You may have noticed at the bottom of the pages of Pete's bio is a website address. In 2003 a wonderful , brilliant and dedicated man in the UK named Mike Meddings offered me a place on his Doctor Jazz website to post my story about Pete. He reformatted my pages and made a beautiful separate site for Pete's info and we were all delighted with the results. Sadly, one or more of Pete's children took exception to a few of my "facts" which they claimed were in error and threatened to make a huge fuss. Mike is meticulous about the information he posts and was fearful that the kids would cause a lot of trouble even if we corrected the errors so he pulled the site and that was the end of it. I'll be honest.... I have not asked him for permission to post this material in the form that I have and I am hoping that he will not object. If he does, I will have to pull Pete's Blog till I can reformat my original material and repost it. In the meantime it can live on happily as is.
As for the errors..........the first one deals with a misunderstanding about the number of women Pete married. During our entire relationship I always assumed that Pete had married the lady known as Fran and that she was wife #2...her full name, I believe was Fran Smith Cash and they had a long relationship of may years beginning in the 50's I am told. However, I have since learned that Pete's marriage to his first wife, Fay O'Brien Daily, was never dissolved by divorce and consequently was still in effect till Faye died in 1973. Therefore, Fran was never officially a wife though she may have been considered a Common Law Wife. Florence whom he married after Faye's death was indeed wife #2.
The other bone of contention was over ME as a wife. During the early years of our relationship Pete had always wanted us to get married but, to be honest, I was fearful of doing so. Not only did I not want him to lose whatever disability benefits he was getting from Social Security, but because of his propensity to go on a bender now and then I was cowardly about exposing myself and my house to lawsuits should he ever have an accident. I knew I could be of no use to Pete or myself if I lost everything so I resisted his pleas to make an honest woman out of me. I could not have been more dedicated to him nor loved him any more had we had the silly piece of paper so I did not consider it important.
However, after Pete had the stroke and was so impaired I began to worry that, without any official standing, I would not be allowed to make the important decisions regarding his health care and since, at this point he was no threat to anyone (unless he ran over someone with his wheelchair) I decided it might be time to do the deed. Besides, I knew it would make him happy, and, to be honest, it would make me happy too. I was still uneasy so we decided to keep it very quiet. We had a tiny ceremony in my backyard by the pool with his oldest friend and some of my oldest friends as witnesses. Afterward we all indulged in some of the wedding cake I had run out to get that morning (it is really damnable when you have to go out and buy your own wedding cake, sigh) and then he and I watched some sport or other on TV........no honeymoon, but that was probably just as well.....we had had the honeymoon years before so we did not feel deprived.
Still, because of the secrecy the children did not know that we had really commited the act and one of them in particular had a habit of making trouble so he stirred up a tempest in a teapot and wrote a ghastly letter to Mike Meddings trashing my bio andrefusing to accept that I was really wife #3. There is no use denying that I was utterly fragmented by this incident. I never faulted the kids for being unhelpful during Pete's illnesses and problem situations, to put it mildly, but this attack was really hard to bear, particularly because it resulted in losing Pete's wonderful website.
In case you weren't sure, I did survive and healed completely, and amazingly, several years ago I received a phone call from the son who had caused all the hassle. He was about to leave the country with his family and relocate abroad and wanted to apologize and set things right before going. I was dumbfounded to hear from him and nearly fainted dead away, but I was also thrilled beyond words to hear him say that he was sorry and that he appreciated all I had done for his dad. So that episide had a somewhat happy ending except that Pete still had no website. Well, if one is patient many things get resolved so here we are and all is well.
Actually, not quite...........even to this day I have never become reconciled to having been a wife who weighed more than her husband. Sob.
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