Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice by Ann Rule Page B

in ten years anyway. You can’t raise those boys by yourself so I’ll stick around until Brett is in college and Dan is in high school, and then I’ll be gone.’”
    Celeste assumed that this meant he planned to divorce her in ten years. But, by then she would be over fifty; it would be difficult to find a job. Knowing that there was a stopwatch running on her marriage, she arranged to update her nursing skills. “I began to plan an independent life for myself,” she said. “I had been out of the workforce for ten years, so I took a reentry course for nursing. I became stronger and more confident. John became more dependent and pessimistic about us, his ability to afford a divorce, the direction of health care in general.”
    Celeste agonized over her husband’s ambivalence. He wanted to leave her; he didn’t want to leave her. He would leave in a prescribed number of years. He didn’t feel he could afford a divorce. From one week to the next, she didn’t know where she stood. She didn’t have a marriage; she had a pendulum, and it sank lower with each swing.
    And all the while Celeste grew more concerned about John’s profound depression. “In December of 1994, he brought me a gun and told me to hide it—which I did.” Frightened, Celeste made an appointment with a psychiatrist for her husband. John seemed to be descending from increasingly darker moods to a point where he himself feared he might commit suicide. He did go to about four sessions of therapy before dropping out.
    Celeste’s hope that John wasn’t actually considering suicide was somewhat bolstered by the fact that he worked hard to keep himself in good physical shape. He exercised and talked about getting a bike that he could ride in the morning before he left for work. She tried to tell herself these weren’t the activities of a man who wanted to die. But her experience in psychiatric nursing told her that John was in deep trouble emotionally.
    She didn’t know then that John was buying more and more life insurance—another policy with each devastating episode of depression. He seemed a good risk; he was healthy, and he had a wonderful career. The insurance he was accumulating didn’t strike the underwriters as excessive.
    When he was home, John was emotionally removed from Celeste, but he tried to be present for his sons. He watched television and took naps. He seemed to care even less about the house and didn’t have the energy to fix things that needed repair. The kitchen floor needed replacing, but he wasn’t interested. He was too tired, with the kind of absolute fatigue that is not alleviated by sleep, though he went to bed right after supper and slept through the night until it was time to go to work. Celeste felt that John was sleeping through their marriage, their lives.
    The Walkers had moved in the same tight circle of close friends for twenty years, but now John told Celeste that he knew they weren’t really his friends—they were hers, and they included him in their activities only because of her. He felt that none of them really cared about him. “That was so far from the truth,” she said, “but it showed how unconnected John felt to everyone in his life.”

    Celeste saw the Pembroke Hill School’s summer 1995 Peru trip as a chance to step back from her world and evaluate where she and John were going. And she was excited about the project: she thought it would be a wonderful time for herself and her older son. Though John wasn’t at all interested, he didn’t mind if Celeste and Brett went.
    Planning for the two-week trip got under way in the latter part of 1994, and a number of parents signed up. They had several meetings about what they should take, what clothing they would need, what they hoped to see while they were there, and even what health hazards they might face.
    Even though they were all part of the medical community, Celeste had never met Michael or Debora. Mike practiced north of the river, in