Excerpt from First Responders and Trauma: Tell Me Your Story (And I’ll Tell You Mine), by Frank Shuck and Matt Kite

Who was Cary Petersen? He was a devoted husband and father. An Air Force veteran, a corrections officer, and an attorney. An abstract painter. A success in everything he did.

And for a brief stretch of time, he was homeless and living under a bridge.

For reasons that still baffle those who loved him most, Cary lost everything: his law career, his dream home, his marriage of thirty-one years. He lost his health and his short-term memory. He lost several aspects of his personality that made him who he was. And he became someone else.

Before he passed away in November 2020, he made a partial recovery, repairing relationships and reorganizing his life. He halted his physical deterioration and found help. But his story, like so many of those who have suffered from PTSD, blurs the lines between cause and effect, between mind and body. How many of his problems were health-related, and how many were the result of trauma?

Everyone who tells Cary’s story renders it a little differently. Most agree on the broader narrative, but the details remain sketchy and sometimes conflict with each other. What follows is only one version of Cary’s story. Like the others, it is incomplete, insufficient, and at times inconceivable. Regardless, everyone who knew and loved Cary will tell you the same thing: he was a good and caring man, and his life ended too soon.

~~~

Born on April 10, 1957, in Carmel, California, Cary Petersen grew up two hundred miles to the northeast in Rancho Cordova. He was an avid reader and ran track and cross country at Cordova High, where he was a middle-of-the-pack distance runner. At five feet, six inches tall, he possessed an unassuming personality to match his short stature. His friends considered him quiet. Indeed, he didn’t say much. He was elusive. A bit of a rogue. He had a good sense of humor and a quick temper and was always ready to defend the defenseless and stand up to bullies. Once, when a baseball player began picking on one of Cary’s teammates on the track team, Cary walked up to the bully and popped him in the mouth, ending the confrontation before it could begin. Cary was a scrapper with a heart of gold, someone who didn’t take guff from anyone. To those outside his circle of friends, he appeared stoic and slow to warm. But his friends knew his fun side.

In late June 1978, during the summer before his senior year, Cary lost his father, Jerry Petersen, to a heart attack. As a result, Cary was forced to grow up faster than most. His older brother Joe had already joined the Marines, leaving Cary as the oldest of the remaining kids. While his mom worked as a secretary at an autobody shop, he looked after his two younger brothers, Victor and Dante, and poured out his grief on the track, becoming a 10:30 two-miler. His father had been a beloved Babe Ruth League baseball coach, and less than a month after his passing, the high school renamed its newly built varsity baseball field Petersen Field in his honor.

After graduating from high school, Cary joined the Air Force at age eighteen and was stationed in San Antonio, Texas, and then later in the Philippines during his two-year tour of duty. Once back home, he earned his associate’s degree at Sacramento City College, where he studied nursing. The gruesome nature of the job, however, had him looking elsewhere for a career.

In his mid-twenties, after graduating from the CDCR Academy of Peace Officers in nearby Galt, Cary became a corrections officer at San Quentin State Prison. Not long afterward, he met and married Sherri Cosens, who had a beautiful three-year-old daughter named Elana. Cary and Sherri would add two more children to their family in the coming years: Brett, the middle child, and Jessica, the youngest. Cary’s stint at San Quentin, meanwhile, lasted two years. He eventually took a job at Folsom State Prison and remained there for the next nine years.

At Folsom, Cary was a yard gunner and spent much of his time in a tower.

“He was a very good yard gunner, one of the best,” recalls Lewis Seaton, a retired corrections officer who worked alongside Cary at Folsom. “He racked up shots fired for fights. He caught people that actually had escape plans. He caught a lot of people with drugs. He wore sunglasses and got good at hiding which direction he was looking.”

While at Folsom, Cary disrupted a fight in the prison yard and in doing so established his legacy.

“He fired a warning shot to get the prisoners in line,” Elana explains, “but nothing happened. So he shot the ice machines.”

The prison yard featured two ice dispensers, which the inmates counted on for ice during the hot California summers. Cary made short work of them.

The move, Brett says, “pissed off his superiors but earned him the nickname Ice Man and the respect of his fellow officers.”

If Cary was cool on the outside, he was a bubbling cauldron of anxiety on the inside.

“I remember him saying, ‘You go home, and you think about the day,’” Elana says. “‘You’re with the worst of the worst people, who would love to turn on you at any moment. It was almost like a war zone. You’re on edge. Your nerves are there. Any moment, something can break out.’ I remember him talking about going in and out every day, and it’s just a fear. You’re at work, and you’re living in fear.”

Moving from the ground level to the tower provided Cary a measure of security. But he still earned a living in a dangerous workplace.

“When I first got to Folsom,” Lewis says, “the PR officer would always give a report about the daily stabbing to the local newspaper. People in town could read about the daily problems. They stopped doing it and weren’t telling everything that happened. People get the impression that everything’s normal unless they hear something in the news. People were getting stabbed right and left, but it didn’t make the news. That’s normal life in there.”

After each shift, Cary came home to Sherri and their three children. He wasn’t always forthcoming about his experiences, and when he was, he sometimes told a particular story to only one person or revealed different details to different family members. Thus, all these years later, the family is still piecing together his experiences as a corrections officer.

