Book Description

I always knew I wanted to be a mother. I come from a close- knit Jewish family in which nothing is more important than the children. After several early miscarriages, fertility treatment, burying twin girls miscarried at six months, and cancer, my husband and I finally had two healthy boys--Alec, my bright, verbal, redhead born through surrogacy, and Asher, my blond, Buddha-baby born after a surprising, high-risk pregnancy .For a while, life was buoyant, productive and full of boy things omas the Tank Engine, shing and duck ponds, hide-and-seek through our dream house in the Arizona foothills. My husband and I were fourishing in our careers, Andre was a successful salesman, first of watches, then of real estate. I worked as a clinical director in a psychiatric emergency room, trying to keep people safe in their most perilous times It was vital, rewarding work . But over the course of the next few years, Andre came to re- veal one dark secret after another, always followed by a desperate apology and promise to reform. Prostitutes, drinking, gambling in the form of day-trading away our savings. The only thing that seemed unequivocal was his devotion to the children Eventually I filed for divorce, the two of us preparing to share custody of the boys across a bitter divide. Then on March 31, 2010, at 8:04 in the morning, my soon to be ex-husband shot and killed our two children: five-year-old Alec and fifteen-month-old-Asher For nearly four years, I have been living with this... this what? is fact is tragedy, this shock, this loss, this aching is emptying out of life as I knew it. But also, this other side, this hope, making a new life built on the only thing it can be: love. This is story is mine to live. There is no way around it . It is also mine to tell The murders and Andre's subsequent death sentence received extensive coverage in the national and Arizona media. I turned down initial requests for interviews because I had nothing more to to offer besides the terrible facts and a shocked numbness. Stunned, dazed, I waited each day for the kids to come home, for the morning to dawn differently, with my boys playing or sleeping in the next room. In those early days, I developed something of a plan, a humble one that was all I could manage at the time: I was going to live until the murder trial was over then I was going to disappear. Not kill myself, exactly, but drift off and join my kids. It was as far as I could see, but it would get me through It did, some days better than others Over time, through the love of family and friends, blinding moments of revelation, and the long, hard slog of grief and healing, I feel that I have gained perspective I have begun to build a platform for living and em- braced a role helping others nd their way through grief, as a social worker specializing in counseling bereaved parents. Now it is time to tell my story. Bulletproof goes behind the headlines to tell the before- during-and-after story of an unthinkable family tragedy.The book begins with a marriage like many other marriages, launch-ing with love and arcing into family. Andre held my hand and made me laugh through infertility, a traumatic miscarriage, cancer, then the miraculous births of Alec and Asher. He taught me how to put on a diaper. He lay on the living room fl oor to set up Thomas's train tracks. He volunteered at the temple school as a "Shabbat dad ". He took Alec shing, brought the boys to feed the ducks at the golf course pond and watch the giant fish at the Bass Pro Shop. Bulletproof will follow the marriage as it hit rocky shoals and ran aground. Dark secrets began to emerge, Andre visited prostitutes, even brought them to our house. He drank too much (we were going through one Costco-sized Bombay Sapphire a week-- about fty shots' worth), had a DUI and his driver's license suspended, and later, blew our savings through risky day-trading. Bulletproof tells the story, too, of a marriage unlike most any other, ending as it d