We are not in control.

The Beverly Hills Breast Cancer surgeon, Dr. Heather Richardson tells a story full of tragedy and love about how two people changed her life forever. Heather’s experience sparked a conversation that revealed a twist I didn’t see coming.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Before we start with this episode of The Unimaginable, I'd
like to give the audience a trigger warning. The first
half of the episode deals with suicide, so if children
are present or this topic is triggering, please skip this
episode or find a safe place to sit down and
give it a listen. I've lived a life that some

(00:34):
say is unimaginable. I grew up in Belfast at the
tail end of a civil war, joined a religious cult
in South Carolina, and then got signed to a major
record deal seven years blue. By singing and touring in
a family band. It seemed nothing could go wrong. But
over the next eighteen months, I lost both my sister

(00:56):
and my daughter to the same thing on a explained
natural causes. That's when everything changed. While we can't live
in the past or the future, we can control how
the past creates the present. When I have flashbacks, I
try to hit pause and focus on my breath. I

(01:18):
opened my eyes and my heart to my new reality. Acceptance.
It's a way of life. The people with Unimaginable stories
seem to know a lot about We've all been bulldozed
by someone or something, but at the same time, we've
been given the opportunity to start over. This is the unimaginable.

(01:41):
I'm your host and musician James Brown. This episode features
a story from the Beverly Hills Breast Concert surgeon Dr
Heather Richardson about how two people changed her life forever.
How There's experience sparked a conversation that revealed its twist.
I didn't see comment, so remember to keep listening, because

(02:02):
just when you think you've heard it all, you haven't.

(02:33):
When I was nineteen, I made my father's greatest fears
come true. I went to England to study. I met
a boy and I fell in love. It was my
first semester. I met this delightful English guy who was
incredibly handsome, charming, he was whipped smart, he had lots
of interesting friends, and I became absolutely enraptured with Dominic.

(02:55):
I had to return to the United States. I had
to finished school, and he said, well, if we're going
to beat again there, well we should get a fiance.
VI said, because otherwise it's going to be really hard
for me to get into the country and get a job.
Three months later we were married, and three months after
that I found this email and realized he had been
having an affair with another woman. I didn't really think

(03:15):
that we had been together long enough for anything to
go wrong, but he assured me that it was months
ago he had had culture shock and had ended it
and I we should move on. And then as the
years went on, this kind of became a pattern. After
the fourth or fifth time, I felt like I needed

(03:35):
some space and I thought we'd be getting a divorce,
but he really hung in there. He didn't really think
it was the right thing. And so after about a
year of him living away from me, we were kind
of in a better place and he decided, we decided
that he should move back in. And in that year

(03:57):
that we were apart, he met this woman, girl Debra,
and she had been a dancer at this famous strip
club in Atlanta called the Gold Club, and had also
done a stint at The Pink Pony, which is really
nothing to sneeze at in all fairness, But now she
was Dominic's assistant. And I have to say I met
her and didn't assume any negative attent, and she was

(04:21):
a really helpful and positive person. She was bubbly and energetic,
she loved to learn things, and she absolutely lived to
anticipate other people's needs. They would sort of spend their days,
I guess, you know. He would run errands and have
meetings and go out and about in Atlanta over the
course of the day. And then when I would come

(04:42):
home after being in the hospital, he'd say, oh, hey,
we should all get dinner, and she would be behind
him like saying, oh no, no, no, like I want
to go home, like kind of like exing it out.
And I would say to him after she was motioning
that she didn't want to go out, like well, maybe
perhaps she would like to go home and do some
laundry and maybe see her cat. And he would be like,

(05:04):
that is that? It's rude? How dare you She's been
working so hard? How dare you disrespect her like that?
And then he would turn to her and say, well,
do you want to go to dinner? And she would
be like yeah, yeah, of course. And I would just
put my head in my hands and be like, oh,
dear God. So one day out of nowhere, Deborah says
that her father has terminal lung cancer and that she

(05:26):
has to go to Florida to take care of him,
and poof, like Jeanie, She's just gone. And Dominic was
so angry about that he had saved her from this
life of being an exotic dancer, and she shouldn't have
abandoned him and disrespected all of the gifts that he
had given her. And we never heard from her again,

