u/DoublePotential6925

Some people live one hard season in life.
Others seem to move from one storm directly into another.
This memoir is not about perfection, heroism, or extraordinary accomplishments. It is about endurance. It is about surviving brain injuries, broken relationships, homelessness, grief, neurological decline, and loss while still trying to remain present as a father.

For years, I carried these stories quietly. Some were too painful to revisit. Others felt impossible to explain.
But memory changes over time, especially when neurological damage slowly steals pieces of the past away.
Writing this memoir became an act of preservation. Not because I wanted sympathy, but because I wanted my children to understand who I was before memory eventually decides for me.
This is the story of survival.
This is the story of continuing forward.
This is the story of still standing.

The Call From Seattle

Only a week earlier, Alec had called me excited to say he had proposed to his girlfriend.
He sounded hopeful. Happy. Like life was finally moving toward something better.
A week later I received a call from one of his friends telling me Alec was in Madigan Army Medical Center following an attempted suicide.
She explained the attempt had followed an argument with his fiancée. During the fight, Alec threatened to kill himself, and she responded, “Don’t threaten it if you’re not going to go through with it.”
By the time I reached Seattle, machines were breathing for him.
Standing inside that hospital room, I tried to hold together decades of damage — concussions, broken marriages, surgeries, grief, and survival. A father is supposed to protect his children, yet there was nothing
left for me to fight.

While I stood beside Alec’s hospital bed, my landlord called to tell me I had thirty days to move out.
That was the moment I finally wondered whether my mother had been wrong when she would say, “God never gives you more than you can handle.”

Broken Motor Mounts

After leaving the Marines, I returned to Southern California, homeless and uncertain about my future.
I eventually moved in with my best friend, his wife, and their newborn child while I tried to figure out what came next.
They were the ones who introduced me to a young pregnant woman who would completely change the direction of my life.

When Alec was born, we made the decision to give him my last name. From that moment on, I raised him as my son in every way that mattered.
Eventually, we fell in love, married, and went on to have three more children together.
After surviving an attempted robbery in Los Angeles, I realized I did not want to raise my children in that environment.
In 1996, we packed our children into a two-door sedan and moved to Alaska with almost no money and no real plan.

The drive north would become the beginning of an entirely different life.
Deep in the Canadian wilderness, our car broke down in total darkness.
My wife had been driving while I slept beside our three children in the car. She woke me to tell me the engine had died.
I remember stepping out into the cold silence realizing the last town we had passed was hours behind us.
There were no cell phones, no headlights in the distance, and no indication that anyone would come along.

Believing our only chance of finding help was northbound, I started walking into the darkness alone while my wife stayed behind with the children.
After what felt like hours, I finally came upon the first sign of civilization — a remote logging camp deep in the wilderness.
Only one light was on in the entire camp.
I knocked on the door, and a man answered. After hearing what had happened, he immediately drove me back to our stranded car and tried repeatedly to get it started.
When nothing worked, he hooked our car to a chain and slowly towed my family back to the logging camp through the darkness.

While her husband was out towing us back, his wife prepared one of the vacant cabins for my family. By the time we arrived, she had already set up bedding, blankets, and heaters so the children could sleep somewhere warm.
The following morning, we woke to the smell of breakfast cooking. While his wife prepared food for all of us, he contacted a mechanic friend who arrived shortly after breakfast to look at the car.

After breakfast, I walked outside expecting another disaster, instead, the car started as if nothing had happened.
I have never forgotten the wife’s words:
“Somebody just wanted you to stop and rest.”

The Church Basement

Somewhere along the Alaska-Canadian Highway, I came over a hill and suddenly found myself heading straight toward a road grader, driving in my lane.
A two-foot berm of dirt divided the roadway, leaving almost nowhere to escape.
To avoid a head-on collision, I forced the car over the berm.
Crossing it, violently slammed the underside of the vehicle against the berm, hard enough to breaking three motor mounts.
With only one good mount left, I spent the next thousand miles nursing the vehicle north, praying the remaining mount would survive long enough to get my family to Alaska.
Every time I accelerated, the engine would torque violently out of balance, rattling the pistons and valves so loudly the car sounded more like a diesel truck than a family sedan.

When we arrived at our original destination, Anchorage, the car still needed repairs.
While it was being worked on, we explored the city and slowly realized we did not want to raise our children there.
Although the scenery was stunning, Anchorage felt too much like Los Angeles — crowded, busy, and disconnected from the quieter life we had hoped to find in Alaska.

By the time the mechanic finished repairing the motor mounts, we had already decided we wanted to find a much smaller community where we could raise our kids.
We had several days remaining on our hotel reservation.
With that security, we kept the reservation and drove the 6 hour drive to Fairbanks. We spent the entire 1st day apartment hunting but could not find one that fit our family size or budget. We would eventually drive the 6 hours back to our hotel in Anchorage and
repeat this for the next 3 days.

