This Memoir is about Resilience Gone Mad that marinated within my son, David, from the age of four. It was how he dealt throughout his life with adversity, low self-esteem, and relationships that went sour.
David felt a terrible sense of abandonment when I left for Vietnam in 1968. A new career in sales, after my discharge from the Air Force, required us to move five times. David relied on alcohol and drugs to compensate for his fear of not being accepted each time we moved.
His mother and I became participants in the wild, uninhibited lifestyle of the 70s and David emulated our behavior. He learned to rely on his innate ability to be resilient in order to cope with the confusing messages he received from our behavior. Resilience became the operative theme in his life. Eventually, the deception of resilience permeated his adult life in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. It ended with his death in 2015 at fifty-one.
As the months passed after his death I thought, "what could I have done differently?"
This Memoir may help others understand what they might do differently.