(05:50):
and I needed a break. A few months later, I
went out a girl's trip. There was a swarm girl
I didn't know very well. Her name was Lauren. We
were seated next to each other on the plane on
the way back, and I finally got a chance to
really talk with her, and she really opened up to
her story. And as we are about to land in Atlanta,

(06:11):
the landing gear and the plane goes down, and I
just feel this pulling sensation. And she's telling me this
story about her experience with her husband. He had attempted
suicide and failed, and after a few years he ultimately
sadly was successful and shot himself with a shotgun. And
I couldn't believe this story that she was telling me,

(06:33):
and I couldn't believe how I felt about this person
who was sort of a stranger, and I just I
I couldn't well, I don't, I don't know what to say.
A few months after my trip with the girls, Dominic
and I went to see a movie and he just
couldn't sit still. So we left the movie, and as

(06:57):
we were going home, he had to confess to me
that he actually had an illegitimate child. So he had
a little girl, and he and the mother had an
understanding that he wouldn't try to get any sort of
paternal rights and I was not to know anything, and

(07:22):
they were to leave each other alone. Dominic actually really
cared about this little girl, and even though they didn't
have any more of an affair, they would still spend
some time together. And I remember him telling me that
he would go out with the friend of his and

(07:43):
her little girl. And I remember him telling me that
that he met a girl friend of his and she
brought her daughter and they got their nails done, and
he came home with his nails painted blue. And I
was kind of like, Okay, this is weird. But of course,
now when I rewind the tape, I realized that was
a day he spent with his daughter. And when he
told me about this little girl, I realized everything he

(08:06):
had been telling me was a lie. He was never
able to tell me the truth about anything. Ever, I
don't really think that he was ever lying. Actually, I
actually feel like he was probably telling the truth in
the moment every moment, but the moment was constantly changing,

(08:26):
so he could never stick with anyone truth. He was
really great at never letting me know the whole story.
So I knew I had to catch him in that moment,
and I became obsessed with uncovering his lies, so that
when he told me he was going to a bachelor party,
I knew he was actually going to a wedding with
this girl he was seeing. And of course he was

(08:48):
spending a lot of time with this person. And this person,
you know, had a had a name that wasn't a
girl's name, it wasn't a boy's name, so let's let's
call them Sean. And so, okay, he was going out
with Sean, who he would say was a guy but
actually was a girl. And so I let him go
with Sean. And he was planning on coming home after

(09:08):
this bachelor party. But then later on he calls and says,
you know, he had too much to drink. He was
going to spend the night on the couch with the boys,
And of course I knew exactly where he was and
I knew exactly what was happening and I knew that
Sean wasn't a boy, and I packed his bag of
things and I got in my car. It was a
pretty big apartment complex and I didn't know exactly which

(09:31):
you knit they were in. It was two in the morning,
so I went to the security office and I said
I had just driven in. I was exhausted driving from
Florida to see my friend Sean. And I was a
lot later than she was expecting, and she wasn't answering
her phone. I asked if he could let me into
the elevator, and he let me into the elevator, and
then I said I couldn't remember the apartment number, and

(09:53):
he let me know what the apartment number was, and
so I wheeled the wheelie bag down the hall and
knocked on the door of the apartment and said, I
know you're in there, And of course, then there were footsteps,
and then there were voices, and then there was zipping
of pants, and then he opens the door and there

(10:16):
I was, and I said, I don't want to be
part of this anymore. And he tried to tell me
it's not what you think. The reason he didn't tell
me about it was because he knew I would overreact,
that I was a hysterical female and that I was
probably cheating on him, and he's totally grasping at straws,
and he even says, look at her. She's like five

(10:36):
inches shorter than you, and she's blonde, and she's ten
pounds heavier than You're like, like, she's not even my type,
and I'm like, your type is mammal. It's the stupidest,
ugliest thing you could have ever possibly said. I want out.
And eventually there was enough of a rucka since she
was like, you need to leave. I don't want like
the police called and my neighbors bothered, and I left.