“When I was a child,” Brett says, “before he became an attorney, my dad didn’t tell me many of his stories of working in prisons, possibly due to the serious nature of the job. I remember my mom once mentioned a story about him being stabbed by an inmate but joked with me about it possibly being a tall tale, that maybe Dad told her that to impress her. He himself never told me at any point about being stabbed or injured on the job. However, he told stories about inmates: drug use, black-market dealings, how they made alcohol in their cells, weapons they crafted, how they split themselves into gangs. I remember marveling at the information, impressed by how dangerous it all sounded. As I matured, he felt comfortable telling me more. How he developed a nose, a sense, a heightened awareness for predicting fights or dealings between inmates.”

Sherri indeed remembers Cary telling her about being stabbed by an inmate, whose improvised weapon never made it past the tablet Cary kept in his pocket. She remembers another incident—corroborated by her children—in which Cary fired a warning shot into the yard. The bullet ricocheted off the wall and nicked a fellow officer, who retired due to stress and began a life of drug abuse.

“As the story goes,” Brett says, “an inmate fight broke out in the yard. Warning shots were fired—one in the air, one down to the yard itself. According to my dad, his warning shot into the yard grazed an officer’s face, drawing blood and nearly taking an eye out, not to mention nearly killing him. That officer immediately retired, citing trauma. A lawsuit was filed.”

Cary battled a bout of depression following the incident—not for the first time. Depression, everyone says, followed him throughout his adult life and grew worse over time, requiring medication. He also sought treatment for anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Cary’s Type A personality fueled his many achievements but also made him miserable at times.

“I believe my dad often lived a life of stress despite his efforts to live otherwise,” Brett says. “He worried about keeping up with his brothers, impressing his mom, taking care of the family financially, and furnishing some kind of legacy. He rarely seemed content or satisfied with his efforts, as if he always doubted himself in some fundamental way and felt pressure to keep seeking a new success, despite whatever he achieved. On the one hand, I think we all admired him. Humble beginnings, and then Air Force, corrections officer, law school at night, opening a successful private practice, buying land and building a home, raising a family, becoming a painter. On the other hand, his ongoing depression, his struggle with feeling accomplished and satisfied I think maybe frustrated those around him. That said, it never seemed, at least to me, that his trauma, whether from working as a corrections officer or otherwise, resulted in him mistreating or withdrawing from the family.”

Elana remembers the way Cary’s job at the prison shaped his parenting.

“He was a tough disciplinarian,” she recalls. “I was a stepdaughter. He came in at year three, and I can only imagine that being difficult for him—not knowing how to raise someone else’s child—and I’m sure that wasn’t easy to handle. No way was he abusive, but I remember standing in the corner with one leg up or some kind of embarrassing discipline. Twisting my hand behind my back, like he was putting someone into custody, and I’m just a kid.”

Sherri recalls one day when Cary came home from work, lit a cigarette, and told her about a rookie corrections officer who had shot an inmate in the yard. Cary seemed confused about the incident and wondered if he had fired the shot himself. Only later, after it was proven that Cary had never fired his gun, did Cary’s nagging doubts about the incident disappear. But he still appeared traumatized by what had happened.

Perhaps the incident that haunted Cary most involved the suicide of a fellow corrections officer. Cary didn’t share the story too often. Brett, in fact, didn’t hear about it until years later. The officer in question was considered one of the best by his peers, but an impending divorce left him bereft. He was stationed in a nearby tower, and when Cary, following standard protocol, radioed to him, the officer failed to answer. A gunshot sounded moments later.

“Eventually, my dad saw blood running out of the tower and down the walkway,” Brett says. “He said he had never seen so much blood before. For what it’s worth, my dad told me this story when his marriage to my mom was falling apart.”

Lewis remembers different elements of the story. Because the officer had locked himself in the tower, a cherry picker was required to gain access. The officer, a former marine, had left a note behind, making sure to point out that the magazines in the tower—strictly against the rules—weren’t his.

“It probably messed with Cary because it was his tower,” Lewis says. “I’m not sure if he was working that day or if it was his day off. That was Cary’s tower for years. I can see how, if he’s viewing it as his tower, that someone we all know and respected committed suicide with one of the prison’s guns—a .38—I could see how that would gnaw at Cary.”

Despite the trauma, Cary earned Folsom State Prison Officer of the Year accolades in 1988. He was later promoted to an operations team that was tasked with conducting an internal investigation, but the new position and increased stress level only made him more anxious. Eventually, he returned to his former position and started thinking about changing careers. When he began taking night classes to earn a law degree, some of his coworkers hassled him. Some told him he was a fool for thinking he could become an attorney. Others derided him for thinking he was better than his fellow corrections officers.

None of the sniping stopped him from following his dream. He passed the bar exam in 1995, quit his job at Folsom State Prison, and started his own practice as a family attorney.

