AUTHOR YOUR LEGACY TOGETHER

"Resiliency and reinvention are two of life's favorite children."

Jaime Alvarez

One of my favorite sayings is, "Life is a journey not a destination." As I look back on the amazing journey my bride Eunice and I commenced, December 2, 1967, I cannot help being amazed. What amazes me is not the fact that we have been happily married for 50 years but our relationship is getting better and stronger. We have endured economic, health, spiritual challenges and more. Through it all we held each other's hand and faced them together.

All marriages will have to endure incredible challenges that will either make them or break them. Eunice and I have certainly endured our share. Your legacy will be the meaning or the moral of your marriage's personal journey. Just like authoring a book your choices will determine the title and chapters of your story. I once wrote, "Resiliency and reinvention are two of life's favorite children." All successful marriages must be resilient. Marriages need to have the capacity to recover from difficulties.

Let's go back to the beginning of when we first met. The year was 1964 and the Beatles had taken over the world. We were sophomore's in High School. Those were turbulent times full of insecurities. The year before our president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas Texas. We grew up in a world where all out thermal nuclear warfare between the United States of America and The Soviet Union was a horrific reality that always haunted us. In our social studies class we were learning about a far and distant place called Viet Nam where the United States was going to prevent a "Domino effect," from occurring. The administration of then president, Lyndon Johnson, was adamant about stopping the spread of communism throughout Asia and Viet Nam was where they were going to do that.

Eunice was attracted to what are now the super oldies of the 1960s. Groups like the Supremes, Martha and the Vandelas, and Chubby Checker's Twist, dominated her personal entertainment. Man, that girl could really dance. That was kind of surprising because she was very quiet and shy, which I really liked. Music was her escape from the harsh reality she lived in. Her mother suffered from mental illness and had bouts of delusion. Her father had committed suicide when Eunice was four years old. His abandonment left her and 6 other siblings without a father and a mentally ill mother. The oldest brother, who was thirteen at the time became extremely abusive and violent. The fact that her mother was religious and delusional added more chaos to her environment.

My family environment was just as insane as my girlfriend's household. My father was an alcoholic that suffered from what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He fought in the South Pacific during World War all and was seriously wounded. That experience compounded by his drinking made our life a living hell at times. He was very abusive toward my beautiful mother and would resort to physical violence at times. Somehow and unsolicited I became the son who tried to protect my mother against my father's rage. I was only 11 years old when I had to try and physically fight with my father to stop him from hitting my mother or pulling her beautiful long black hair. Have you ever watched a bull riding contest at a rodeo? There are these brave cowboys dressed up as clowns. Their job is to distract the raging bull when the bull rider is knocked off. That was me at 11 years old. My father was a big man weighing over 250 lbs. I was a big kid for my age but only weighed 110 lbs. So, the drunk raging bull, who was supposed to be my beloved father, had no problem throwing me from wall to wall literally. Something happened to me, as result of the violent chaos of my childhood, I began to hate my father and love my mother more. After every violent incident my father would tearfully apologize the next morning after he was sober. When you are young you want to believe your parents with all your heart and I did. My father promised to never drink and fight with my mother a thousand times.

At 69 years old I am writing this book and recognizing that's who my father was. He died in 1981 after a lengthy and painful battle with stomach cancer. I wish I had better memories of my father, but I don't! It's terrible, as a child, to love your father and hate him so much at the same time. My father never apologized for his horrible conduct, but he did spend his last days saying over and over, "I REGRET THE WAY I LIVED MY LIFE, I REGRET THE WAY I LIVED MY LIFE!"

When we hear the word legacy we usually think of the name or reputation a person left behind. How and what was he or she known for, especially amongst their family. What kind of person was he or she? A legacy is almost always thought of in past tense after the person died. When my father was on his death bed and he kept repeating over and over, "I REGRET THE WAY I LIVED MY LIFE!" it was too late to change anything.

SOMETIMES THE FIRST STEP TOO MENTAL HEALTH IS FORGIVING YOUR PARENTS.

So, what is the moral of this story? What is its meaning? I say we need to live our legacy daily and not just leave one. Dr. Victor Frankel, a man that survived the horrors and injustices of The Holocaust taught, "Between Stimuli and Reaction there is Choice!" He was really talking about personal responsibility! We can't go through life blaming our parents. Much is made about learned behavior, by therapists. When we decide to take personal responsibility for our lives we will unlearn bad behavior. Because my father was an abusive husband that didn't sentence me to a lifelong condemnation of repeating his mistakes. It was now up to me not to repeat his negative conduct. I had a choice to break that malignant mold and I did. My marriage and household would be different than the one I grew up in or the one Eunice grew up in. Violence and drunkenness was not going to be the norm in my marriage.

The great thing was that I had a lifelong partner in Eunice, that would help me break that demonic mold. We were eighteen-year-old-kids when we married. Through our 50 years of marriage we have experienced many blessings and many challenges. At 18 you don't know very much about life, but we did know one thing, we would face our future together and author our own legacy. What was even more important when we were starting our lives together was that we had clarity about what we did NOT want our marriage to become.

It's amazing to be able, in hindsight, and like the Alan Jackson's song says, "Remember when." I remember when we married in 1967, I was working as an apprentice meat cutter at a Safeway store in South Pasadena. There is an old butcher saying that you are not a real meat cutter until you have received 100...