(10:56):
I just went home. I got into bed with my dog, Georgia,
and I just cry myself to sleep. It was about
seven am that I realized a car had pulled up
into my driveway and there were people in my house.
And suddenly he's sitting on the bed in my bedroom,
and she's standing in the threshold of my bedroom, and

(11:19):
he's asking me to listen to her so that she
can tell me that they're just friends and that that
I'm wrong and that I shouldn't be so overreacting. And
he's trying to convince me to stay with it, that
everything's in the past, and then I'm throwing it all
away for no reason. And I just say, I don't
really care if you never stuck your dick in her,

(11:41):
which I don't believe for a second. I think, of course,
that you've been sticking your dick in her. But even
if that isn't the case, I'm your wife, and I'm
supposed to be your best friend, and you are lying
to me about where you are and who you're with.
And this is a person who clearly are very close
to and I've never met them, and I don't want
to be in a relationship of those sorts of things happen.

(12:02):
And I just say, I don't care what you do.
I'm not going to stay here. YouTube can stay here,
YouTube can leave, I don't care, but I'm not going
to be here with you and not wanting to just,
you know, be in underpants and a T shirt. I
get up to go change in my closet, I put
on some jeans. I come out and I realized that
he has taken a bag out from underneath the bed,

(12:23):
and I know what this bag is, and I grabbed
this bag and I wrapped my arms around this bag,
and I hang on for dear life, and suddenly I'm
this rag doll that he's dragging around the room. He's
pulling my hair and I scream at her, this is
a bag of guns. You need to call nine one one,

(12:44):
And as I'm holding onto it, the whole thing opens
up like this viscerated animal and everything spills out and
I just scream. Run. My legs weren't even my own.
And we leave the house. We run down the stairs,
we run outside, we go to get into her car,
and both of us look up and there he is

(13:04):
on the front stoop of the house, and he doesn't
say anything. He takes a gun, he puts it to
his head. He fires the gun, and everything just stops.
And now he's miles away from me, and I run
up the stairs. I run to him. He crumples, he's

(13:24):
completely on the ground, and strangely enough, I've I've been
in this place before as a doctor, where there's blood
and I sweep the airway and there's teeth and there's
trying to make a breath happen, and realizing that with
this traumatic pathway that this has taken, that that this

(13:48):
is not survivable and this cry, that animal sound that
you just don't even know where it comes from, comes
out of you. And I realized that there's nothing that
I can do anymore. About three days after Dominick died,

(14:08):
I got an email from Deborah and she said she'd
been dreaming about me and had been thinking about me,
and she said, don't tell Dominic that I've contacted you.
She hoped I was okay, and she listed her phone number,
so I called her and I had to tell her
that Dominic had killed himself about three days before. She

(14:31):
had no idea, she had no clue whatsoever. And she
went on to tell me that she left so quickly
when she was working with him because he clearly had
been misbehaving and had been having affairs while she was
with him, and she just couldn't come home and looked
me in the face. And I didn't want to be
part of that anymore. So she left. I totally understood.

(14:51):
I got it. I had this void in my life,
this empty house, and you know, she was alone, her
dad had died. I was loan, and we started hanging out.
We tried to find an forge a new path for
each other, and she introduced me to some of her friends.
I met some really amazing people through her, and about

(15:13):
nine months later I realized I really I needed something else,
and I needed to establish my own identity, and I
had an opportunity in Los Angeles. I decided to take it.

(15:46):
People can come in and out of our lives in
the most peculiar ways. For Heather, it was a sudden,
un tragic ending. The impact of loss quite often makes
life feel uncertain. But I have are uncertain the road ahead.
Maybe it is the start of a new chapter, and
sometimes what happens next can be just as unimaginable. There's

(16:14):
a lot of things, but that the whole story you
just told that I find really interesting and worth investigating.
One of the things that I remembered at the start
of it, or in the middle of the story, was
the conversation you have with Lauren on the plane and

(16:36):
you were you were coming back and the landing gear was,
you know, deploying, and you saw that as like something
that was interacting with her story, and it was all
kind of one of those moments where it all comes
together at the same time. She's telling you this story
about her husband that had tried to kill himself multiple
times and eventually became successful while the landing gear is opening,

(17:00):
and that's a that's one of those moments where you
just you don't forget it and you're like, wow, okay,
one of those crystallizing moments where you feel like something's happening.
And once this happened with Dominic, I immediately called my
brother or my sister in law, and of course they
came over, and I heard myself telling my brother, like,

