The saga goes on...

It didn’t take Barb and me long to realize that we had to come up with a solution to our gaming situation. Without Barb there to gel us all together, our new group quickly fell apart. Russ married and moved to Northern Ohio with his new bride; Roger soon followed him. Not surprisingly, Utah wasn’t exactly a role playing paradise either. So with no other choices out there, we decided to resume playing our game via the glorious internet!

It was sort of like those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novels that I loved in my youth! In the beginning, we mainly wrote out our epic in stories. I’d write one scene and she would reply to it and so forth. It took some getting used too since for this to work, we would have to allow a certain amount of flexibility in the rules and give up total control of our characters. Since I’d been playing Martin to her Kali for years now though it was rather easy to know how she would react to certain things and situations. If one of us decided there was no way we would have done what the other person wrote for us, we could change it. It is pretty remarkable how little that happened.

I found quickly that I preferred this style of gaming. It was fantastic! I could write in detail how a character was feeling or what he was thinking. The characters became more three-dimensional to me. Soon we were playing out other minor characters (NPC) to flesh out the game. We would take turns running the adventures so no one person had total control of the game. It was an oasis of escape to me. It was so easy to slip into my head and write for hours.

By the time Barb moved to Texas, we had started to IM games in real time. It was like doing crack – instantly addictive. I lived for those gaming sessions. I could step out of this boring, draining real life and become Martin. Sure he had a pretty crappy life at times too, but he was still larger than life. Nothing could keep him down and out for long. In his alternate world I had control, in my own life I didn’t. I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning with Barb online. The hours flew by unnoticed. Sometimes I regretted it the morning after, but it was like waking up the night after a glorious evening of sensual delights…well worth it!

Back in the real world, Barb and I seemed able to maintain a close friendship while she was in Utah. We’d game and email each other a few times a week. She would call a few times a month. I even managed to fly out there one summer to see her for a week. She was right; Utah was beautiful. It was awesome for sinus/allergy problems too…the climate seemed to zap those issues out of existence the moment my plane landed. We spent a lot of time driving around in her sister’s jeep and listening to alternative rock. Barb took me to a natural hot springs, drove us up into the mountains and visited a state park filled with those awesome huge red rocks. We spent a day in Salt Lake City too. Barb was living on a farm that her sister’s family owned and in the evening Barb and I rode their horses. For a few days it was great…but I could have never lived there - too rural!

At the end of my week there, Barb and I hit the open road and drove to Las Vegas. It was like nothing I have seen before. We gambled a bit and saw as much as we could in 48 hours. My favorite memory of that trip though was when Barb and I snuck into the outdoor pool at our hotel. Technically it was closed…but we didn’t let that stop us. We took a quick dip under the waterfall and swam a bit before settling into the large hot tub. We must have sat there in the warm bubbles for a good half hour. The stars were out and it was just the two of us. We talked about our lives and giggled over private jokes. It was like we had never been apart. She was the same Barb who I had been close too back home. Eventually hotel security wandered out and asked us to go back into the hotel – but they were nice about it. I wish that moment could have lasted longer. There were lots of tears at the airport, but eventually I boarded my flight knowing I had a family waiting for me back in Ohio.

When I heard the news that Barb had decided to move yet again with her sister, it pretty much crushed any hopes I had that she would come back to Ohio. I did my best to try to convince her to come home, but it fell on deaf ears. Her decision to move to Texas with them marked the beginning of the end for us. Her sister had become overly-dependent on Barb’s help with her two boys. Her sister’s marriage was crumbling and Barb worried non-stop about how her nephews would manage in that atmosphere without her to blunt the hurt for them. To top it off, Barb had a very rocky relationship with her sister and the stress of a failing marriage only made that worst. I tried to tell her that she could not live her whole life in the middle of her sister’s messy life. The boys had parents and she was just going to get hurt in the long run. I told her that she had been living for them and their goals for too long – it was time for her to work on her own life and goals. The only way she could do that is to move out of their home.

Meanwhile, my life was no bed of roses either. In 1998, Brian and I found out that we were going to be parents yet again. It was very stressful because we had so little money and it was much sooner than we had planned on having a second child…but what can you do? We announced the pregnancy to our families. This one would also be born in December. Just shy of my second trimester I began to bleed while at a company function in Delaware. We rushed to the ER and saw our baby for the first time. He was moving around and we even heard his heart beating. The next day I went to my first OB appointment and was put on bed rest and medicine to try and stop the bleeding. I felt terrible guilt. I thought that it was my fault for not wanting to be pregnant again so soon. I thought my stress was another cause for the problems. Brian and I had a terrible fight the night I started bleeding and I’ll never forget saying to him “I bet you wish this baby would die!” He did just a few days into my second trimester. We wouldn’t find out until two years later, when we decided to try to have another baby, that he died due to a partial molar pregnancy. Had he lived to birth, he would have been extremely deformed and would have died soon after birth.

We named our son Jacob William Riley and had him blessed before he was removed from my body. I remember them rolling me into the cold, stark room. In my head I sang “Hush Little Baby” as they put me to sleep and when I woke up he was gone. He was only the size of a large strawberry, but he had arms, legs, hands and feet. He had fingers and toes and he was a real baby. Except for those few ultra sounds, I never saw my son. They wouldn’t let me see his remains because the body is often pulled apart during the procedure to extract it. Complete strangers saw my boy, but I never did. We had his remains cremated and put them in a small music box. The box is beautiful. It has a baby duck and lamb playing together. We also purchased a lovely angel in his memory and placed it in a garden dedicated to those who have lost a child. We have no grave to visit, but we treat that garden and angel as if it were holy ground. I felt completely lost. I thought I might die from heart break. Brian just shut down. I screamed and raged and he was silent. Truthfully, if it were not for Meaghan needing a mother, I don’t even know if I would still be around now to write this. I pushed through each terrible day for her. It was very nearly the end of our marriage.