Posted on 04/13/2008 5:10:44 AM PDT by fweingart
As she tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered marriage to Eliot Spitzer in the wake of his embarrassing prostitution scandal, the state's former First Lady is coping privately with two other family tragedies.
Her sister's husband is on his deathbed, according to Trilby Wall, Silda's gracious Southern mom. "Right now, her brother-in-law is dying," the elder Wall told the Daily News.
Ray Grayson - the adored 64-year-old husband of Silda's younger sister, Susan - is under hospice care at their Richmond, Va., home.
Silda's parents - Trilby and Bob Wall - are by his side as his brave battle with cancer comes to a close. Asked if Silda would soon join the family, Wall said simply, "She will."
The bad news doesn't stop there. Eliot Spitzer's father, Bernard - the 83-year-old patriarch of the family and creator of one of the largest real estate fortunes in the city - has also been hospitalized.
He suffers from Parkinson's disease and has been admitted to NYU Medical Center's cardiac floor.
The former governor and his wife have been visiting the elder Spitzer at his bedside in the Tisch pavilion.
The grim-looking couple were photographed coming out of the First Ave. hospital last week, one of just a few times they have been seen together in public since an ashen-faced Silda stood beside her husband when he resigned in disgrace on March 17.
"Things happen to every family at some point in life, in different ways," said the elder Wall of the challenges her daughter is facing. "I'm sorry about Bernard. I'm sorry about all the stresses. In time, the sun will come out."
It's been just one month since the feds outed the former governor as sleazy "Client 9" - a regular john of a high-class call girl ring. Feds said he paid $4,300 for a romp with call girl Ashley (Kristen) Dupre at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.
His tawdry professional and personal betrayals ended his 14-month governorship within a week, inflicting unimaginable anguish on a loving wife of 20 years and their three teenage daughters.
Relatives and friends say Silda, 50, is tough - and the one-time hard-charging corporate lawyer who gave up her career for her husband's political ambitions will do what she thinks is best for her children.
They say she has made no concrete decision on whether the marriage can be saved, but wants to keep her family together as she begins to regain her emotional footing and find what is the "new normal" for her and her daughters.
"They are very strong, and they are very brave, and they will find resolution at some point," Trilby Wall said of her daughter and son-in-law.
Family friend Janice Shorenstein, who co-hosted a Women for Eliot Spitzer fund-raiser in 2005, said, "I think she is an amazing woman who is putting one foot in front of the other. That is what the situation is."
For the cheating Spitzer, these last few weeks have been an exercise in extreme contrition - a trait not usually associated with the former Sheriff of Wall Street.
He's in therapy, and Silda's mom said the ex-governor and attorney general has tried to make things right with his in-laws.
"He has spoken to the family," she said when asked if Spitzer had apologized for his behavior.
Besides leaving their Fifth Ave. apartment to take walks in Central Park and overseeing the active lives of three teens, Silda Spitzer has been able to distract herself with her charity, Children for Children.
The $1.5 million nonprofit - which gets young people involved in community service - is gearing up for its annual benefit on May 21 at Christie's auction house in Rockefeller Plaza. Friends say Silda is determined to make sure it is a success, despite her private pain.
The fund-raiser may also be her first reentry to the Manhattan social swirl she was used to living as the governor's wife.
"She is passionate about the organization," said one upper East Side girlfriend who asked not to be named. "She started it from nothing in 1996. She also has friends who are making sure it works."
For now, she continues to wear the human face of the Spitzer marriage, a face of pain beside her husband's starched, inscrutable facade.
"There is still anger, but my prayer is that they stay together and get it worked out and go on to a happy relationship once they put it back together," said one family intimate who asked to be anonymous.
"That is my hope for the family, for the girls. There is a lot to sort out here. Her very life was pulled out from under her.
"What she is going through at home and with her brother-in-law is enough for any one person to have to bear."
cry me a river.
“will do what she thinks is best for her children.”
....run his ass out of the house at gunpoint and call a locksmith...then call the most vicious divorce lawyer in town....that’s what’s best for the children...let them see how a respectable woman with standards handles a cheating husband...what she’s doing now just invites further insult.
It's only a matter of time before the divorce settlement is made public.
Not if they were not having sex.
How do ya know she hadn’t stopped giving up the poon aster she found out about his philandering?
She may be a cold fish that was happy to be relieved of her wifely duties. Happy to have her miscreant husband pay whores to take care of his manly needs.
You are right though in your statement that he is garbage.
This story goes to show you that life is challenging enough. When THE building block of our lives, our dealing with other human beings, truth is abrogated by the anti-life liar unnecessary destruction/dehumanization is the result.
The big problem with Democraps (and socialists at large) is that they not only hate conservatives, but they hate and feed off each other. They are an unholy and evil bunch.
One can envision Hitlery upstairs in the White House filing her nails, while her sick-o husband thingy is downstairs completing his sex act by masturbating in the oval office washroom sink. What a class act this moron was!
>> What she is going through at home and with her brother-in-law is enough for any one person to have to bear
The anguish that Eliot Spitzer put so many innocent people through, with the tacit approval of his wife Silda, is more than any of those innocent people should have had to bear. But no mention of that...
I don’t shed any tears for the Spitzers. Nor for the old man Bernard who raised that vermin POS Eliot and funded his power-lust ambition.
They show him a picture of a hooker and then they spank him?
Therapy? Hey , this is your zipper, keep it zipped?
Cry me a river is right. They are the classic examples of the left. Billions of dollars, Harvard, fifth avenue...but they really have nothing at all.
I thought this said, "Harvard filth..." and I kind of dug it.
The only people who warrant sympathy in this soap opera are the three Spitzer girls who, as I heard through the private school grapevine here, were crushed. The adults can all rot.
It’s hard to have sympathy for the woman if she is still standing by her whore-lovin’ man. The fact that she married him in the first place raises a lot of questions regarding her intelligence.
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