(17:22):
you have to call Lauren. You have to call Lauren.
And I knew that I would say those things, and
I knew that this as soon as she was telling
me her story, like you so you called Lauren after Dominic, No,
I couldn't call her. I didn't. I didn't have the

(17:43):
capacity to do that. When she told me her story,
I heard in my own head saying, somebody needs to
call Lauren. Lauren will understand. And I didn't know why
I felt that way, And as soon as it happened
in real life, I was like, this is the moment,
this is it, This is is when I'm supposed to
call Lauren. And I turned to my brother and I
was like, you need to call Lauren. Lauren will understand,

(18:06):
and he called her, and she was in New York City,
I think, preparing for a dinner party, and she stopped
everything that she was doing and came immediately down to
Atlanta and stayed with me for three days and came
to the funeral home and saw his body with me
and held his hand with me, and walked this walk

(18:27):
with me when she had been through it herself. Yeah,
it's kind of like a premonition nearly of sorts, you know,
where it's like somebody tells you the story and then
and it being such a wild, unrare story, really, and
for it to happen to yourself it's rare. Was this
undeniable sensation of deja vu that I had been here
before and and she would understand. And somehow I knew

(18:50):
when she was telling me the story when on the plane,
that I knew that this was going to be happening
to me. Yeah, that's that's that's absolutely bizarre. And we
have this connection and she sort of led me out
of the darkness. Wow, it's incredible. One of the other
things that I thought, I'm sure other people would probably
think about two was whenever the bag of guns spilled

(19:14):
out into your bedroom and you said, let's run, let's
get out of here. And you know, you guys are
at the car and saw this happen, and you, as
a doctor, were able to go up and try to
be helpful in the situation. What did this other woman do?
What was her reaction? Did she stay or leave or

(19:36):
like you remember, Oh, I seem to remember out of
the corner of my eye, she just kind of fell.
I mean, what do you do? I mean, it's like
we both have survived a plane crash and she just
fell at the spot. And I I don't think she
did much of anything, but I can't imagine what else

(19:57):
you would do. But just did you ever talk to
her sure about it? Or of you guys talked at all?
We did meet and we talked, and first of all,
she's perfectly lovely and he said horrible things, and he
said horrible things because he was a wounded animal himself,
And um, I think she really loved him. And I

(20:18):
think that she knew all about me. I don't think
she meant any harm, but I don't think she knew
what was going to happen. I mean, who does know.
I don't think she's a bad person, and I hope
you know she hears this, that she knows she's not
a bad person. We haven't had any real contact at
all really since then again, you know, how do you

(20:40):
survive a plane crash. It's like it's something that connects
you to someone else and it's an experience that no
one else can possibly understand. And when you said the
plane crash, like you're talking about people that had relationships
with Dominic, other women like her and yourself, that you
guys are like, well, the most tragic thing happened to
this person. We're all in this together. Now we're still here,

(21:01):
and he's not at least like. The interesting thing is
that there's that level of understanding between you guys, even
though it was obviously in like an affair, which is
I think it's beautiful personally speaking, but I can understand
why it could be difficult. It just I don't I
think he honestly loved me, and I think he honestly

(21:24):
loved these other people too, And I just didn't have
the benefit of the knowledge at all this was happening.
If I could have somehow known that he was making
all these other choices, I would have said, hey, I
want to be left out of it. And that's what
I tried to do. I think he needed a lot
of attention, maybe a lot more than I could give.

(21:44):
Maybe I wasn't available enough because of my job or
or whatever. I tried to be the best wife that
I could, and I cared about him and loved him passionately,
and I was enough. It just wasn't enough. And even
if I could have quit my job and been there
seven like deveror was, I don't. I don't think it

(22:06):
could have been enough. And he had amazing relationships and
inspired a lot of people, and he could create these
fantastic situations where everything was wonderful and fantastic and life
was golden, and then he could be horrible, and he
could be terrible, and highs are high and the lows
were low. I think this person that was with him,

(22:30):
I got to appreciate a lot of the highs and
not a lot of these classic you know, It's like
it's very easy to entertain and somebody at home, I
think we have We had a say in Ireland that
kind of goes something like who are they when they're
at home? You know? I always like that one because
it was like, you know, it was like, well are
they different at home? And how different are they? You know,

