There’s a story that’s been circulating on the wire since early Monday morning about an apologetic burglar that left $200 for a broken window as he exited the house he broke into.

I found it this morning on such far-flung and interesting sites as the Bharat Express News, The Guardian, The Indiana Gazette, and US News. Every account repeats the same story. That someone broke into a home, bathed, slept, cooked, and drank beer before being found by the owners, after which he apologetically left $200 to pay for a broken window and then fled.

A friend sent me a link from #NewsNut with Matt Harris.  Evidently it makes great copy to talk about this surprising end to what could have been a harrowing experience for the homeowners.

Except, friends, I’m that homeowner. What people don’t know is that it was my house that the burglar broke into. It was my beloved husband Toby standing in the living room with him, staring at the AR15 laid across his green duffel bag when this strange young man said, “Here, I want to leave you $200 for the window I broke.” If you don’t know already, AR15’s are controversial in part due to their use in several mass shootings across America.

Nothing amusing about that, right? Guns carried by strangers into your house are not funny.

Here’s who I am: I published a book last January about gratitude. I’m a stage IV colon cancer survivor and I run a weekly podcast that’s all about gratitude. I’m the rookie Board Chair of the Cancer Foundation for New Mexico, an organization so dear to my heart that I volunteer countless hours of each week to help northern New Mexicans get to treatment.

I coach people on how to integrate gratitude into their business plan, their relationships, their physical healing. I teach on how to use gratitude and positivity to find peace in this crazy world. I’m working right now on a planner for salespeople that has thirty days of making gratitude part of your lead generation plan. I run hard and fast all week, problem solving and assisting others because that’s how I’m built. How I was raised. And it’s what gives me joy. To whom much is given and all that. . .

So I should be able to turn this “apologetic /embarrassed burglar” story into something sweet and funny and useful for myself and others.

But I’m struggling.

Instead I feel victimized. Angry. Frightened. I’m afraid to be alone in my home during the day. I had to talk myself into getting on the treadmill this morning because I don’t want to have my back to the door. I stopped after a half mile because I kept imagining a stranger in the house.

I’m sitting in my office right now, looking out at the pinon tree in the backyard. I love this office, a converted bedroom at the back of our Santa Fe home. This is where I wrote my book, Lifesaving Gratitude; How Gratitude Helped Me Kick Stage IV Cancer’s Ass. This is where I record my podcast, where I talk to coaching clients, where I write every day, slogging away on a second book (which, by the way, is not going very well this week). It seems that I’m stuck. And I’m especially stuck since last weekend.

Half my picture window, the one I gaze out when I’m searching for another two hundred words to reach my daily count, is covered with plywood. The apologetic burglar, after he came over our back fence, broke into our shed, took a crowbar, and used it to bust that window. He climbed into my office over the glass shards, one of which stuck in my foot yesterday. Even though we’ve run the Dyson over it a dozen times, there are still tiny pieces of glass everywhere.

What I’m thinking of most of the time instead of getting through the list in my Full Focus planner is about how things unfolded on Sunday afternoon.

Toby and I walked into the house from the garage around 2:30 p.m. to a strong, unpleasant smell in our kitchen. We’d been gone for two days visiting my parents. I had a cousin in from Scotland. We had spent the weekend in Logan, my hometown in northeastern New Mexico, celebrating her return to the States to see my parents who are in their late 80s.

On the way home from Logan, Toby and I continued our ongoing debate about whether we should get a dog. Someone had a puppy I wanted, and we talked about shedding and hair on the furniture, about training a dog, about why we think we want to take on a new pet when our life is so unfettered at the moment.

I sent up a prayer for an answer on the dog issue, just because that’s what I do. I always ask for help from a place that seems wiser and better at life decisions than I am.

I always need all the help I can get.

We came home to a funky smell. Someone had obviously cooked fish recently. “Did you leave something in the trash?” Toby asked, and I said, “We carried everything out when we left.” I had washed all the dishes and left the kitchen clean, but there was a glass of water on the counter. I checked the trash can and the recycle bin had two empty bottles of Summer Shandy, my favorite summertime beer. There was a wrapper for Argentinian Red Shrimp from Trader Joe’s. I haven’t had a Summer Shandy since mid-October. I looked at the shrimp a week ago and thought, “That’s well past it’s good-by date.” But I put it back in the freezer. Now the empty package was in the trash.

