This is What it is Like to Come Home and Find Your Husband Dead

This is what it is like to come home and find your husband hanging dead with a rope around his neck in your basement.

You come home from a couples’ therapy session that he was supposed to attend but didn’t. You notice his truck in the driveway and the front door is slightly ajar, and neither of these things is usual. You get out of your car almost not turning the engine off because you are not thinking about car engines.

You sat through couples’ therapy, by yourself, recounting to the therapist how he had raped you the night before, thinking that that would be the thing you would have to get over for the rest of the year, or two years, or your lifetime.

But it wasn’t.

You sat through couples’ therapy, by yourself, saying “this is a safe place where I can talk about this, but I wish he was here, so I could say these things to his face, and I’m not sure why he’s not here, and that worries me.”

And you checked your phone many, many times to see if he answered any of your many, many texts.

But he didn’t.

This is what it is like to come home to your husband’s dead body hanging in front of your eyes like the worst form of revenge you could ever imagine.

You had sat at the local car garage, while your minivan got an oil change, before the therapy appointment, texting him even though you didn’t want to because he had just raped you the night before, and when he didn’t answer, you texted his brother, who said he hadn’t heard from him that day. Then you sat there thinking of all the things he could be doing. You thought he could be packing and moving. You thought he could be drinking himself into a coma, or at a casino gambling.

Then you texted the guy you met on Twitter a few months ago.

 This is what it is like to come home to your husband, and the father of your three tiny children, being dead and gone forever and ever and ever.

You see his truck in the driveway but no suitcases are in it. You see the front door is ajar and you know instinctively that things are not right. You go into the house expecting him to be locked in his bedroom or packing things in boxes, but it is just silent. There is nothingness. Your house feels dead.

You call his name and there is no answer.

Your brain starts to panic before you start to panic because your brain knows things about your husband that you didn’t allow the rest of yourself to know for ten years. Your brain knows things that everyone else knew but nobody wanted to tell you.

You run up the stairs to the bathroom and check the bathtub.

You run down the stairs of the basement and look at his small, far corner of the basement, where he was always hiding from life.

You run up the stairs and look out into the back yard.

You go down the basement stairs slowly.

Your brain and your eyes and your body didn’t allow you to see your husband’s body the first time you checked the basement, even though it was hanging there, right at the bottom of the stairs.

You were not ready. You were not at all ready.

But now you see, and you scream.

And you don’t stop screaming for what seems like three hours. You don’t stop screaming as you run out of your house, and fall onto your front yard. You keep screaming while the neighbors run over to you, while they look at each other with panic, while the men go into the house and the women usher you into a neighboring home. You don’t stop screaming as you yell “HE’S DEAD!!!” over and over and over again into your phone because that is all you can say. You don’t remember words. You don’t stop screaming while you see the three ambulances pull up in front of your house, out of your neighbor’s window. You don’t stop screaming while you see a stretcher taken out of the ambulance and brought into your house. And you don’t stop screaming while you don’t watch your husband’s body being carried away, because you can’t handle death or him being really really dead.