Eventually, after the 4th day trying to make Fairbanks our home unsuccessfully, we decided we had to give Anchorage another chance. We started our 6 hour drive back to
Anchorage.
By the time we reached Healy, roughly halfway between Fairbanks and Anchorage, we were exhausted and hungry. We decided to forego the last night in our booked hotel and checked into a hotel in Healy. The clerk informed us the card we had was declined; out of money, exhausted, and completely uncertain about where we actually belonged, we found ourselves increasingly stranded.

My wife mentioned we had passed a small church on the way into Healy.
Desperate and exhausted, we drove back to that churched and walked in.
We both were hysterically crying, asking for help.
The pastor and her husband talked us back into a calm state, reassuring us everything would be ok.
For a week, they let us sleep in the basement of the church. They supplied food for us and our children, found me work,
and eventually, with donations from the congregation, pooled enough money together to secure us a trailer in Ferry, Alaska.
In a season when we had nothing left, complete strangers kept our family alive.

Coal Smoke

The trailer in Ferry was a mile off the George Parks Hwy. To reach it, you had to exit the Hwy, drive to the north bank of the Nenana River and walk over the river, on a railroad bridge, continue walking another several hundred yards.
The trailer had no plumbing, no electricity, no sewage, and no running water, but it was ours and we had somewhere to call home.

Without plumbing, we had to haul water from nearby springs, use an outhouse and bathe in buckets. To heat the space we had to learn to burn coal, delivered from the mine from the other side of the mountain.
At the time, it felt humiliating and overwhelming, but looking back, it stripped life down to its essentials: warmth, food, water, family, and survival.
The first few times I attempted to fire the coal stove was disastrous. I’d stoke the lumps of coal, having to fine tune the chute, filling the tiny trailer with thick black
smoke. I’d look at the kids after finally getting it started ,they looked like miners coming out of the mine; they were covered in black soot.

We watch our daughter take her first steps in that trailer, potty trained the boys on the outhouse and taught them the lessons of resilience.

Over that summer, we would use our weekends to drive to Fairbanks, looking for housing and work. By the end of summer I had found a warehouse job in Fairbanks at Sears and secured an apartment in Moose Creek.

The Headaches

In 2001, my first marriage collapsed and my wife left the state, we had no idea where she was. I was working as an environmental specialist with a small bush pilot outfit during the day and with the help of a friend watching the four kids, I drove taxis at night.
One taxi shift, during the slow hours, I parked in a parking lot, turned the CB up and layed across the front bench seat to get some rest. Only through stories recounted to me, I learned that during my sleep the dispatch called my car number and gave me a pickup. I don’t remember this, but, apparently I sat up, put the cab in
drive and proceeded to drive 50mph into a cement filled pole. I have no memories of any events prior to or immediately afterwards, but according to the dispatcher, I got on the CB and amazingly was able to tell them what had happened and where I was.

When I finally regained consciousness, I was inside an ambulance being transported to the emergency
room.
The accident eventually led doctors to diagnose me with traumatic encephalopathy syndrome with probable CTE.
I found myself raising four children alone in Alaska while battling severe neurological symptoms.
Eventually, doctors discovered untreated concussions and dangerous pressure building on my brain. I underwent multiple brain surgeries, but the headaches, dizziness, memory problems, and emotional
instability continued.
Still, I kept working because stopping never felt like an option.
With 2 separate brain surgeries to relieve the pressure, neither were successful, I started researching other options.
I found a neurosurgeon at the UCLA medical center in San Diego who was using an experimental procedure, going away from the shunts that I had previously tried.

We discussed my conditions over the phone and I gave him access to my medical records from my neurosurgeon in Anchorage and he thought I was a good candidate for his procedure. We arranged for me to fly down and do a consult.
Once again, I had to rely on my friend to care for my kids while I was in CA.
After my consult, the surgeon thought I shouldn’t fly with the description I gave him of the pain I felt on my flight there. He immediately scheduled me for surgery that week.

My parents arranged and paid for my kids to fly down to be with me, during recovery. My kids being there, as traumatic as it was for them, it was so healing for me. They were what gave me the strength to push
forward through recovery.

The Brady Bunch

In 2004, I met the woman who would become my second wife, and we blended our families together into a loud, chaotic household full of children, and in 2005 we had our first child, a son.
In 2006, we moved to Kansas searching for stability and a better future.
In 2007, we welcomed our second son together.
Then, in 2008, while I was a long distance truck driver, I called home and my wife said she asked the kids if they could live anywhere, where would It be?
Unanimously, they chose Hawaii. So, we moved again — to Hawaii.

After our first summer there my wife told me we were expecting our 9th child! But, After a devastating miscarriage, something inside our family changed. The joy faded.
Eventually, we began discussing another move north to Alaska — starting over once again.

