I was married to my first husband for eighteen years. If you asked him, this first generation American with a Sicilian/Romanian heritage, what the American Dream was, he would have said it was owning his own business.
He grew up poor in Brooklyn. He dropped out of high school. He had a disastrous first marriage where he went into deep debt fighting for custody of his daughter. This broke up his second marriage, though he made sure he lived near his son.
He had health care while he put in many years as an equipment technician for a large corporation. That's when I became wife #3, and learned his Dream.
We raised the two kids. As his Fully Vested date approached (the day he would have full participation in the pension plan) he was harassed, sent to bad neighborhoods, and denied raises on flimsy pretexts. We also had a three hour daily commute, and wanted to see more of the children while they were growing up.
So he quit, tried some other companies who were closer by, and then his check came; the check that would have been invested for him if he hadn't given up his pension. By this time the children were taken care of, and he wanted to use this money to invest in himself. He wanted to start his own business.
And we did. He became internationally famous working on the Amiga computer; the only one at that time which did video editing and special effects at a price other small business owners could afford.
We were doing this on a shoestring with a knot tied at the end. We were still in debt. We could just do it; but we couldn't afford health insurance.
We managed ten years that way.
Then I got sick and had to have arthroscopy to open a pinched blood vessel in my kidney that was going to make me lose the kidney, or stroke out, if we didn't have it done. We negotiated with doctor friends and friends of doctors and wound up with payments and more debt, but I was okay.
But that's why, in 1999, when he got a terrible case of flu... my first husband did not go to a doctor or the emergency room. It was the middle of a big flu epidemic. A doctor friend listened to the symptoms and agreed it sounded like a nasty case of flu. The second night of symptoms, he almost had me start the car... and said words that haunt me still: "Let's see how I feel in the morning. The emergency room is going to cost a lot more than going to the doctor's office."
Our five month old puppy woke me up at 4 AM. Our other dog was anxiously guarding my husband in the hallway. It wasn't flu. He was gone.
With him went the business. That meant I couldn't hang onto the house. Since our only source of capital to keep the business going had been our second mortgage, I didn't get much from the sale, and a lot of that went to filing for bankruptcy.
And I alone have escaped to tell thee.