(22:52):
it's is it a Jaquelin high situation or are they
kind of the same personal tone? But maybe they just
kind of like strop around the hospital but less than
they would in public. You know. But if somebody is
like very different at home and the loads, I'm the
only person that gets to see those are the person's
wife or the person's partner, like I think us whenever,
like you can. It's a telltale sign of like, well

(23:14):
there's something, you know, a fit at this point, and
there's something to be said for like that. Ye, like
years of cyclic like no there's nothing happening, and and
finding things and and the cycles of needing attention outside that,
you know, needing needing to go self soothed with, you know,

(23:35):
attention from other women. I understand why that's necessary, but
why lie. It's like yeah, and like if you need
a lot of attention from a lot of different sources,
that's fine, but let me go. Let I don't want
to be part of that. No, I understand, Well, I
mean I don't, but I I hear you basically, I

(23:59):
know you don't at it. You're not that good. I mean,
I just I see what, I see what you're saying.
The other obvious thing for me is like Deborah. So
you know, Deborah came into your life after you guys
had had a brick, and she was somebody that was

(24:20):
really impressive that you really liked, and it was obvious
to you that she was uncomfortable to some degree. You know,
you mentioned the story about her not wanting to go
out to dinner, but like when it came down to
it and he asked her that she actually said, yeah, sure,
I'll would do that, which I understood. That sounds like
a terrible situation for everyone at that point, while you

(24:41):
and her, but you know, her coming back into your
life in such a strange way through a dream and
through just you know, are you okay? But don't tell
him that I am reaching I Like, that is absolutely wild,
especially only three days after she had no idea and
she hadn't any contact with me or any reason, Like

(25:02):
it was completely out of the blue. This is like
five or six years later, completely out of the blue.
And I thought for sure, like well she'd heard something
or some murmuring of something or no, and there wasn't
anything in the paper like it wasn't it wasn't newsworthy,
and she just had emailed me and I just thought, well, wow,

(25:23):
she kind of like made herself busy. She had had
a job as a social director and a golf club.
She'd become incredibly depressed and had a bad relationship. Her
father had died, and she was kind of very alone.
I left Atlanta. I came to Los Angeles and she
and I kept in contact. She had a bad relationship

(25:46):
and she was she was really depressed and she wasn't
really happy with her life in Atlanta. So we had
this conversation and I just said, l A is good
for me. It's like a nice fresh, brand new start,
Like why don't you come out to l A? And
she said, oh, I have to do this, and I
have to do do this and I have to like every
would have to get this straight away. And I said,
you know what, there's never a perfect time. There is
never going to be a time where everything is wrapped

(26:08):
up in a nice little bow. At some point in time,
you're just gonna have to get on the fucking plane.
And so she came out to Los Angeles and I
get on the fucking plan. Yeah. It was like it
was like are kind of like you you just gotta
get on the plane. It was like doing it. Doing it.
Talking about it isn't doing it. You know, let's just
go Exactly at some point in time, you've got to

(26:28):
take action. There's no certainty in anything, as much as
you plan your best, you know best laid plans and
mice and men off playing a game. So she got
on the plane. She got on the plane, and um,
she came to Los Angeles and I had a spare room,
and I figured, we're gonna like take two or three months,

(26:49):
like set of yourself in get a job. She got
here and she was she was really unhappy and she
needed to do some healing. And she suddenly kind of
like took on little task during the day and would
take care of the housekeeping. I had my dog, Georgia,
and she would take care of the dog. And and
my friends here in Los Angeles were like, well, isn't

(27:09):
she going to get a job. And I kind of
felt like, well, you know, I have to pay the
rent either way, like I got to pay the utility
bill no matter whether she's here or not. And um,
she took care of things, and all of a sudden,
like my dry cleaning was picked up, and my dog
was getting taken care of, and my my luggage was
packed if I needed to go out of town or
if I needed, you know, a birthday present mailed to

(27:31):
my brother. Like suddenly it was happening, and you know,
it just became a really great situation where if I
had to pay someone to do all these wonderful things
that she was doing for me, I couldn't have paid
them the amount of money I was spending on like
rent money and utility money and whatnot. And what she
was getting out of living with me was you know,

(27:53):
she was living in a really cool apartment. She was
doing like what a two hours were the work of
day and if she wanted to sleep all day, she could,
and if she wanted to work, she could. But she
didn't just sleep all day. She just did these wonderful
things since she connected with the neighborhood and she met
all these wonderful people, and she would walk the dogs
all day and and and she became happy and she
became this this we had this kind of symbiotic relationship.

