Natalie Portman Drizlyk. (Photo By: Nick Micallef.com)
Wearing a white T-shirt, a red sweater and a red varsity baseball cap, Kaffee sits across from her. Her eyes are painted silver-pink as well, a symbol for unity among women.
While I was at the meeting, I was dressed professionally in the green sports clothing she was wearing for a few days along with her husband, Josh.
“He loves the girls, I love guys and I love to play basketball as well,” Kaffee said. “We’re on up our own here now.”
As it turned out, the couple had a hard time figuring out her way home because of the high volume of their schedules, including two separate meetings with her father: a phone call with the father’s attorney, who is an attorney representing the couple, and a call from a friend with a financial impairment, after a family-planning dispute had spilled over.
“I don’t believe this was a really good thing for them to do,” Kaffee said.
The dispute resolved a little sooner than the two had been told. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll try to figure it out as soon as I see what happened to you,'” Kaffee said.
Kaffee also wasn’t the only one of whom encountered a conflict. Kaffee recalled how she became involved with her husband in the late 80’s and early 90’s, as she was on the phone with the dad.
“The whole situation was so different,” she said. “He’s the one who called me up and said, ‘Hey you have family,’ I don’t get into very much of it. I haven’t had to explain to him how the whole thing works.”
Kaffee, who began acting openly as an activist later as the fall of her husband’s last year, was still with Josh four months after the marriage. They were married five months later.
In January, Josh came home and took a long walk in the road near the church where Kaffee had planned to live. He called his mother before the meeting ended, but the two were separated.
“He was looking at me, saying, ‘I’m not going to leave this wife, okay,'” Josh said. “He didn’t know how I was going to feel this morning, so he said, ‘OK.'”
Kaffee also called the husband and cried when he described what had taken place in the church as “a little bit of a shock.”
In November, she also called Josh’s parents and said that his behavior toward them was “dangerous.” She said they were unable to cope with the intense media scrutiny that followed their divorce, and she called Josh’s wife, who was pregnant, a “hostile monster.”
“He was kind of the last one I knew to be around,” Josh recalled. “I said, ‘We’re not talking about this anymore, and I just can’t imagine not getting this pregnant. These things have happened. And you’re going to get pregnant.’ I think that’s what’s happening. My wife was telling me, ‘Stay strong. I’m not going to tell you this.’ It was very much like this.”
It appeared Josh had lost his mind. He also had a feeling of guilt and remorse toward his father, who left after weeks of speculation.
As Josh was preparing for dinner, his mother found her son and he sat across from them at work. It was not her son that she described, but her son’s stepfather.
He took his phone, gave it to her, then took it to the mother’s computer. That’s when Josh came in and showed her the code that confirmed the same.
His mother called Josh, who then called his father in the hospital. “He was like, ‘You’re not dead.’ I’m like, ‘I really love you. You have all the rights to be here, but you’re not going to leave me like that.’ He’s so sad to see that,” Josh said. “He just thought I was OK, now I have no words.
“So…this has got to be the last thing in Josh’s life that he wants to see come true. I want to know why he was here that night, why he’s so angry. His life has been shattered, but he’s still gone now.”
Josh’s mom, Carol, was at home at about 9:30 a.m. Thursday while Josh was checking her out. She had been sleeping in her bed and thinking that he was over his birthday.
“I want to be here,” she said. “I want to show everyone what they got from this marriage that lives for a long time. And I want to put an end to that.”
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