The older you get, the more likely you will have experienced the death of a loved one. It's a brutal fact of life which is impossible to avoid, and if you have not experienced it... you will if you live long enough.

I have been a widower for 20 years this month.

I was born in 1964 which makes me the very last boomer, and I have been married twice. First time was a high school sweetheart and we were married when I was 19... seems crazy today, but back then it was just what people did. Of course we also smoked like chimneys, and we did it everywhere. Movie theaters, airplanes and buses, restaurants... everywhere. One of my early memories was the smell of my dad's Tareytons blowing into the back seat of our Buick Le Sabre. So needless to say, we were incredibly stupid by today's standards. As it ever was...

That marriage fell apart after 7 years for exactly the reason you already think it did.

Monkey branching... ie. hypergamy.

We had a son... so of course it was child support city. That lasted until his mom found him an inconvenience just before middle school, at which point she abandoned him, and I became a single dad. I love my son of course, and raised him by myself from then on. He's 30 now, with 2 young kids of his own... great guy.

I remarried many years later in my mid 30's, to a beautiful girl 5 years my junior. She never made 30... She had left, and was cheating (again), and after a pretty wonderful weekend we spent trying to "reconnect", got drunk, continued cheating, and hung herself the following Tuesday. I'm the one who found her hanging in the bathroom of the motel she was living in, and I'm the one who pulled her down. Hung herself with the belt of the bathrobe I bought her the previous valentine's day no less.

Brutal.

Took me a very long time to finally go through her things. Goddamn heartbreaking.

We are all time travelers... just one way. So flash forward 20 years and here I am.

In that 20 years I didn't get married again, but was dating a girl about 11 years ago. We were both in our 40's when out of nowhere she sat me down and announced that not only she was pregnant, but that she was not going to murder our baby... in her 40's. I was flabbergasted of course, but what can you do? I was living on my 40' houseboat at the time, and had a job flying all over the world teaching computer stuff. So of course, I sold my boat, moved her and her grown son as well as my son into a McMansion and prepared for our child to arrive.

Maybe luck, maybe my apparently super sperm, but my daughter was born without any of the feared medical conditions common to older couples... in fact she's a pretty terrific kid. Healthy, bright, agreeable and pretty.

But of course...

You all know what happened.

Her mother didn't murder her In utero, not for some deep-seated respect for a human life, but rather for money. I didn't know this at the time of course, and relished the thought of being a parent again, which I genuinely love. Before my daughter turned 1, her mother decided it was "game on" and shattered my illusion... which eventually led me to MGTOW.

That was 10 years ago now.

Those 10 years were what you all already know. 10's of thousands of dollars, thousands of miles traveling for the 4 days of visits with my child per month... all that jazz. Until a little over 1 year ago...

Her mom found Jesus. I don't have a problem with this despite my own agnostic tendencies; in fact I have been paying for my daughter to attend a private christian school, mostly to keep her out of public education, which is toxic IMO. But her mom didn't find Jesus in some mainstream religion, but rather in the laying on of healing hands, glossolalia (That's speaking in tongues) rural Evangelical kind... and decided I was Satan.

I have not seen my daughter for over a year now, and for most of that have not even spoken to her.

Breaks my goddamn heart.

Still on the hook for child support of course...

And finally, the purpose of this post.

There's almost a decades worth of stuff in her room in my home. All the artifacts of the very limited time we were allowed together. Her microscope we used to examine the small things... the telescope we used to explore the big stuff. Literature, games, crafts like painting and habitats for insects and reptiles, music stuff... (I'm a musician) and on and on... her little clothes, now all too small, still hanging in her closet.

In the last few days it hit me like a ton of bricks... I was feeling just like I did many years earlier when I went through my wife's things. All her things were right where my daughter had left them. All her little drawings, and paintings... all her games and books... even her little clothes hanging right where she left them were sitting right there, untouched.

Just like my wife.

The tragedy here is manifold. My stupid Ex didn't just destroy my life, rather she destroyed all our lives. But she is just a pawn in a much larger game I think... another brick in the wall. TFM just updated his traditionalism life cycle theory, and I could not agree more. This isn't just about my tragedy, or my daughters'. Our entire civilization is being destroyed systematically.

My story is just a small sample.

I thought I was done with weeping after a decade of such following my wife's death. I didn't shed a tear sitting with my own father as he died... just wasn't in me.