Thus began a new life with Joyce and we were together for the rest of her life. Those first years were not as easy as they were expected to be. Life doesn’t always happen as we plan.
We moved back to Missouri in 1974 and we prepared to open the TV business. We were running low on cash, so I went to work at two other TV shops for more than a year before I could go out on my own. We struggled for four years through a major recession and were losing ground. TV’s had gotten better and needed less repairs and when a set had major problems, people went and bought a new set instead of getting the old one repaired.
In 1978 we sold out and went back to California. By the time we got there, we were running low on cash again. It took most of what we had getting there and acquiring an apartment. I had to cash in some of my US Savings bonds to survive until I found a job. Once I started working things were much better. It was MargaritaVille every weekend. I was making some money at Burroughs and Joyce had a part time job when Annie was in school. Life was a lot better for us. We started saving some money. We bought a home a year later, sold it for a nice profit 4 years after that and bought Joyce’s WOW home. We hosted some legendary parties there and lived there until late 1987 when we moved back to Missouri so we would be close enough to our parents to assist them in their elder years. That was needed as I expected it would be. I started working at Litton in January 1988 and worked there until the plant closed in 2007.
We bought the farm in 1989 and lived there until 2017. We had many good years there. We sold the farm in 2017 and moved to town so we could be close to doctors and hospitals. That was lucky because Joyce had her first brain Aneurysm in October of 2017 and had we been on the farm she may not have made it to the hospital in time to survive. Once Joyce was diagnosed in Springfield she was sent on a life flight helicopter to Saint Louis for surgery. That led to several weeks in Saint Louis until Joyce was sent back to Springfield for rehabilitation after surgery. We almost lost her again in Springfield when she went unconscious and was sent to the hospital in Springfield for another surgery where they put in a device to drain fluids in her skull that were causing excessive pressure inside her brain. She went back to rehabilitation again and was finally released in January of 2018. She was so weak she could barely walk after those months in hospital. She was also suffering from a brain syndrome that gave her hallucinations that frightened her. Driving home she was seeing cars coming right at us on the highway when there were no cars coming at us. She didn’t even recognize where we lived and thought there were windows when they were actually walls. I had to care for her 24/7 for a few months.
Joyce finally recovered, though she had severely limited vision in one eye and none in the other eye. She began to realize the hallucinations were not real and life got much better for her last years. We had some of the best years of our life in her remaining years, until one year ago in our apartment when she went unconscious from another aneurysm. She never recovered. Now, all I have is my memories of Joyce in better times.
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