A Chosen Child: A Journey Back from Satan's Playground

In the beginning -

God’s invisible plan takes shape

Chapter 1 –

Young Tragedy

I t was August 1966 when a new dot on God’s never-ending time-line began. Two young newlyweds, L.H. and Patsy Cole, were on their honeymoon when God reached down and began fashioning a new life. She would make her presence known about nine months later on May 13, 1967 in Dallas, Texas. That new life was me, AnaliseCole. I was born at 1:10 a.m. and weighed six pounds, ten ounces.

According to descriptions by my family members, and letters my mother wrote, I was the joy of both my parents’ lives, and it seemed that nothing could tarnish the happy little family they began that day. I don’t want to make it sound like some kind of fairy tale; they had their problems, just as any normal married couple. My mother was said to be very headstrong and impulsive, while my dad is more laid-back and less inclined to deal with conflict head-on. So I am certain they were fallible in their relationship, but I am also that much more certain of the true and deep love they had for one another.

My father was a traveling salesman, so he spent a good bit of the first few years of my life on the road, or moving us to wherever he was transferred. We lived in Atlanta, Georgia and then sometime before January 1969, we moved to Matthews, North Carolina. It was in the town of Charlotte, on January 10, 1969 that the newest addition to our family came along. Another little girl, Kristee Cole was born at 9:47 p.m. weighing in at six pounds, twelve ounces. She was beautiful and the spitting image of our mother. She was named after my mother’s best friend. Kristeewas another joy in our parents’ lives. In a letter written from my mother to my father for Valentine’s Day in 1969, she wrote:

Hello Doll,

Seems funny that I’m writing you a letter. I’m usually writing everyone but you.

Things have gone pretty smoothly, but I guess I never stopped to think or count the many little things you help me with. I’m sure I don’t let you know how much I appreciate you near enough. You’ll get this on Valentine’s Day, so this is my Valentine to you. I love you and miss you bunches and bunches, etc. I hope you don’t have to use this check, for you know as well as I that our money is null. I put Analise to bed at 7:30 p.m. tonight, and as I walked by her room to check on Kristee, she was singing Popeye, The Sailor Man Phoop! Phoop! She sure misses you.

Every afternoon late, she goes to the back door or windows calling for Daddy. We all love and need and miss you. Guess that’s all for now. I have diapers in the washer to put into the dryer. Sound familiar?!

I love you,

Your Patsy

Happy Valentine’s! Be careful coming home to your"girls!"

The letter is encased by a large heart drawn by hand, and I will cherish it more than gold for the rest of my life. One of God’s precious gifts to me was this tangible evidence of my parents’ love that brought my sister and me into this world. Through some very hard times I have encountered, I have often pulled out this letter just to remind and comfort myself that what my parents had was real and God really did have a plan in mind, even if I couldn’t see what it was for what seemed like a long, long time.

Life continued in our normal fashion, and in August of 1969, we moved back to Dallas,where Mom set up house and Dad went to work. Dallas was where both sides of our family lived, and I am sure that both my mother and father were happy to be back closer to our extended family, especially now that they had children to think about. Dad continued in his field, proving to be gifted in the area of sales. At some point Mom got a job at a local insurance carrier.

One particular event of interest in our lives was a family reunion held in August 1970. I have pictures of our family together, with Mom holding Kristee, and our cousin holding me. In other pictures of the same event, we were all sitting around eating, visiting, and having a great time. Family reunions were and still are a tradition on my mother’s side of the family. They met every five years in Archer City, Texas. I am certain no one at this particular reunion had any way of knowing that these would probably be the last pictures taken of my mother alive.

In late October 1970, Mom fell ill with a particularly dangerous form of pneumonia referred to as walking pneumonia. This specific kind of pneumonia is classified as walking because most people afflicted with it can continue to function long after they are sick and may not even know they have it initially. Well, according to Dad, as he told us years later, Mom went to the doctor who diagnosed her with walking pneumonia, and gave her medication and instructions to stay down until she was well. Like most of us, Mom took her medication dutifully, that is, until she felt better. Then, thinking she was well, she got up and went back to work and was no longer diligent about taking her medication.