“I wonder if one of the girls came over to get in the hot tub,” I said, and Toby dialed his daughter.

“Dad, I’m allergic to shellfish. And you know I wouldn’t come over while you’re gone unless I called and asked,” she said, and I walked through the living room toward the tv room, thinking I’d check to see if there were tracks through the snow to the hot tub, I glanced down the hall to my office and noticed that the door was closed. I don’t close my office door unless I’m recording a podcast. We have radiant heat and my office has a southern exposure. That means it gets really warm compared to the rest of the house. Which in turn means I always leave my office door open. Except that it wasn’t open at that moment.

I suddenly felt uneasy. I pointed down the hallway and mouthed to Toby, “That is really weird.” As he walked down the hall I saw him turn at the guestroom and say “Dude, what are you doing in my house?” Followed rather quickly by “and what’s up with the f-ing gun?”

There are a lot of details between that moment and the one when this young man bolted from our house toward the arroyo.

I know the story says the burglar was incredibly apologetic, but we were still startled. Scared to death. Where I come from they’d say “Scared as Sh*t!” Just writing this down makes my stomach churn.

The gun was not pointed at Toby but lying on top of the stranger’s duffel bag. I learned later it was an AR15. Don’t ask me about the gun. Even though I grew up in rural New Mexico, I don’t know very much about guns. But I do know that in that moment when I heard my husband say “what’s with the f-ing gun” I was paralyzed. And then frightened for both of us.

I dialed 911. I don’t want to go into how ineffective I felt the dispatcher was but it seemed to take a really long time for her to grasp that I felt we were in a life and death situation. Toby kept saying to the guy, “Dude, you have to get out of our house. You have to get out of our house.”

My husband was the calmest, quietest, most purposeful man in the world in that moment when he could have been aggressive and ugly and demanding and this thing could have ended up much worse than it did. I don’t know how this would have gone if Toby had just carried his pistol in from the pickup. I don’t know what would have happened had I been alone.

He just kept saying “you have to get out of our house.” And the perpetrator, whose name we didn’t know at the time, kept saying “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I was so cold.” He had been sleeping in our guest room for some undisclosed amount of time, in the king size bed next to the Pack N Play where my grandson naps. He’d lounged in my guest bed, eating crackers and pistachios. Finishing up a third beer.

As I stayed on the 911 line, I kept an eye on this six foot tall young man wearing a stocking cap, not looking particularly like a homeless person but more like somebody who’s coming in from a hunting trip. I opened the drawer on the bedside table where Toby keeps a .45, but knew it wasn’t there because he’s so careful of our grandsons who visit from time to time.

I remember thinking the burglar looked like someone from home, which means small town New Mexico to me. He said, “I want to pay you for the window I broke,” and he reached into his back pocket. Toby tensed because he didn’t know what was in the back pocket. Our burglar simply took out his wallet, which seemed to be full of cash, and threw $200 onto the ottoman.

And then once again Toby said “Dude you have to get out of my house.” Toby led him to the front door, opened it and stood outside while he watched this young man walk away down the arroyo, duffel bag and rifle in hand. I handed the phone to my husband because I didn’t feel that the dispatcher was getting how urgent this felt. Toby said to her,  “There’s a stranger with a rifle with a scope headed down our arroyo. The sheriff’s deputies need to get here now.”

The rest seems to be history, and has been turned into an amusing anecdote for the world.

The sheriff’s deputies, ten of them at once, showed up after a while. This is a story that’s now showing up on the wire everywhere, but nobody has called us to hear our side of the story. I don’t guess that it makes exciting copy to say that the homeowners felt frightened and powerless and frustrated. That this felt extremely intrusive and violating. That I’m having to fight my fears to stay right here in this chair in my office in my home. Alone.

We live on two and a half acres south of Santa Fe only twelve minutes from downtown in a gated neighborhood that has felt, up to now, extremely safe to me. This place is something I’m grateful for every day. As two kids who grew up with parents who barely made ends meet, Toby and I have worked hard and created an enviable life. I never would have believed I might live like this one day.

