I survived the first month.
It's been a month exactly since I found out my husband took his life. So much has happened in that time. We moved, had his memorial service, a Bay Area reporter shared his story on Facebook and it reached 500k pages, his birthday was Monday and yesterday I participated in commencement and received his Master's Degree on his behalf (he was weeks away from being done). The university did a great job of making us feel loved and special and when I walked across the stage, all the faculty stood and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
I am starting to come to terms with this new life. Some moments I'm relieved I'm no longer on the roller coaster that is living with a depressed addict, some moments I'm angry that he chose to leave our little girl without a daddy and some moments I just miss the hell out of him. The things that have been helpful to me are to continue to take care of myself (exercise, acupuncture, massage, taking time to be alone), talking about how I feel and not judging it, counseling, and the support group I found for those who lost loved ones to suicide.
All in all, I think things are going about as well as they possibly can and I hope maybe by sharing what's been helping me, it may help someone else going through this.
Posted Jun 12, 2015, 5:21 PM UTC
I'm truly sorry you have had to go through this. Our situations of loss are not all similar, but I was young when my mother took her life so most of all, I relate to your daughter.
And so I am sure everyone is giving you words of wisdom and telling you to hang in there and, let's be real, it's years later and I still sit in the bottom of the shower and miss my husband and cry. But, from a parenting perspective if there was one thing I wish my dad would have done different, talking to me about my mum would have been highest on the list. My siblings and I all had an unspoken rule to not bring her up, because my dad would become emotional and cry. We didn't want to rock the boat or upset him, so we said nothing. As the youngest, I was the one who had the least time with her and only a few memories. I would have loved to have known the story of my birth or if she could sing or general experienced about her life. As a teen and an adult, it was as if she were a jigsaw puzzles and I only had ten pieces.
It's because of my experience as a motherless child and the death of my husband that I'm probably of the extreme: I talk to my kids about their grandmother as if I knew her, too. I want them to have a connection. I talk to them about their dad and remind them of the things he would say and quirks of his and stupid crap that is utterly insignificant but are just more of those jigsaw pieces so they can understand how he was. I see so much of him in them that it rips my heart apart that he isn't here to enjoy it, but I want them to understand he loved our family, and gone doesn't mean forgotten.
So, talk about your husband to your daughter. It's so important for her to understand who he was, outside of the confines of his addiction and mental health.
Thank you for saying that. My daughter is 17 months so other than asking for him and recognizing him in pictures, she really has no clue what's going on.
I'm continuing to talk to her about him and we asked family and friends to compile memories about him that we are going to make into a book complete with photos.
As she gets older I'll begin to talk to her about his illness and how he made that choice because he was sick, not because he didn't love both of us.
Thank you so much for the kind words.
You're so welcome. I'm here if you ever need a strange person to talk to. :)