"See what?" I ask.
"The article, it's up." Angelo is excited beyond words. "I wish I could be a fly on the wall at that courthouse today."
I was just walking into work. "You're kidding, oh my gosh!" I had butterflies in my stomach all of a sudden. It's a scary thing to go public. We were opening ourselves up for scrutiny and airing our dirty laundry for all to see. Also, I didn't know if the judge would retaliate against me or Frank in some way, it was a risk I felt we had to take. I threw my purse down on my chair and started up my computer. After waiting a couple weeks for this article, I had kind of forgotten about it. It didn't hit the paper as fast as I thought it would, so I was wondering if the reporter had changed his mind. Maybe he was just waiting for a slow news day. Either way, he didn't warn me that it was coming. He never contacted me again, even after I sent him a thank you email for showing concern for our plight. I guess because it wasn't personal, he's just doing his job, and moving on to the next story.
The article starts out describing his visit to the hospital. He said that he told Frank that his sister-in-law sent him, but Frank looked at him with incomprehension as if he was trying to figure out if he was a person or a thing. Then he described his physical appearance, thin and pale. Next he says that Frank has Frontotemporal Dementia, an incurable and progressive disease. That's all he says about it, but if the FTD Association had collaborated on the article, it could have been more, and this will haunt us. He goes on to call the judge out by name for finalizing the divorce while Frank was in prison and unrepresented in court and he says that Fargo is "alleged to have engaged in an unethical conspiracy to deny this patient his rights." He also calls Kat out for having an affair with another man. So we pretty much covered all the players, and now they all have a reason to hate me.
By 10am there are comments posted on the article. The very first comment muses that Frank must have been an alcoholic, because no one ever has dementia at age 51. This upsets me, especially that it's the first comment and anyone reading it will be influenced by this one thing. I call my contact at the AFTD again to see if they'll change their mind about getting involved now that the public thinks that FTD is from alcohol abuse. I plead with him to post a comment from AFTD to dispel this myth officially. Again, the director feels that it goes against their mission to educate the public about FTD by educating the public about Frank's FTD. She says that she can give me information and I can post it myself. This causes me to fire off a nasty email to her:
I'm sorry that you feel this way. It's a wonderful time to comment on the misconceptions that occur with this tragic disease. The first comment to post on the article felt that he must be an alcoholic to have dementia at age 51. This deeply offends me and I felt that your organization should be the ones to set things straight. If I post, it seems that I'm only defending Frank because we're related.
I am deeply disappointed that you do not feel, as I do, that this would be a great time to make the public aware of AFD. You have no idea how long it took us to find a diagnosis for Frank. Most people have never heard of someone so young with dementia. He had been to a psychiatrist, psychologist, neurologist, general practitioner and finally a three week stay in a hospital psych ward before we finally knew what was wrong.
You could have made a difference for so many people experiencing this same thing. I'm sorry that you are not the advocates you claim to be. Keep your pamphlets, because by the time someone needs them, they already know all they need to know the hard way.
The issue is debated all day about whether Frank was an abuser or not, how men are treated unfairly in divorce, someone posted a nice message about being a caregiver. There were many comments that were extremely personal. One said that they knew Frank and he was abusive, one said that since my children went to private school that I should be able to afford to take care of him and gave out personal information about us. It was quite obvious that the Green family were posting up a storm. I didn't want to get involved in fighting in an online forum so I restrained myself from responding, which I'm sure drove Kat nuts. Right before I went to bed I checked the comment section one more time to see if there was anything new and there was one last comment posted at 11:00pm. It said that Frank should "kill himself like his mother did". This one actually frightened me with the hate and viciousness. I reached for the mouse and clicked off the web page as fast as I could, as if a snake had just popped out of the screen. This is not information that anyone knows about us and could only have come from Kat or Little Dick (see entry 18). I went upstairs to tell Matt that I think he should see it and by the time he came downstairs and we logged back on to the article, the comment had been removed by the newspaper. Matt was concerned enough to call the reporter the next day and he expressed shock at the horrible comment and said he was sorry we saw it and that he removed it right away. Matt told the reporter, "Well, now you know what we've been dealing with. The Greens are trash. Frank wanted to get married and he married the first thing that came along, to his detriment."
Speaking to a reporter about a very personal issue was a difficult thing to do; it goes against my nature to draw attention. We were outraged at what was perceived by us as the judge, lawyer and courthouse employees working in concert against us, and I was grasping at anything I could think of. I believe that calling into question the groups integrity forced the judge, who had only been on the bench for two years, to realize that she needed to end this game that she was letting her girlfriend, Fargo, get away with and get serious about the job that she was elected to do.
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