The Hostel

I returned to Alaska, alone first, to rebuild our life before bringing my family north again.
The job that I had secured before flying back to Alaska disappeared after I arrived, leaving me stranded.
I found a hostel to stay at and started working for a moving company. I found a 2nd shift job at a convenience store, working 11p to 7a.
At first I’d get off the night shift and go back to the hostel to sleep but realized I could get more hours sleep by just going to the moving company straight from the convenience store.
I would ride my bicycle to the moving company in -10° temps and crawl inside an empty moving crate they left outside, to sleep in before my shift there began.

Slowly, I saved enough money to fly the family and ship the car and I reunited with my family and started to rebuild our lives once again.

The Long Drive South

It had been ~10 years since my second wife and I married and I suspected infidelity in my marriage, I saw signs that made me feel I needed to do anything to save my marriage and family structure. I knew she
loved Alaska as much as I did, but also knew she missed her family back in Louisiana.
So, I made a proposition that I was sure she would like, one final move to Louisiana.
We both started researching jobs and housing.
She knew a couple, the husband worked in the oilfields of TX and put me in touch with the company.

I was hired and we contacted my friend, the same one that would watch my 3 kids when I was a single dad, to ask if he’d fly to AK to drive down with me to Louisiana.

During the drive south, I discovered my wife was having intimate conversations with him; I intercepted a text that was unmistakable. I continued the trip as if nothing was wrong. Dropped our belongings at the
house we found and returned to the airport where we both went different directions.

I flew back to AK, gathered my family, loaded 3 dogs 8 kids into a 13 passenger van and drove the 4,300 miles to Louisiana.
During the drive, we stopped on the side of the road to change our youngest son’s diaper.
With my wife standing outside the car, and the door opened, our Afghan Hound escaped into the Canadian wilderness.
I spent an hour trying to coax him back into the car.
Eventually I had to make the horrible choice to leave the dog in the wilderness.

After getting to Louisiana, my wife started reaching out to the Facebook community around the area we lost our dog. Miraculously he was rescued by an RCMP officer.
Even in the middle of heartbreak, life still found ways to surprise me with unexpected kindness.
While, I was in Texas training for the oilfield job, my wife drove up to her friend in Missouri to pick up the dog we lost in Canada. I had arranged a driver with my former employer to deliver the dog from the RCMP to MO.
Something my wife said before she left on her trip sent up red flags. She said she wanted to go through Little Rock on our way up to Missouri from New Orleans. The route didn’t make any sense to me, and I started looking through Facebook and realized that friend of mine was temporarily in Little Rock.
By the time she returned home, I had already an over the road trucking job outside of Baton Rouge.
I got up early one day to go to work, and decided to look at her phone, following her return back from retrieving our dog. That’s when I discovered a detour into Little Rock was to pick up my friend and spend the week with him driving to Missouri. I filed for divorce that week.

Burying Grief

By 2018, life had already taken me through divorces, neurological decline, financial collapse, and years of rebuilding.
In 2018, I was contacted by a friend of Alec. It was the worst call of my life: Alec had attempted suicide.
I dropped everything and flew to Seattle to be with him. When I arrived, and spoke with his medical team, his doctors told me he would never wake up.
While in that emergency room, I had to make the decision to remove life support from the little boy I once chose as my own son decades earlier.
My landlord called to let me know she had sold the house I was renting from her.
All at once, I was losing my son, dealing with having to find somewhere to live and struggling with worsening neurological decline.
I couldn’t even stay in Seattle long enough to give Alec a funeral, I had to get back to his brothers.
I returned to work almost immediately. I had to. Not because i needed income, but I knew if I stopped moving, grief would swallow me whole.

The Daughter I Never Knew

Years later, a woman contacted my daughter claiming I might be her biological father.
I contacted her mom and she wholeheartedly believed I was the father. I drove out to meet her and her
girls ,(I potentially became a new dad AND a grandpa in one call.)
A paternity test confirmed she was indeed my daughter.
After so much loss, life unexpectedly returned something beautiful. I was elated!

What the Doctors Call It

Doctors eventually diagnosed me with traumatic encephalopathy syndrome and probable CTE.
Memory loss, emotional instability, confusion, and cognitive decline became part of daily life.
What frightened me most was not dying, but the possibility of slowly disappearing in front of my children.
That fear became one of the reasons I began writing this story down.

The Things Fathers Carry

When I was younger, I believed fathers carried strength.
Now I think fathers mostly carry fear — fear of failing, fear of losing the people they love, and fear of becoming a burden.
But through every hardship, fatherhood remained the one thing that kept pulling me forward.
Not perfection.
Not toughness.
Persistence.
No matter how many times life tore me down, I kept getting back up and moving toward my children.
Always toward them.

There are still days when memory slips.
Still days when names disappear briefly, emotions hit without warning, or exhaustion settles into my bones deeper than sleep can fix.
But I also know this: I survived things that should have buried me.
I survived because people helped me when I had nothing.
I survived because my children gave my life meaning.
And I survived because somewhere along the way, persistence became stronger than despair.
This memoir is not the story of a perfect man.
It is the story of a man who kept getting back up, no matter how many times life knocked me down.

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