~~~

Cary’s Type A personality made him a good fit for his new career. Soon he boasted a thriving practice, and as his and Sherri’s respective incomes improved, so, too, did their surroundings.

The family moved to Sherri’s father’s homestead, an eighty-acre expanse in the foothills just outside Placerville. While the Petersens lived with Sherri’s parents, Cary built his and Sherri’s dream home on the property: a sprawling white house with black trim, complete with a wrap-around porch, an apple orchard, and a detached garage as big as a barn. Deer and wild turkeys roamed the landscape, set against the beautiful backdrop of the Sierra Nevada, and oak trees grew in abundance. A long dirt road separated the property from the rest of the world.

Cary was justifiably proud of the place. He bought Jessica a horse and himself a $60,000 Mercedes.

Elana was a freshman in high school when Cary began his law practice. She went to work for her stepfather as his secretary, and the two developed a special bond at the office, where he told stories of his experiences at the prison, giving Elana glimpses of the anxiety that still gripped him.

“Cary probably dealt with trauma during and after his corrections officer days and carried it throughout his law career,” Sherri says. “I’m not sure he was aware that he might have been suffering with PTSD.”

Likewise, no one in the family was familiar with the signs or symptoms. Cary suffered a recurring nightmare, which he shared with Brett, of trying to escape the prison at night.

“His hands were bleeding from the barbed wire as he tried to scale the walls,” Brett says of his father’s nightmare. “These dreams came to him both during his time as an officer and afterwards too, following him for years.”

Later, when father and son spoke candidly about their mental health, Cary described himself as clinically depressed—another sign of PTSD. The condition, Brett points out, predated Cary’s time as a corrections officer. But his experiences at San Quentin and Folsom exacerbated the problem at regular intervals, and he was eventually prescribed antidepressants.

As Cary tried to find ways to cope, he self-medicated with alcohol. But he struggled to find lasting relief. The trauma he had witnessed while a corrections officer was still fresh in his mind.

“There’s no way you can go into a stressful situation like that day in and day out and not see things,” Elana says. “And to not be able to talk about things—especially in the eighties, you were supposed to be a macho corrections officer. You weren’t supposed to share your feelings.”

Lewis, who totaled twenty-five years as a corrections officer at Folsom, remembers the prison environment well.

“When you get there, your mentality goes on a higher state of alert than that of normal people,” he explains. “So when you go home at night, your state of alert goes down, but it doesn’t go down to the same level of everyone else. People talk about how many years have to go by after retirement before they feel normal again. There are certain stores that have a buzzer that sounds just like the alarm did at prison. I heard a buzzer at Walmart once and wanted to yell down to the yard.”

Unfortunately for Cary, transitioning from one stressful line of a work to another kept his trauma alive. By the time he reached middle age, instead of cementing his relationships and enjoying the fruits of his labor with family and friends, he found himself more anxious than ever.

