Robin’s Story

Robin Deann Treadway was born on Sunday December 6, 1959, in San Antonio, Texas. She was the daughter of LaVerna (nee Arnold), a nurse, and William Rockus Treadway III, a fabricator. The family soon moved to Moss Bluff, Louisiana, where Robin always had fond memories of a childhood spent playing in the nearby swamps and learning cooking and other lifeskills from her Lebanese Grandma. Robin had three siblings.

At the age of 11, Robin and her family moved again. This time it was to Arizona, the birthplace of her Mother, where they settled in the small town of Globe, an old mining community in Gila County. Her Dad found employment in a nearby copper mine, while her Mother continued nursing. Robin quickly took to the Western lifestyle, owning a horse called Chopper, and raising steers. Robin was always something of a tomboy, always game for any adventure. By the time she reached her twenties, Robin had three children from a failed and troubled marriage. A talented singer with a beautiful voice, she began performing professionally around the local bars. Alongside this, she supported herself through a number of other jobs, a cook at a bowling alley cafe and various retail positions, before finally deciding to follow in her Mother’s footsteps and pursue a career in nursing.

So, from 1993-1997, Robin studied at Central Arizona College in Coolidge, and proudly graduated as an RN. She always had a natural understanding and empathy for the less fortunate and elderly, and spent much of her ensuing career caring for such patients. She was only two years out of nursing college when we first met in 1999. We became the deepest of friends keeping in touch throughout the days and nights, either via international phone-cards or the newly released Yahoo Messenger. As I worked from home as a website and games developer, I had the freedom to hang-out with Robin and experience much of what she did in her profesional life. I remember the times she would drive out to see patients, often late at night, on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. It could by all accounts be quite a dangerous place, but Robin put her faith in God and took it all in her stride. On another night, I remember her visiting a little old lady out in a remote canyon and getting trapped in her car by a marauding herd of javelinas. We laughed and joked until they eventually went on their way. Her travels often took us through what she called “Our Canyon” near the Queen Creek Tunnel on the road to Superior. At night, there was always a little star that twinkled the brightest that she equated with “us”. My business at the time by strange chance was called Desert Star Web Design.

While she was at her best caring for the old and vulnerable, Robin’s work would sometimes take her into quite illustrious circles, usually in the wealthy suburbs of Scottsdale. She listed close family relatives of both Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac), and movie star Chuck Norris among her patients.

Over the years, Robin’s family grew as her children delivered a series of five grandkids.

Foolishly, in 2003, we parted company for awhile. Sometimes writers, for all their skills, are not the best communicators. Both of us carried serious damage from our childhood and teens, making us more fragile and volatile. However, by Christmas of that year we were back together again as a true romantic couple. By then, I had become involved as a Whistleblower in a major governmental and corporate scandal, though this did nothing to deter Robin from flying to be my side. Indeed, albeit long-distance, she had been there every day since the whole saga had begun.

In 2011, a tragic event took place that robbed Robin of two of her most precious possessions, her nursing career and her singing voice. She was diagnosed with a growth on her thyroid, and carelessness in the resulting procedure damaged her vocal chords and left her with debilitating Neuropathy. Helped by as much love and encouragement as I could offer, Robin’s speaking voice did return, and over the years she went some way in managing to sing again. She always sounded like an Angel to me. I have never forgotten the time she sang with me that Christmas in the old Gothic cathedral in Beverley. The moment her sweet and powerful notes carried down the aisle from our seats at the rear, just about all of the congregation turned to discover their source. I was so proud of her.

Around that time I had developed several online stores, and with her nursing career effectively over, Robin became my partner in business, too. One of our stores involved selling spectacles to followers of the Steampunk and Goth lifestyles. As a big fan of Gothic/Vampire fiction, Robin was in her element years later when together we visited Whitby in England, the birthplace of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

In the years that followed, Robin was still somewhat lost and looking to rediscover herself, in the course of which returning to a passion of her youth, writing. She had always said that we should write a book based around the events that unfolded in our lives in 2004, and began a dedicated campaign to encourage me to do so. Eventually, I agreed, following a day and night when the whole story came to us in an almost mystical awakening. TG (Working Title: The Second Gospel of Peter) was born. It had been many years since Robin had written poetry and I had walked the streets of Hollywood with screenplays under my arm, so the project represented a real challenge for us both. As an aside, we always wondered what would have happened if back in 1976 when I passed through her hometown of Globe we had somehow met. While I got down to the day-to-day writing of TG, Robin got busy on several of her own books, Jayne, the semi-biographical story of a hospice nurse, Counting Stars, a romantic road-trip homage to the 1970s based on the above premise, and The Girl, a period tale set during the Arizona Gold Rush of the 1880s.

Sunday’s Child is full of Grace. Robin had Grace to spare, and so many more precious qualities. She was literally The Love of My Life, and The Light of My Life….