If you landed here for the first time, you may want to read the following blogs to catch up.
Life with John Hudgins – Introduction
Life with John Hudgins – Part 1
Life with John Hudgins – Part 2
Life with John Hudgins – Part 3
Life with John Hudgins – Part 4
His dad convinced me that John should be in rehab. I believed then and still believe that that was the only choice we had. I can’t remember the name of the place. I do remember sitting with John and his father waiting for him to be processed in. He only stayed about three days.
He called me and told me to come get him. The people working there tried everything to get him to stay. But he refused. We could only make him stay 72 hours. So we went home. He was hearing voices. We couldn’t watch television, because they were sending him messages. We couldn’t even listen to the radio. I remember I had some raw chicken that went bad. When I threw it out, he smelled it. He became very suspicious of me for a while. I think he thought it was human body parts.
We did continue to see the psychiatrist. He was put on Haloperidol. It was an antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia. That was his diagnosis, paranoid schizophrenia. The drug made him very lethargic and he began to have the shakes, which were side effects of the drug. So they had to add another drug for that. But the John I loved did come back to me. He was pretty much his old self.
He did work while we were married. He was a wonderful carpenter. He worked for a cabinet maker who was very good to him. At least until he couldn’t put up with John showing up late and sometimes not showing up at all.
A few months later John ended up back in jail. He had broken into his mother’s house and stole his grandmother’s silver. She pressed charges. I don’t blame her. Around this same time, my dad came by the house and discovered his welder missing. He went ballistic. I found the pawn ticket and gave it to him. My dad went to the pawn shop to get his welder back. He was nearly thrown in jail, because he wasn’t paying for it, he was taking it. My mother was able to diffuse that situation, by paying to get the welder back.
I remember standing in line, again, waiting to visit him at the Tarrant County Jail. I became very familiar with that jail and their visitation rules. But I remember sitting next to a woman that was there to visit her son. She said that he had had a drug problem when he was younger, but had seemed to have beaten it. He got married, had children, and was living a good decent life. Then in his late 40’s he got back on drugs and was back in jail. For some reason her story stuck with me and I felt like I was on a fast train to nowhere, but I didn’t know how to get off.
My father’s father was an alcoholic. My father was sent to live with his grandparents when he was very young. My grandmother spent a good majority of her life just trying to keep up with my grandfather in honky tonks and bars. That was their life. He had younger siblings that were often left alone and weren’t raised the way children should be raised. When John was released from jail, my dad sat me down and had a long talk with me. He told me that he had watched his mother chase after and take care of his own father and that he was not going to watch me do the same thing. He said that if I wanted to stay with John, that we would need to find someplace else to live. That he wouldn’t watch me live out the same life as his mother did.
John came by a friends house he knew very well, Jeff Ferrell, that was about a month ago, Mrs Ferrell thought it was some homeless person lost, but John called out to Jeff’s sister Annie and told her who he was, they said he had long hair and a beard carrying 2 suite cases, they would not let John in the house, so he sat outside waiting for Jeff to come pick him up and take John to his mothers house. They said John was talking to himself and cussing himself, Jeff finally arrived and took John (I guess) to his mothers house. I haven’t heard anything else about what happened after that.
Thanks for the info Barbara. I did find a mug shot online where he was arrested on his birthday in July for being drunk in pubic. I don’t think his mother lives in Riverside any longer. She was a very sweet woman.