Eventually he began writing a memoir—what he called a “fact-based fiction”—to describe his work as a corrections officer. He never completed it, but his last draft, dated 2016, offers an intimate, gritty look at life inside a state prison’s walls. The unfinished memoir serves as a collection of anecdotes, many of them violent, all of them visceral, through which the reader is given a grisly education. A kite is a note from an inmate, a yard jump is that moment when an inmate attacks another in the prison yard, and “the hole” was a particularly dangerous cell block at San Quentin.

Cary describes living life on the razor’s edge—between allowing prisoners to murder each other and using lethal force to stop them, between doing one’s job correctly and losing it in disgrace. Intermittent spasms of violence break up the monotony of filing reports and conducting strip searches, and the colorful cast of inmates and officers includes Dirty Eddie, who covered himself and his cell walls with his own excrement; Blue Norris, a mountain of a man; the even bigger Cornfed, who literally got off on shanking and killing a fellow inmate; and the Nun of North Block, a former Catholic nun turned prison guard and sergeant. Cary takes the reader back in time to his days in the academy and then describes “a slow rolling war” between the inmates and the men and women charged with protecting them from each other.

~~~

For those who loved him most, Cary’s troubling demise is still difficult to fathom. One day he was the man his family knew and loved, and the next, he was a stranger behaving strangely.

“Cary’s personality started changing the last five years of our marriage,” Sherri says. “He was more agitated or irritable. He was blowing through money, and if I questioned it, he would blow up. We were having money issues that were out of control. I thought he was suffering with a mental breakdown or depression. It was like he didn’t care anymore, almost like he was drowning and was ready to give up. We sold our dream home due to our financial situation, and it just got worse after that.”

At his practice, Cary began having memory issues. Little things—like clients’ names or previous cases—escaped him. And away from work, Cary’s relationships began to fray. He drank more, reasoned less. His friends and family could only look on in shock as he made one bad decision after another.

“Our children and our friends started noticing the odd or different behavior,” Sherri says. “Our children were definitely asking a lot of questions and experiencing stress in our family. We had no clue what was happening.”

Neither, it seemed, did Cary, who was stumbling toward insolvency and divorce. By 2014, he and Sherri were living in an apartment in Folsom, and in July, they moved to another apartment in the same building (they would later share the apartment with Jessica and her husband, Conrad). Something happened during the move that accelerated Cary’s decline.

“It’s hard to adequately explain, to emphasize how dramatically he suddenly changed over the course of one weekend,” Brett says. “In many ways, life already wasn’t moving in the right direction for my parents. They had lost the house and the property. Debt hung over them, and now they lived in an apartment, which, no matter what my parents said, I knew hurt my dad’s pride. But after the move that one weekend from their old apartment to the new one, everything changed. Perhaps he exerted himself too much during the move. Maybe his high blood pressure, combined with the fact that had stopped taking his medication a couple months prior, took a toll. But either way, something severe happened. We worried he had suffered a stroke. His condition was so extreme and strange that doctors considered, of all things, transient global amnesia as the diagnosis. I myself feared it might be vascular dementia, and I still believe that is the most likely explanation, barring a complete psychic breakdown.”

Adds Brett, “The situation continued to deteriorate at a frightening pace. My dad’s personality changed in a disturbing, unsettling manner. He would lash out at Mom and at my sister Jessica, who both lived with him, threatening them. Perhaps he always dealt with some level of alcoholism, but now his drinking sessions felt desperate, aggressive, abusive. One disaster after another over the course of a few months left him alone until he ended up living with my [maternal] grandmother and my step-grandfather. That situation fell apart too. He threatened them and refused to leave the house after they demanded he do so, prompting them to seek help from law enforcement.”

Cary’s daughters were just as shocked by his sudden change.

“He was just not himself,” Elana recalls. “That’s when he started talking about PTSD. No one could live with him. No one could help him. And that’s why he ended up being on the streets.”

Cary was in free fall. And before he could arrest his descent, he lost everything, including his practice.

“During this time, I would go over weekly to study law with him,” Brett recalls, “but he no longer could remember anything from the readings I would send him and seemed constantly to be improvising and hiding that his memory was dysfunctional. I remember driving home one night after studying with him, crying, confused, and terrified at what was happening. Eventually, no longer able to remember client names or details of their cases, he could not work anymore as an attorney, and my family closed his practice and issued refunds and apologies. The state bar of California revoked his license to practice law.”

“He lost his business and his house and his wife,” Lewis says. “No job, no wife, no home. Literally one day he was living under a bridge.”