(28:17):
In November, um, you know, we watched television and she
went to bed in her room and I went to
bed in my room and at four five in the morning,
she like burst into my room and she said, something
is really wrong with my head. And she sits down
on the floor and she starts rocking. And my first

(28:41):
thought is like I have to go to work in
the morning, Like what is really wrong with you? And
immediately I realized, oh shit, like like something is really wrong.
And in medical school they teach you like, um, the
worst headache of my life, Like worst headache of my
life is a thing. She was acting in a way
we call in medicine and extremists. It's like it's it's

(29:04):
like something is so bad so no one wants to move,
or something is so bad they can't help but move,
they can't stay still. It's like those things are just extremists.
We got up and I said we're going to the hospital,
and she was like my shoes, and like you don't
need shoes, and no shoes, no bra jump in the car.

(29:27):
Five minutes later, we're in the car. Five minutes later,
we're at St. John's Hospital and I get the valet
and he helps me get a wheelchair and we get
her inside and she can't really move because her head
is hurting her so much, and you know, we're good
enough friends that I know about her health history. I
know that her mother died of a brain tumor. I

(29:48):
know that her father died of lung cancer. I know
that she had been suffering from hepatitis but had had
been undergoing treatment and was now really healthy. And I
tell all this to the hospital staff and they're like,
does she have an the allergies? And I'm like, peppers,
and she's like an adhesive tape and I'm like what,
I didn't know that adhesive tape. I'm like, really, I
didn't know that. And they take her back into the

(30:11):
emergency room and um, the staff were wonderful, And the
emergency room doc comes out and was talking to me,
and out of the court of my eye, I realized
she's having a seizure. M And I'm like, wait a second.
And the nurses like, oh, honey, she's just having a seizure.

(30:32):
It's okay, And and a seizure is okay, Like she'll
be okay in a minute. She'll just wake up and
she'll be postictal and she'll be kind of sleepy. Post
dictyle means um, if you've had a Grandma seizure. Afterwards,
you're very tired. You wake up in yours like she'll

(30:53):
be She'll be awakened just a second, sweetheart. And I'm
just like she used to be intimated. There's something really
wrong here, you know. I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's the mother's history with the
brain tumor or the history with the hepatitis, and she
has a coagulation problem and maybe she's got a brain
bleed and that's what I was worried about. And the
attending says to the nurse, Yeah, you need to intebrate

(31:15):
her and so that we can safely image her, because
you can't just put some throw someone in a in
a cat skin or an m r I and not
know if they're breathing or not. You can't just shove
them in a machine. And they're like, well, let's hope
this works out. So they take her and they image her,
and they come back to me and say, um, she

(31:36):
has had a aneurism rupture. And I'm strangely relieved, and
I'm like, well, okay, these are the things that we're
going to have to do to deal with this aneurism rupture.
She's going to need either you know, interventional radiology, ner surgery,
coiling decompression. She's going to have to be an ICU
for a while. Then we're going to have to go

(31:57):
to rehab. And I'm like, I've got all of this
in my head it and then the nearer surgery team
comes by and they say, this isn't survivable. I'm in
that exact same place. Yeah, like back to losing somebody
in in that I don't nowhere, you know, I mean,

(32:19):
how do you do it? Janes? Wow? So this all
happened within the space of like what thirty minutes, Yeah, yeah,
thirty minutes. So she like, she's not on life support. Yes,
And we had had lots of conversations about everything, and
we m had shared each other's living wills in our

(32:41):
last wishes and put it in writing, and I highly
recommend everyone to go get a living will and put
it in writing and share it with someone. And she
let we know that if she were ever in a
position where she would need to be on life support,
that she wouldn't want to be unnecessarily kept alive, and
then she would want to donate her organs. And I
don't recommend that anyone ever be in the position to

(33:04):
take their best friend off life support, Yeah, it's I.
I it's not. It was my best friend, but it
was my sister and she very similar situation. Absolutely, hers
was undiagnosed, but she died in the shore within thirty minutes.
She's at the hospital and she's on She's a nice

