This is not a story about daughters, although it involves them deeply. It’s about spiritual blindness, terror, and how tragedies sometimes happen in threes. Mostly though there’s a life’s lesson for all men: the most dangerous person in the whole world to your children is your wife’s boyfriend.
Living in the New York area as I now do, one constantly learns about one horror story after another due to the incredible media presence ever eager to exploit the latest example of human hardship.
In recent days the stories interestingly involved daughters. A hero cop was murdered trying to bust a drug deal and left behind four teen-aged girls. The officer already had acquired enough time on the force to retire, but his devotion to his children led him to continue working at night, so he could be there for them during the day and provide for their every physical need. With his death, the divorced father would never again seen his progeny who friends and colleagues say meant everything to him.
A second story involved a woman in Manhattan, single as so many of them are. The 40-year-old perished in an old elevator in an old building when the elevator crushed her when she became stuck in its doors. The elevator accelerated between two floors, either up or down, I’m not sure in which direction. There were two witnesses to this pathetic scene who saw it all while escaping with minor injuries. Upon the woman’s demise her father from Florida described her as his wonderful daughter and the apple of his eye.
The grand prize in this madness, though, goes to the Christmas Day family disaster in Stamford, Connecticut, when a divorced woman’s three pre-teen daughters and her parents died in a house fire started because her boyfriend allegedly failed to dispose properly of fireplace embers. The embers were placed outside the stately home in the affluent New York suburb and ignited, and engulfed the house in flames destroying it and taking the five lives.
I admit to my premise of this article, there was nothing venal here. In fact the embers were placed outside supposedly to accommodate the three young girls’ wishes that, “Santa could come down the chimney safely.” The boyfriend was thoughtful and even loving, it appears.
Nevertheless, I can’t help seeing the story as a metaphor for all men who marry: caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. The statistics prove this out. Your wife’s new guy either wittingly or unwittingly has your children in his headlights. If you’ve been there, and you are a loving father, you now you must pay attention closely. And if you haven’t, please, everyone, keep your eyes open for these guys and these innocent children caught in these divorces and separations. For these guys, the new hunk, are often more interested in their new gal than they are in the well-being of your kids.
So what else makes this case so instructive? The grieving father was portrayed as playing a supporting role in all of this. But in the end it appears that blood is indeed thicker than water. For at the funeral for these beautiful and playful daughters, who the mother called her “little girl tribe,” was a photo taken that illustrates the axiom that a picture is truly worth a thousand words.
Departing the church service in Manhattan or maybe beforehand, whose shoulder did the wailing mother cry upon while dressed all in black? The boyfriend’s? No, it was the shoulder of her ex-husband, whose hand she also gripped tightly, while her boyfriend stood behind her stoically, rubbing his hands on her neck area.
Nobody could have expected that life would throw this woman such a curve. She is an accomplished person in the advertising world. But when the rubber met the road, and her world blew apart, it’s interesting to notice to whom see she turned for comfort and strength and emotional support: the father, and not the boyfriend. The father, who was in New York City at the time of the deaths, now knows a void that we all hope that we will never know. A void handed to him accidentally by the boyfriend of the mother of his children. Call me callous, but one can’t avoid this awful conclusion.
Daniel Wiseman is an independent political commentator, who focuses on national and international affairs. He spent nine years as a professional journalist in Wyoming before working in fund-raising, non-profit management, and is now working in New York City. Wiseman focuses his writing on how to bring the United States back to its Constitutional moorings. He writes exclusively for Canada Free Press.