Cary reached out to long-time friends for help, and soon, with the assistance of others, he was living in a small apartment in Folsom. But he didn’t start to turn things around until he was diagnosed with a dangerously low heart rate. The only thing keeping him alive, it turned out, was his high blood pressure. The memory lapses, the irrational behavior, the mood swings—all could be traced to the fact that his heart wasn’t delivering enough oxygen to his brain. A pacemaker was installed, and for the first time in years, Cary’s situation stabilized.

“After he got help,” Jessica explains, “he was coming back to himself in some ways, but in some ways, he was a new Cary. I had to forge a new relationship with who he was. He wasn’t super confident. He wasn’t cocky—in a good way—like he used to be. He wasn’t driven like he had been. This new person was different. Even though he was rebuilding his life, he was different. He needed words of affirmation. He was softer.”

The softer Cary was perhaps more open than he had been before.

“You never had to doubt that he loved you,” Jessica says. “You knew where you stood with him. He made sure everyone knew how much he loved them.”

According to Brett, Cary’s memory, though never quite the same, improved on the margins. The aggression was gone, replaced by “a sensitive, almost childlike demeanor.” He received financial support from social services, found a girlfriend on Facebook, and began writing and socializing with friends and family. A bit of ambition—the hallmark of his former personality—resurfaced. There was talk of moving, perhaps to the East Coast or Ireland, and of earning a master’s degree. Those around him saw reasons for optimism.

“Eventually,” Brett says, “I reconciled myself to the reality that he really had—no matter how or why—changed into what seemed like a different person, and that I needed to approach him differently too. But I also acknowledged that, no matter how strange and surreal it all seemed, he was still my dad. I still loved him even though he presented and acted in many ways as a different person.”

By now, Brett was living in Oregon, but he managed to see more of his father during visits and spoke more with him on the phone.

“I mostly feel mixed about these experiences, to be honest,” Brett says. “His voice and character sometimes seemed the same, but then with enough time, the differences between his old self and his new self would become obvious, reminding me of the reality of the situation. It’s still a difficult situation for me to process.”

While Cary tried to repair his relationships with his children, he poured his emotions into abstract painting, something he had been doing since his days as an attorney. He worked with acrylic and often used clay to add textures beneath the paint. His style varied and progressed through several stages. In the early days, he worked with lighter colors, but as his technique improved, he adopted bolder, darker tones and produced some of his best work. In his final days, he was working mostly with primary colors.

Some of Cary’s paintings were striking—and sold for a hefty price.

“After my dad passed away,” says Jessica, who kept a lot of his paintings, “I brought a painting of his to my grandmother, and she just couldn’t believe he painted it.”

Although they had gone years without seeing each other, Cary and Lewis by now had become close friends. The two began talking about teaming up for a great adventure on the American River in March 2019: paddling from Folsom to Alcatraz. The trek in Lewis’s seventeen-foot canoe would cover 150 miles and require five days. The cause? Just because. Lewis had hoped to make the trip years earlier and had proposed it twice—once to his oldest son and once to his second daughter—but it had never come to fruition. When Cary heard about it, his response was quick and to the point: “Why don’t we do it?”

Local television media hyped the event, and cameras were rolling during a training session beforehand, when the duo’s canoe first hit the water, and again when Lewis and Cary emerged from their tent after the first night of camping on the banks of the American River.

“We got seventy miles in the first two days,” Lewis recalls, “but we were hurting. We used kayak paddles for speed. There were times when Cary wouldn’t paddle. He enjoyed the stillness and scenery. I’d call it sublime. We saw ducks and geese, otters, a red fox.”

A huge sea lion swam right up to their canoe to greet them, a buck with an enormous rack waded into the fast current, a fisherman caught an impressive steelhead—the river amazed at every turn.

When the two reached Courtland, the wind was blowing forty miles an hour, nearly flattening the palm trees and making it all but impossible to pitch a tent, much less light a fire.

“We cooked our steaks, corn, mashed potatoes, and used hickory chips to smoke the meat,” Lewis recalls. “And Cary said, ‘I didn’t know you could barbecue in a hurricane.’”

The next leg was fifty miles, and suddenly things went south. Cary’s shoulder was hurting, making it difficult for him to keep pace. Worse, the wind and river conditions were downright hazardous. A county park ranger told them of recent fatalities on the river downstream.

“I had to make a decision,” Lewis said, “whether to keep pushing this or call it. The news had been covering us. Everyone was cheering for us on Facebook. Cary and I had even gone to a Bay Area weather seminar beforehand. But the prevailing winds from the southwest were too much. We were facing a steady headwind of forty miles per hour, riding the crests of the whitecaps. I decided to call it.”

It was a wise choice, considering gusts in the delta have been known to hit the 100mph mark. Lewis and Cary told themselves they would do their homework and take another shot at the river when conditions were optimal. But that time never came.

