“It was the sweetness of your skin
It was the hope of all we might have been
That filled me with the hope to wish
Impossible things…” ~The Cure
Pam and I dated very seriously for a very short time. We met when she worked as a reporter and columnist at my newspaper.
It might have been the most intense relationship of my life, and although I desired it, our time together was one of the most difficult in my life.
Most of why I loved Pam was that she was so beautiful, but part of me was attracted to how intense and interesting she was.
Journal, October 24, 1990: Pam fascinates me more than the others, but she’s cold and withdrawn (because of her divorce). She’s beautiful, smart, and she always seems to have me figured out. I really like the way she dresses, too.
Pam and I went out to lunch a week later, and later that afternoon, she knocked on the darkroom door and told me she didn’t really want to date, since, “I still have some graveyards to build.”
Journal, May 25, 1992: Her smile says, “I like you, but I see through you.” Even when she doesn’t . . . “Richard,” she asked, “why do you want to get into Pam’s head so much?” Heart. You should be able to tell from the way I hold you that I want to get into your heart.
Journal, May 30, 1992: Pam, I awoke this morning dreaming about the sound of your voice. Why don’t we love each other? I mean, if you were to look at it more or less objectively, you’d think we were meant for each other. We’re both single, highly intelligent and creative, filled with admiration and respect for each other, physically affectionate, and attracted to each other. And yet, there’s always a certain tension between us.
One very attractive thing about Pam is that she wrote. She penned a column at our newspaper, often politically unpopular and inflammatory, and claimed she wanted to write books, stories, and an autobiography. Along with Frank Rodrigues and Melissa Price, Pam joined my writing club in 1991. Oddly, it was hard to get her to write much, and now, decades later, her claims of wanting to write have never come to fruition.
She was one of just three smokers I dated. Her brand was Virginia Slims, and she was as addicted to them as I have ever seen anyone addicted to anything. She was also one of four women I dated who had children. She had a son named Dane.
At the end of May 1992, she and I started seeing each romantically. By July we were known as a couple. The romance never turned sexual, though, because of what was about to transpire.
Early in our dating she copied a poem into my journal and signed it as her own, but I almost immediately discovered it was not hers. When I confronted her, she made up some kind of “I wrote it to you” excuse, and I accepted it.
Journal, June 3, 1992: After holding her for a long time at her front door, I took her hands in mine and looked into her eyes, soaking up her beauty, her affection. We smiled and just stared at each other. It was wonderful.
“I’ve never felt so comfortable with a man,” she told me early on, but now I realize she still wasn’t comfortable. She also told me early on that she thought of me as “genderless,” meaning that she felt safe with me, but insulting me at the same time.
After looking through a box of photographs that included some of my old girlfriends, Pam decided she did not generally want to be photographed because she didn’t want “to end up in a box like that.”
Journal, June 18, 1992: Once again feeling very close to Pam, very much like she and I have some reason for being in each other’s lives. (For her), she’s never known a man with whom she could share so much, with whom she felt so comfortable.
Journal, June 23, 1992: “Do you feel it when I hold you?” I asked. “Sometimes,” she answered.
I looked at her beautiful face inches from me. I let her eyes soak me up. I let trust and love swell inside me. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I was thinking,” I told her, “What a great moment this is.”
Later, sitting at home, a feeling of surprise and disbelief sneaked up on me. How could it be that this beautiful woman who is so full of love and pain and joy and life be in my arms?
She got into the habit of calling me “Rusty,” which was my nickname for the first seven years of my life. She said it was the name of my “inner child,” which I thought was ridiculous, but I let her do it anyway.
“Our song” became Elton John’s relatively obscure The One. She liked the line, “a spirit born of earth and water. “I looked up our horoscopes again,” she said, “and found that my element is earth and yours is water.” I find horoscopy to be complete crap, but she was so beautiful, I let it ride.
Journal, June 26, 1992, 1:51 am: “I have to confess that I sometimes hope that when you are I are both ready, we could marry each other,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered, “I’ve thought that too.” Then I watched her eyes fill with tears as she told me she thanks god every day for putting me in her life. Hopes fill her eyes.
