Chapter 1

Naomi sat looking at the bottle of pills in her hand and the bottle of vodka on the table, tears streaming down her face she was heartbroken, no more than that her heart was shattered and she felt she could not bear the pain any longer. If a broken heart was fatal Naomi would have been dead months ago, but at last fate does not allow for anyway out of the pain except through it and Naomi felt she could not make it through this.

Naomi had given her life to her husband Phil for over 40 years, her dreams, desires, and needs had all been pushed back without a thought on her part. Since the moment she had fallen in love with Phil at 16 he had been her life's work. She had wanted to be the perfect wife to make his dreams come true she had bent and given to the point when she looked in the mirror she wondered who the face was looking back at her. She knew she was not perfect, but she was human and within all her power she had been a devoted wife for the 38 years of their marriage. In a marriage of 38 years there are good times and there are bad. Naomi and Phil had had their share of both, and the last few years had been some of the worst. She had felt Phil becoming more depressed and slipping away, several events over the last few years had left him lost and confused. The death of his father, the failure of several huge business and personal ventures and then he had been forced to face several health issues leaving him realizing that his body was aging and that his youth was slipping away. Naomi had talked him into going to see a counselor and it seemed to help for a while but there were the little things that looking back where the real signs she should have noticed.

The Beginning: First Kiss

Phil and Naomi had meet at a Campus Crusade for Christ rally on the University of Tennessee campus. It had been a rainy night and Naomi had driven a group of her friends to the rally including her best friends brother who she had a huge crush on. Tom was a Senior and a star on the high school basketball team and Naomi had a crush on him for several months. Now here she was sitting by him on the gym floor and wishing she had washed her hair that morning. Naomi heard a high pitched giggle and looked up to see her friend Suzanne running over with a tall skinny guy in tow Naomi did not recognize him as anyone from their school. Suzanne introduced everyone to the boy named Phil and all Naomi could think was "man he is tall" as she almost fell back on the floor looking up at him. He sat down on the gym floor next to Naomi and start to talk which was annoying because she was trying to talk to Tom. Soon the speaker came on and things became very quiet the speaker was a young long-hair man talking about sex and how wonderful it was but that Christian youth should stay pure until God had sanctioned a union with marriage. Naomi was listening intently when the tall stranger named Phil lean over and whispered in her ear that there was 1,677,006 bricks in the building, she laughed out loud and several hundred people turned to look at her she wanted to sink into the floor and she really wanted to slap the boy. Still when she got home she had to laugh again about the incident and how funny the boy had been. Naomi did not give him another thought until several weeks later.