I can’t believe we didn’t choose to move here when we first got married seven years ago, rather than living right in the middle of downtown. We have an eight foot coyote fence around our backyard and for those of you who don’t know what that is, it is rows of thin cedar posts lined up. Not an easy fence to climb. But this guy came over our back fence, took a crowbar out of Toby’s storage shed and busted the window in my office to gain entry to our house.

We’ve wondered incessantly about his personal story.

Why was he here? What we’re seeing in the worldwide news doesn’t give us much insight, but it seems to be entertaining for the general public. Except that our friends get how sick we’ve been. A friend of mine saw the story on a local TV station. She messaged me and said, “Wow Are you going to be on Good Morning America tomorrow?”

As always, I’m searching for the moment of gratitude.

On Monday evening, about thirty-six hours after we found him here, I started to cry. I had held myself together all day, but I hadn’t been able to stand being here alone. We sat down to a glass of wine, our last for a month since we’ve pledged to do a dry February, and Toby said, “I keep thinking how surreal that was,” and I started to cry. I couldn’t stop, and I realized later that I had not been so afraid since that day in November 2012 when the oncologist on call said, “You have stage IV colon cancer.”

Where’s the gratitude? What’s the good in this?

Well, it could have been a thousand times worse. I write blog posts about “What not to say to cancer patients,” and one thing not to say is “Well, things could be a lot worse.” Because there are few things worse than a cancer diagnosis when you’re the one who received it. 

But in this instance, things really could have been a lot worse. We could be dead. Or Toby might have shot a stranger in our home. He might have left before we got home, which means we’d forever be wondering what happened.

And the other thing I’m grateful for is that it was Toby who went down that hallway. I don’t know how I would have reacted. It could have been either of our daughters, and it could have been Johanna with Baby Milo.

Tuesday the Apologetic Burglar was arrested.

The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that a young man confessed to breaking into our house after he was arrested less than a mile from our house. He  attempted to carjack a woman at the Church’s Fried Chicken on Rodeo road. I guess his behavior wasn’t so benign after all if he would pull his rifle out to threaten a civilian at a fast food joint.

We’ve slept better knowing he’s in jail. And despite all our fear and the trauma of finding him in our home, we have spent a lot of time worrying about the Apologetic Burglar’s well being.

We learned that he’s from my neck of the woods. He’s from Melrose, a small town on the eastern plains of New Mexico. I think I may have gone on a date with his dad once. It’s a small, small, small world, eastern New Mexico. Toby says that explains his good manners, the fact that he’s from a farming family in Curry County. Maybe I watched him play basketball at a Logan/Melrose match fifteen years ago. 

I can’t figure out why we continue to worry over him and why I feel so angry at the same time.

Why was he our apologetic burglar and not someone else’s? Did he come to us because Toby was going to be the perfect person for him to meet in that moment? This 32 year-old kid ended up first breaking a window to get into my house and then attempting a carjacking at a fast food joint. What was he running from? We don’t know what led him to this. He was completely lucid at our house, so when people mention mental illness or drugs, I tend to think that’s not the reason. We don’t have any answers.

And because I don’t have any answers, I do the only thing I can. On our way home from Logan the other day. I said a prayer to help myself get clear about a puppy or a dog, which now seems like a really small issue (except that I’m wishing I had a dog here with me, right now – we’re working on that detail).

So today I do the same. I pray for a respite from thinking about this all the time, all the time, all the time. I pray for some wisdom as I tell this story. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining or whining, although I probably do. I’m mostly bewildered. And still jittery. And a bit tired of the amusing story of the guy who was so ruthless with our innate trust.

I do what I’m doing now. I sit down and I write for a while because other than writing it down, I have no idea how to how to make any sense of it. It feels like when I was trying to write my book about having stage IV colon cancer. I’m not quite sure what the story is, other than it’s not fully contained in the narrative that’s circulating on the wire. All I know is that the best way for me to keep doing this and to keep making sense of life is to keep writing it down.

In a minute I’m going to get on the treadmill. I’m a farm girl. The only way to move forward is to get back on that horse and ride, right? I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for checking in.

By the way, that photo is of Toby and me on our front porch of this house we so enjoy. Just thought you’d like to see the other side of the story.