~~~

When Jessica ponders the effect her father’s canoe trip had on him, she has nothing but glowing things to say. It provided quality bonding time with his old friend and fellow corrections officer, and it gave him something to work toward.

“I think my dad—he had lost so much,” she says. “I think this was kind of his phoenix rising. ‘If I can do this, I’m not lost. I may not be bringing in the big bucks like I used to, but I have this new purpose. If I can do it, I’m worth something.’”

The trip showcased Cary’s determination to find new adventures and create new memories. His health, although far from perfect, had stabilized. He was drinking less. He and his girlfriend were talking about living together, and he had a community of friends looking after him.

But the COVID-19 epidemic brought life to a standstill. And in November 2020, Cary stopped returning phone calls.

“My dad was the type of dad that if you called, he answered,” Jessica says. “If he didn’t answer, he’d call back five times in a row. Three days had gone by. I had texted and called him, and I thought, man, this is weird. Then his girlfriend messaged me on Facebook. I had never met her. I thought, Why aren’t you with Dad? I asked if she’d heard from him, and she said, ‘No, he must be mad at me.’ That’s when alarm bells went off. I called a friend and called my sister and told them I was going to go check on Dad. I’m worried he’s depressed and not answering the phone. My sister said, ‘Do not go without me.’ But I thought, No way. This wasn’t the lowest he had been. Thanksgiving was coming up. We get in the car, get to my dad’s apartment, and I realized I had forgotten my dad’s key, which was usually on my keychain. I called him, and I could hear his cellphone ringing inside. But my mind wasn’t going to, He’s dead. I wouldn’t allow it to go there. It wasn’t until the police officer who went in told me he was gone, and then I went into complete shock.”