Journal, June 29, 1992: Words from Pam tonight, “No matter what happens, I’ll never abandon you.” Words from Kathy in 1988: “No matter what, I will never desert you.”
Journal, July 11, 1992: As I was leaving, she was going to tell me about how she will remember me years from now. “I picture you with a glass of iced tea in your hand, sitting on the porch swing in front of your house.” She paused and looked down.
“Was it ours?” I asked. She looked at me and smiled, embarrassed that I caught her thinking that. She didn’t answer, but didn’t have to.
Journal, August 5, 1992: What if she’s the one I’ve been waiting for my whole life? Today was her first official use of the word “boyfriend” to describe me.
“Do you think you could fall in love with me?” she asked.
“I think I already have.”
Journal, August 11, 1992: She finally told me the story in detail about her sexual abuse.
“I never thought I’d tell that to a guy. I can’t believe I did it,” she said afterwards.
On August 15, 1992, I took my first flying lesson, somewhat at her urging, and I have been a licensed pilot since May 1, 1993.
In September of 1992, after a fair amount of soul-searching, Pam entered a treatment center called Cottonwood in Los Lunas, New Mexico, and in the first week of October, I visited her there where I participated in their “Family Program.” The program was during the peak of the sexual abuse mass hysteria that swept the nation and ruined lives in the late 80s and early 90s. That experience showed me first hand how divorced from reality psychology can get, and how dangerous the human psyche can be.
Probably the craziest things she wrote me about were the concept of multiple “inner children” residing inside us, and the “anger wall,” a place where therapists would take patients to scream at their abusers in abstentia.
The time when she was at Cottonwood and I remained behind was difficult for me.
“i fear nothing
besides myself
please don’t watch me
love like an infant trying to stand up
“am i two souls
one hard, one whole
am i real
i don’t want to feel anything
anymore
“i feel nothing
besides this pain
please don’t touch me
love like an infant
scared and crawling…”
~Toad the Wet Sprocket
She wrote letters describing insanity among her co-patients, being terrified, being numb, being lonely, being shut down. I cared about her so deeply at the time that it was difficult for me to let her face the situation alone. I wrote her almost every day, and she wrote me about twice a week. My letters were too needy in their efforts to comfort her, and didn’t help an already difficult situation. I visited her son, Dane, who was with Pam’s mom, but Pam’s mom was against the whole situation, and vilified me.
~Toad the Wet Sprocket
In my journal, I nervously, impatiently counted down the days until I could see her again.
As the time for me to join her for the Family Program grew near, she and I got into a dispute about her son, her mom, watering her houseplants, etc., and just before I drove to Albuquerque, she wrote a bitter, angry, hateful letter, which she read to my answering machine before mailing it. She apparently told our mutual friends about it, and turned them against me. That represented the bottom of our relationship, and I was about one angry thought from never speaking to her again.
I arrived Sunday afternoon, October 4 to a sea of uncertainty. She and I talked under the cottonwood trees for a while, deciding little. At on point, she tearfully asked, “What do we have? Do we have intimacy?” The truth, of course, was that we only had moments of intimacy, moments she would talk to me, trembling like a soaking-wet kitten, about what really happened to her and what it meant. “Yes,” I said instead, “We have the simple intimacy of these moments.”
I made extensive notes as I attended the Family Program, which was unpolished. There were about 10 of us from all around the country. One, Arye, was a recovering heroin addict, as was his girlfriend, patient Tammy. Some years later Arye died of an overdose. Tammy’s mother Putzie claimed to be under a great deal of pressure (possibly from guilt), and one night wandered off into the desert, returning hours later shivering and muttering.
Fun fact: Arye used the phrase “swirling toilet of despair,” which I use to this day.
On the fourth day of the Program, Pam and I were supposed to meet with the shrinks to share some exercises we wrote out. Facing each other in an upstairs bedroom at Cottonwood Treatment Center, she told me she “couldn’t be in a codependent relationship,” and could barely be there for her son, let alone me.