(33:24):
e and her brillon wasn't working anymore. And she was
on my support for what it probably was a week,
and as a family, we had to take a take
her off of it. So I was absolutely horrendous. The
things that you tell them, the things that I hope
they hear. Yeah, you're holding their hand. You know, there's
nothing going on. You know, so Deborrah has just been

(33:49):
taken off life support by yourself, and now you're faced
with the you know, dealing with what comes next. You know,
was like what happened next? The strange thing was we
lived together. We shared everything, and she had access to

(34:10):
all my bank accounts, and we had each other's living will,
and you know, she she moved here from Atlanta without
anything and so we so she didn't really have many
material possessions. And I went to the bank after, you know,
of course, having to, you know, take take control of everything.
And she had a bank account. Her dad had died

(34:32):
and left her with a small piece of property and
she sold it and had had some money squared away,
which I told her, don't touch. I'll take care of expenses.
And I expected, you know, when I went to the bank,
I didn't think they would tell me anything. But I
thought she would have like sixty or seventy thousand dollars.
And come to find that I was the co signer

(34:53):
on the bank account, which she was the co signer
on my bank account, so it made sense. They let
me know that she only thousand dollars left in the
bank account. And I was sort of a gas, like
what what on earth? Like where did where did all
the money go? You know, over four years, like sixty dollars?
Where did it go? So I asked the bank manager

(35:14):
to print out her bank statements, thinking, well, okay, she
squirreled it away somewhere. I've been paying for everything, like
she must have invested it somewhere. And I was looking
through these bank statements, and month after month after month,
I see she's bought the groceries, she has bought the
dog toys, she bought the hair dryer that she was

(35:35):
so worried to know that if I liked or didn't like.
And she of course was putting money into my account
unbeknownst to me, you know, monthly, to go towards the
rent of our apartment that we were living in. So
of course she was paying for the apartment the entire
time she was living there, and I had no clue,
I had no idea. And so the entire time she's

(35:57):
living with me, she's contributing, she's giving. And she never
once said, well, you know, this is mine too, like
I live here too, not that there's any reason that
she would have to say that. I just I've never
ever come across anyone so selfless and so giving. And
the whole time she's living with me, she is contributing

(36:20):
to our entire lifestyle, in our life, and allowing me
to think that I'm paying for everything when I'm not.
And I just can't imagine coming across anyone so selfless
and caring every year, And it's very rare to find
somebody that is like, you know, for living with you
for how long? How long was she here? Four years?

(36:42):
Four years? We lived together four years. It's like I, I
I mean, it's incredible to like how somebody live with
you for that length of time and for you to
feel like you're paying for it all, and for your
friends to be questioning what, like what she did and
you know, does she have a job, what's going on?
And for her to probably always feel that and not
you know, like nobody was worried, you know what I mean.
You didn't know. I had no idea, she had no clue,

(37:05):
and she didn't care about making a point of it ever,
you know, and in fact, she actually went above and
beyond to just try to find things that you would
love that And it's remarkable because well that's just and
I wonder she didn't think she was going to die.
I didn't think she was going to die, Like what
was going to happen another like six months when she

(37:27):
had no more money, is like, well I actually don't
have any money, and like I always kind of wonder
about that. And I would have been like, what were
you thinking, Oh, well, here we go, Well we're going
to take care of it. It's okay, don't worry about it.
But it was it was just this like she literally
she lived her whole life giving and giving and giving,

(37:48):
and she left this world almost at like like to
the point like she she net net Yeah. Yeah, she
just created this situation where she got everything she needed
and she gave everything she could. Yeah. Man, that's that's
that's why I wish, I wish. Yeah, I feel I think,

(38:10):
I feel you. As I sat with Heather in her
apartment where Deborah once lived, I was reminded of how
important each one of our lives are, how fortunate we
are to be here, to be alive amongst the living.

(38:34):
Had their story resinutes with me because she lost two
of the closest people in her life, and both were
sudden and unexpected. When I lost my sister and my daughter,
the sudden and unexplained natural causes, I felt pin in
a way I didn't know could exist. The time we
spend with our loved ones is invaluable. The memories we

(38:58):
create are useless, and we will always have those everywhere
we go. You've just listened to the unimaginable. I'm your host,
James Brown. Until next time.