trying to live life without her. I'll share what I can of that here.

Current Mood: lonely
Current Music: "Sweet Dreams" by Air Supply