I drove home listening to the World Series on the radio, thinking about her and the relationship I felt had ended unfairly.
I wrote a somewhat fictionalized account of my trip to Cottonwood called Sangre de Christo.
Years later, she claimed that she “cried for weeks after that,” but that is likely wishful revisionism, or, if she really did cry, it wasn’t exactly about me and our breakup.
I loved her very intensely, though she was always hesitant and conditional about professing her love to me.
According to my journal, Pam met Kevin La Born in September 1993, not quite a year after we parted. They married on July 31, 1994. At the time, I distanced my self from that news, which was easier because I was going through a very happy time in my life, and was flying a lot.
Her meeting and marrying Kevin so soon after leaving me called into question her whole narrative about me and the ideas toward the end of her life that she should have been with me all along.
They divorced in about 2002. She married again to Renée Janski in 2003-ish, but was alone again by 2008 or so. She spent much of her time and energy since then resenting and despising Renée.
Some Songs Are Right on the Money…
“She won’t recover from her losses
She’s not chosen this path
But she watches who it crosses
Maybe move to the right
Maybe move to the left
So we can all see her pain she wears
Like a banner on her chest
And we all say it’s sad
And we think it’s a shame
And she’s called to our attention
But we do not call her name
The girl with the weight
Of the world in her hands
“Cause we’re busy with our happiness
And busy with our plans
I wonder if alone she wants it
Taken from her hands
But if things didn’t keep getting harder
She might miss her sacred chance
To go a consecrated martyr
“The girl with the weight
Of the world in her hands
“I wonder which saint
That lives inside a bead
Will grant her consolation
When she counts upon her need
It makes us all angry
Though we feign to care
But who will be the scale
To weigh the cross she has to bear
The girl with the weight
Of the world in her hands…”
~Indigo Girls
Pam claimed to have cancer, to have had multiple surgeries, and to be suicidal, and though I had no direct reason to doubt those claims, she had no credibility in my view, so much of it could have been untrue.
She once told me in a text message that I was, “the best man I ever dated.” But she used a subtle system of conditions such that there was no clear definition of “best” or “dated,” so it doesn’t hold a huge sway.
She claimed to resent being accused of prescription drug addiction, but I believe, based mostly on conversations with her both online and on the phone, that she was either addicted to morphine and/or over-prescribed.
Of all the women I loved in the years before I was married, Pam is easily the most self-destructive, damaged, and tragic.
Her social media presence, exclusively on Twitter, was devoted almost entirely to despising the Republican administration, and her rambling, raging posts are usually in all-capital letters. She posted things like “Documenting the many moods of cancer,” and “What to do when bedridden and lonely and no friends to talk to,” despite the fact that I had made it clear she could call me any time.
After years of my encouragement, she finally got some thoughts together – loosely, chaotically – and in May 2019, emailed me a long essay about her situation. The contents of that email is in the comments section.
Email from Pam, June 1, 2019…
And many of my journals – incomplete, some pages blank, others full – many of them, when desperation hit, began with Dear Richard. I’ll make sure YOU get them in my will.
And I love you. All I can do at this point in our lives is say, forgive me. Forgive me for not recognizing love when it was right in front of me. I always think of you – never ever should have let you leave Cottonwood without me on the tail end. But, as you said, you found Abby. And that has been your blessing.
Thank you for what you have done for me – back then – and even to this day. I have never been more grateful for a person than I am you. And please – forgive me. I’m such a stupid fool. Now – I know with all my heart – you were who I should have been with.
As years went by, I curated a long-distance friendship with Pam, in part because I think she is interesting, and in part out of compassion for her difficult, if somewhat self-made life. She frequently told me I was her only friend, but that’s not true, because she told me about talking to other friends.
Pam died in hospice care on November 15, 2023. She was 58.
Pam’s benefactor, Dr. Bill Ashmore, died January 6, 2026. He was in his 80s.
Also see:
The Weight of the World in Her Hands