When Cary had stopped returning phone calls, the first thought on everyone’s mind was suicide. Cary had been depressed in the past. Indeed, once, while Elana had been battling postpartum depression, Cary had confided in her that he had contemplated suicide during his darkest days. But the police found Cary in his recliner, the TV remote nearby. All evidence suggested that his pacemaker, which was due for a recharge, had failed him and he had died peacefully in his sleep.

~~~

Cary said and did a lot of hurtful things during his health crisis, including suing Sherri for half of her retirement income. But in a testament to Cary’s character and the grace of the people who loved him most, no one in the family has held on to the pain of their temporary estrangement.

“Cary was a very caring man,” Sherri says. “He loved his high school friends dearly, his corrections officer friends, and his law school buddies. He kept in touch with them throughout the years. They meant a lot to him. He loved his brothers, his children, and me. He always told us so. He wasn’t perfect, but he was a wonderful man in many ways. But something happened that changed all that, and maybe we’ll never ever know what started his downward spiral.”

When it comes to her father, Jessica feels like she knew three different men: the man she grew up knowing, the man in crisis, and the man who struggled to recover from near total destruction.

“I loved my dad in every form he was in,” she says. “He was an amazing person, just so full of wisdom. He was gone too soon. Almost sixty-three. I imagined taking care of my dad when he was old. He was my favorite person to argue with literally about almost everything. That was our love language with each other: to bicker. We just trusted each other to argue nonstop. I miss having that banter.”

Elana remembers her stepfather as a fun—and funny—man.

“In his prime, he was just amazing,” she says. “He was very in love with my mom. He was very family-oriented. I never doubted that. He was just awesome. It would be nice for some people to see that, hey, even normal people have some sort of trauma in their life that changes them and how they would have been or acted.”

Among Brett’s fondest memories of his father are those moments Cary spent at home with the family, whether listening to music on the porch or talking about life and goals. He was a great man, in Brett’s estimation, whose sense of humor, sharp mind, and love for family left an indelible impression on those around him.

“I loved my dad and considered him my best friend,” Brett says. “He inspired me with his constant ambition. He supported me through my most difficult times. My dad was an incredible father, and I loved spending time with him. Arguing, debating, philosophizing—we could talk forever and enjoy each other’s company. I still miss him and always will.”

Cary didn’t heal every relationship before he died. And some, like his friendship with Lewis, soured. The new Cary, it seemed, was capable of nursing a grudge. But none among his family and friends holds his transformation against him.

The only remaining mystery involves the cause of all the turmoil that nearly consumed him. Brett, who has been diagnosed as bipolar, notes that bipolar disorder runs in the family. Cary’s father took lithium to treat it. Did Cary suffer some kind of psychic breakdown? Or was it merely his heart? Was it the alcohol? Depression? A combination of many factors? Compounding the mystery is the surreal nature of Cary’s demise. Those closest to him were shocked—and remain shocked—by his metamorphosis. It had a disorienting effect on his family and friends, and his legacy, while largely intact, carries with it a cloud of confusion. A sense of loss pervades everything.

PTSD, meanwhile, hangs over Cary’s story like a blanket of fog. He was never diagnosed with it and didn’t seem aware of its effects until after he was in trouble. But no one denies that he experienced trauma that haunted not only his waking moments but the dreams that played out while he was asleep.

Dave Cropp, a retired police officer from the Sacramento Police Department, met Cary a little less than a decade before Cary’s passing, and the two became friends. Dave is an expert witness in domestic violence and does clinical assessments and testifies in court. A licensed therapist with a small private practice, he’s board-certified in domestic violence by the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress and currently works for the Sacramento Regional Family Justice Center, where he sees clients and works on special projects.

“I did not diagnose him,” Dave says of Cary, “but I can tell you that when he talked about his experiences working for corrections, he would seem to not just recall those incidents, but he would ‘re-experience’ those incidents. He would talk as if it were happening again. The voice, the look in his eyes, the body language—all told me that these were not just memories, but they were experiences that he could not categorize as past memories.”

Cary told stories in bits and pieces, revealing something to everyone but everything to no one. With no way to dispose of the trauma, his unconscious mind replayed the same nightmare for years, stuck in a harrowing loop. Not until he had alienated everyone he loved did he receive treatment, but that treatment was limited to his physical problems, themselves inscrutable for far too long.

“I’m sure there are many others that have suffered through agonizing events and don’t have a true understanding of what PTSD is,” Sherri says. “I feel horrible that I didn’t know about PTSD and that maybe, if we had understood or considered PTSD as maybe the root of his problems, there could have been a different outcome.”

Brett, like others, has a hard time drawing a clear line between PTSD and his father’s last few years.

“It’s hard for me to say how much that impacted him towards the end compared to heart issues or his struggles with depression,” Brett says. “I think his time as a corrections officer traumatized him. However, I don’t think PTSD is likely the reason for the dramatic change in his memory and personality, given what I know. I don’t rule out the possibility, however, and certainly think it could have played some role in what transpired.”

A large body of research suggests that PTSD is intimately associated with depression and anxiety and can present in many ways, including borderline personality disorder (BPD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). PTSD also can result in enduring personality changes and memory loss. But because Cary was physically sick with an ailing heart and had battled depression from an early age, it’s impossible to untangle the sources of his struggles. It’s likely that each condition aggravated the other. It’s likely, too, that losing his father at a young age scarred him in ways that no one, least of all Cary, understood. What we do know is that childhood trauma does not inure people to trauma later in life; it makes them more vulnerable to it. And PTSD in general is not merely a mental condition but a trauma felt throughout the body and spirit.

Cary Petersen lived a full life. He celebrated atop the mountain. And he wallowed in the valley of despair. He won it all—a loving wife, a wonderful family, an extraordinary home and career—only to lose it. He struggled to regain what he’d lost, only to come up short. But throughout it all, he gave as well as he got. The love he shared with friends and family came back to him when he needed it most, and the trauma he faced, although it scarred and changed him forever, never stole his heart, which swelled with love even as his pacemaker failed him.