Dad had a ball to attend, and despite his concerns, Mom went with him. When they returned, Mom fell seriously ill. She had a relapse of pneumonia, and the doctor’s advice was to hospitalize her. She begged Dad not to let them admit her because she had my sister and me at home to take care of. She felt she could do that and still rest and recover at home. Dad only agreed to this under the condition that she allow someone to come into our home and handle the household chores and cooking until she was on her feet again.

Arrangements were made, and Dad went back to work, thinking all would be well. What he found out much later was that Mom resumed doing all of the housework and cooking after only a couple of days. She just made sure she was finished long before Dad came home from work.

On the night of November 5, 1970, Dad, Mom, my sister and I were all asleep. In the wee hours of the morning on November 6, I awoke with a start, knowing only that a sudden noise had awakened me. I got up out of my bed, and my sister, who had awakened at the same time, tagged along behind me, holding on to the back of my nightgown. I made my way down the hallway toward our parents’ bedroom. When I got to the doorway of their bedroom, I froze.

Dad was sitting on top of Mom, and the next thing I remember was seeing two men in blue shirts flying down the hallway of our home with a white bed. (I would learn later that it was a stretcher.) They took my mother, and I never saw her again. At the age of only twenty-four, my mother was pronounced DOA at the hospital.

We learned later that her official cause of death was congestive heart failure, secondary to the pneumonia. Mom had literally drowned right there in her bed as she slept. Years later, we that my mother’s side of the family was genetically predisposed to heart disease. One other tragic fact came to light only years later when my sister and I sought answers to a lot of questions: At the time of her death, my mother was three months pregnant with my parents’ third child, which only served to further weaken her already fragile system.

I remember my mother’s death, but I am sad that I do not remember the funeral service for her, nor the love and respect friends and family had for her. If I could remember these things, I am certain that I would have felt, even if not consciously then, a better sense of closure from my mother’s passing.

I have been told many of the details about my mother and our early years because at the time of her death, I was three and a half years old and my sister was not quite two years old. My paternal grandmother and aunt moved in and evidently made quite a few of the decisions in our family for the next year or so of our lives.

I am told now that I was very afraid of my father and somehow connected him to losing my mother. Thinking back on that tragic night, when I entered their bedroom, my dad was over the top of my mother. This was because he was attempting to resuscitate her. However, in the eyes and mind of a child who was not even four years old, this might have been construed as him attempting to harm her. After all, the next step was that two men in blue came in and got her, and she never came back. I clearly remember thinking, Why are the firemen in my house? Later I realized that these men were paramedics and thus they wore blue shirts and not white, like doctors. But all the same, in my three-year-old eyes, my father was the cause of my mother never coming home.

In the years to come, one of the greatest tragedies of my mother’s passing was in the absence of her. Yes, we knew she was gone physically, but there was no effort to maintain her memory, her story, or our identity with her. There were no pictures, no letters, no stories. It was as if she never existed. And this would play an important role later in our lives – we were always searching, yearning for identity.

Chapter 2 –

A Rush Back In To Life

A pproximately a year-and-a-half after my mother passed away, my father remarried a woman he had known from high school, at the encouragement of friends and family.

Her name was Ellen and she stood about 5’ 4 tall and had dark shoulder-length hair. She was not a beauty queen though she was not horrible to look at either. Her husband had walked out on her a few years earlier, leaving her with an eighteen-month-old son. Since her son needed a father figure, and we girls needed a mother, in a day and age when moms stayed home, and dads brought home the bacon," they decided the thing to do was get married.

It was clear early in their marriage that she had no maternal feelings toward my sister and me. She needed the stability of a marriage to someone who could provide, and provide well, for her and her son. She did not have any education to speak of, and no experience to find work after her first husband left her. Marriage was the only option.

It was also very obvious to everyone, especially us children, that there was never any real love between Ellen and dad. In the thirteen or so years that they were married, I never once saw them kiss, hold hands or show any other form of affection at all toward one another. They slept in the same bed, but on complete opposite sides and facing opposite directions. There was no love, but this was a time when divorce was still unacceptable and shameful, for the most part. This union began what would be the destruction of any solid foundation upon which my sister and I could base some of life’s toughest decisions, and at an age when adulthood is still fragile and Satan and his host of demons are waiting in the wings to devour young lives before they ever get started.

