# 21 I really did love him. Reminiscing about the beginning.

Today has been a rough day. I have spent the whole day going through pictures and videos and I really am sorry our marriage didn’t work out. We had some really good years and Craig was an awesome Dad to the boys and a wonderful husband to me. I have uploaded a bunch of pictures onto my drive and will post them in the next few days.

I just wonder what went wrong? When did it go wrong? Why? When you marry your high school sweetheart, you don’t expect it to end so tragically. I look back at pictures and I was always attracted to Craig. I loved the way he taught the boys to respect me (and still do today), I loved our lives and how connected we were. We enjoyed so much together. Massage school, raising the boys, boating, taking care of our home, he was very good at fixing everything. He never needed to call a repairman, he figured it out on his own every time. His large family that extended from South Africa to Utah all loved him and he loved them. I went through some of his pictures today and I see Uncle X and Aunty X (not mentioning names). Craig has a lot of cousins who all have great memories of them growing up. All his pictures of him growing up he was always in a river or the bush, exploring. He is the oldest of 3, and his Mom's pride and joy. Craig has an awesome Mom and his Dad was great with how he taught the boys to read and write before they learned it in school.

It has been a big reminiscing day for me, and I realize I haven’t said many positive things about Craig in my writing previously, but he deserves them. He was 40 yrs old when he was arrested, and will now spend the rest of his life in prison. I was the last person to really know him, so I feel it’s my duty to tell the world he was not a bad person. He made a very, very big mistake. He allowed a stranger online to manipulate him and do something that destroyed the rest of his life. Was it one big mistake? Or was it a lifetime of choices that took him down the wrong path?

Since starting this blog I have received numerous emails and messages from people who grew up with Craig. Each has their own memory, and sadly it’s the negative ones that are coming forward to me. This fueled the fire in a way that gave me the strength to keep writing. Unfortunately he did leave some tracks behind him that offended or scared the people who knew him. Craig was raised with a gun in his hand (I have photos of him as a young child, teaching others to shoot), and then went on to join the special forces unit in the military. Did being a sniper, who took the lives of many, have a bad effect on him? Did it make his heart harder than most? Did he become numb to killing? I don’t want to believe this, as I know we have so many military people around us and I don’t want to set a negative precedent that this is how they will behave when things get rough.

But then what did go wrong? I remember the day my heart changed….I remember it vividly. It was the day I received that phone call from our friend Mike, who told me that his wife and Craig had been involved in an affair 2 years earlier. After that I tried very hard to forgive and move on. And then I discovered he was having an affair with Liz. After that, it was a constant roller coaster.

Was it my weight? Maybe it was my fault. I look at the pictures of us and I was very heavy from 1993 until 1999. 6 years. But he never, ever complained about my weight to me. He always made me feel special and always expressed his love. His first affair was with a girl even bigger than I was, which really surprised me.

When I look back, I feel like his neurosis came after I lost 100 lbs. I feel my weight loss became a threat to him. When I was working in the insurance industry, I had to train agents. Craig had a big problem with that. He did not like me going on appointments with men. Part of me believes he intentionally destroyed that business for me because he couldn’t handle me being out at night on appointments.

So I know this is completely different to the types of blogs I have been posting, but I needed to put this part out there too. I loved Craig with all my heart, I was very happy with him and believed we would spend the rest of our lives together. I wish I really understood what went wrong. That might help me move on. I have not remarried in the 14 years since our divorce. I do want to be married again, but it will take me understanding what went wrong in this marriage so that I don’t repeat it again. Was it my fault? Did I respond incorrectly? What made him so angry at me that in the end I was worth more dead to him, than alive. That is a big pill to swallow.

I know my grandchildren will grow up and want to know about their grandfather. They deserve to know he was a great man, who made a very terrible decision and paid for it with his life.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you understand why I needed to put this up. The rest of my blog will continue as usual. The emails, the phone calls and the journal notes are disturbing. Then after his arrest will come the press, the newspaper articles. And then his letters to the boys and I, and the threats I received from other people in the prison. There is lots more to come. I just felt the urge to put out the good side of Craig tonight.