Prison Camp: Breaking the News
A Forum for Stories of Incarceration, Justice, and Redemption
When the actual status of my company came to light in December 2015, the news traveled—like most bad news—slowly. Despite its sweeping impact on employees, investors, and, most of all, my family, I remained frozen in the trauma of being discovered by my partners. I should have confronted it immediately. Instead, the fallout trickled out unevenly, first to staff, then to stakeholders, and, finally, to my family. It was only under pressure from my daughter, who worked at the company and had learned the truth before I told her, that I was forced to confront the moment. What follows is how that reckoning unfolded.
BREAKING THE NEWS
On the afternoon, when I planned to break the news to my wife about my company’s demise, she had already been informed by my daughter. Lynn was in the Great Room. Not as in great or large, but an open area of kitchen, dining, and den altogether, overlooking a patio and the woods behind it. Seated on a chair, she was looking straight ahead out to the patio, the high pines behind it, bare and blowing. An early winter storm was ramping up. She didn’t turn toward me, although I knew she heard me come in. I sat in the love seat next to her, but looking away. There was a long pause, like my meeting with my partners, where the actual status of my company was revealed. I couldn’t retrieve an answer. Nothing was coming. I needed something reassuring to say, but there was nothing reassuring to say. What, ‘we’ll be all right…it’s not true…I have a plan.’ There was nothing. We were financially wiped out, and I was going to jail, and I couldn’t do anything to protect her. Warren Buffett said it takes “twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” My five minutes had arrived, and I was at a loss for words.
“I guess you finally heard,” I said, finally breaking the silence.
"You mean it's all gone?" my wife asked.
"Yes," I said, so weakly that I wasn’t sure that she heard me.
"All of it?"
"Yes. All of it."
"How is that possible?" Her tone was rising but not demanding. "You've been keeping crazy hours, so I knew something was up. But you've always come out of these things."
"Not this time," I said.
She put her hands over her eyes, bending down and shaking her head.
"I just can't believe it. I can't believe it. All gone."
She kept looking down. I wondered if she was thinking of all the other men she could have married. There were others before me. She told me once that I was so different from all the other husbands of our friends.
“All those hyper-competitive men with their flashing egos and little boy insecurities. You are not like that,” she said. “You never come home from work slamming doors or bringing a long face or a tantrum from the day's battles.”
She said she was so sure of me.
We had serious financial reversals in the past, but I always overcame them. This was something else. I could see she was having a hard time grasping it.
"Are you saying you could go to jail?" she asked, leaning back in her chair and looking directly at me to be sure she could see my real feelings. She knew that I tended to understate everything.
"Yes."
She stood up and walked to the glass doors out to the patio, putting both her hands on the glass. But she pulled them off quickly. The glass was ice cold. It was an early, bitter winter day. Much colder than usual for the early part of December. A nasty wind had strewn branches on the empty planters with dead plants from the summer that she hadn't removed. She was unlucky in the garden. It was one of her sore points. She was so artistically centered with her music, her portraits, and even her cooking, but she had no success with a “green thumb.” All her efforts to create the garden she had envisioned yielded only disappointing results.
After a long pause, she answered—but without looking at me.
"I could live in a hut with you. I couldn't care less. We've had everything. But you in jail? I don't think I could take that."
Another pause. I didn’t think she wanted to press me. She never really pushed me. She often told me that I was always taking on everyone's problems, and doing it with “rare patience,” especially with all of our kids who had always been challenging.
"How could you get to this? I can't imagine you would risk everything after all we've been through."
There had been many stops and starts in my career: a failed family business, a real estate venture that was scuttled, my first start-up ending in bankruptcy, and numerous painful relocations. But for the past twenty years, we had stability. The travails of the past had become anecdotes and interesting stories that we enjoyed telling, even hyping, like other successful people who overcame previous failures and wore them like a badge of honor.
"It was a slow, creeping conundrum. Not a big deal at first. Then it became more serious. There was a tipping point. I crossed it without recognizing it—or ignoring it, or rationalizing it. And then it was too late."
"What are we going to do now?"
"We'll sell the house here and move to our place in Florida until I know what the outcome of my legal situation will be."
"Aye, Yaye Yaye. Just like that?"
"There is no other option."
We had moved almost a dozen times since we married. However, we both thought that this house would be our last move. I kept telling everyone, "They'll carry me out of this one."
She couldn't say anything else and kept staring ahead, out to the patio. I sat back in my chair, also staring ahead, with nothing more to add. The light in the room created a sharp reflection of both of us in the patio's glass door. She was staring at it. I was sure she didn't like the reflection. She was not happy with her weight, her hair. A substitute hairdresser had ruined her hair earlier in the week. She often asked me if she should let her hair go completely gray. She didn't look her age and was still a beautiful woman.
I always looked younger than my age when I was growing up. As I got older, it became a positive. Even now, I hardly have any gray hair for a man in his seventies. But my reflection told the story—my eyes were drawn and puffy, and I looked my age. I turned away from it.
There was so much more to discuss. But I was spent, and neither of us could break the silence. Four months later, we sold the house and moved to Florida while my legal case played out.
*
Backing out of the driveway, we took one last look at our house, which brought me back to the first time we went to see it. We didn't know which house on the street was the one we were looking for. The realtor didn’t provide any description, only that it was number 19. However, none of the houses had numbers on them. We stopped in front of a red carriage house with a tiny statue of George Washington in front and hoped that it was the house we were looking for. Just as we were pulling past it, we saw the number 19 on the back door and knew that this was the house we were looking for. We fell in love with it. It was heartbreaking to leave it now. We stopped again in the front for one more long look at the house I told everyone they would carry me out of.
If this story resonates with you, or if you’ve wrestled with your own origin myths, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Self-Respect
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More portraits from prison