Dad and Ellen were married for thirteen miserable years—miserable for them, but especially miserable for us. But we were the picture perfect family in the eyes of anyone who saw us on the other side of closed doors. We were the good little family that went to Sunday school and church every Sunday morning (even though we never graced the doors any other time). We were always clean, decently dressed, and well-versed in the do’s and don’ts of public behavior. We would never want anyone thinking badly of our family, after all.

Relatives, especially those on our mother’s side, never raised an eyebrow that now the only time they were able to see my sister and me was once a year at my grandmother’s house for Christmas. This was a one-day event, and some of the few fond memories I have of that part of my life come from the sights, smells and sounds of that house with the family gathered there. This perception of a happy family may have fooled them as well.

But very quickly on in our lives with Ellen, it became apparent that she had no use for us. We were simply a nuisance and a bothersome reminder of a chapter in my father’s life that was now closed. We were in the way. She demonstrated this mostly by ignoring us altogether, but as time passed she began to try and control our every move and thought, and when she couldn’t do that, she made up things to keep control over us.

Ellen’s best friend was a woman named Linda. Linda was a beautiful blonde who stood about 5’ 11", and captured dad’s interest, I believe, from the very beginning. I think there were probably many times he wished that she had been the one available to marry instead of Ellen. Much evidence of this exists in a lot of the pictures I have from those years. There are no pictures with Ellen and dad showing any affection toward each other and very few of them in the same picture. However, on the other side of the coin, many, many pictures of dad and Linda show them in quite cozy positions next to each other.

Since Linda and her husband, Allen and their three children lived right across the street from us, I can remember dad going across the street many times to wash Linda’s hair for her. She was a hairdresser by trade and loved to have someone else do her own hair. Dad rubbed her back and shoulders, washed her hair and I imagine did just about anything she wanted. This used to and still does blow my mind, when I think that Linda’s husband was usually right there in the same house! Dad obviously couldn’t stand to touch Ellen, but would take the slightest opportunity to do favors for Linda.

And somehow through all of this, Linda and Ellen were seemingly best friends. They talked every day, and many, many nights. On Friday nights at the end of the workweek, we went across the street to Allen and Linda’s house for the evening. The adults played Tripoly or other similar card games. You would think this sounds pretty normal and actually kind of fun, no matter what was going on with the adults.

They had three children, all about our age, so it stands to reason that the six of us kids probably should have had a great time together until the wee hours of Friday night, until dad and Ellen were ready to go back across the street to our own home. Only it didn’t quite happen that way. Sure, there were a couple of times I can remember getting to actually play in their daughter’s room, with Barbie dolls or whatever, but most of the time, my sister and I were destined to be confined to one of two places. Somehow Kristee and I were the only two deserving of these places of honor, never our stepbrother or their three children. If the weather was bad, like in the winter, and it was cold, we were told to sit against the wall in the long hallway of their house. One of us was placed at one end of the hallway, and the other at the opposite end. We could not talk to each other, play with each other or with the other children, nor were they allowed to talk to us. We were to sit there until our parents were ready to go home. When the weather wasn’t bad, which was usually more the case than not, they placed us in a more suitable place.

Linda and Allen lived in a single-story house built into the side of a hill. The garage was downstairs. A stairway led down to the garage, which was converted on one side to Allen’s office, as he was an architect by trade. This stairway seemed to be the ideal place for two children that no one wanted to think about. What is the old adage? Out of sight, out of mind? One of us was placed on the top stair, and one of us on the bottom stair, with instructions that we were not to talk to each other, but to sit quietly until they were ready to go home. Then the door was shut to the house upstairs, and the adults played cards until sometimes 2 or 3 in the morning.

Of course, the other kids were free to roam the house above, playing with each other, watching TV or whatever else their hearts desired. Strangely, we did not resent the other kids. I guess it never dawned on us to feel that way, or maybe it was because we knew that they were not to blame for the actions of their parents. Spending those long, tiring hours listening to the clock tick away, or occasionally to the radio when it was left on in the architect office downstairs, is time that I will never forget as long as I live. To this day, I cannot hear a song by Tom T. Hall without it sending shivers up my spine, and taking me right back to that stairway.

Why? Why would someone detest the presence of a child so much that they would basically