Born to Live
It is his birthday today.
I always feel like my emotions have been put in a blender for at least a few days before his birthday. Like, throw two scoops of sadness, a scoop of confusion, and a healthy amount of resentment into an appliance with ice and put it on the highest speed possible. Blend for three days.
I don't know what to do or what to feel on this day. I become anxious to settle on a thought or feeling. I become anxious to feel or think one way or another but not 48 different ways about him, because feeling 48 different ways is UNsettling, it is destabilizing. There is no resolution on the horizon when you feel 48 different things. You just sit with all of them and let them turn inside you. I let them turn inside me.
He would have turned 48 this year.
The one thought I settled on for a bit today was again thinking about how much I have always feared death, and how much he feared living.
Since I was a kid I would have moments where I would burst into tears because I didn't want life to ever end. I truly cried about it, even when I was five years old. I would become so overwhelmed and distraught over the thought of my life ending. I loved listening to birds and I loved my friends and I loved the way food tasted and I loved climbing the tree in the backyard. I didn't want any of that to end, ever. Sometimes I tried to imagine it ending and I couldn't because it was too scary to me. I'd have a physical reaction when I tried, a shiver that extended from my head to my toes, and it made me want to physically cling to something around me as if holding onto life with my hands might keep me living forever.
I really, really wanted to live forever.
Now I want to live forever, but just because I want to watch my children grow up for as long as I possibly can.
Since Chris was a kid he struggled with wanting to live. That blows my mind. I can't imagine that feeling. I know so many people feel it, and it is so hard and so overwhelming and so debilitating and paralyzing, but I myself cannot imagine it. I don't understand that fear of living, that absence of any will to live.
He felt like he needed to end his life. He tried so many times. Despite the sound of birds, and his friends, and the taste of food, and tree climbing.
And then the kids. He didn't even feel any need to live to see the kids grow up.
I can't understand it.
I feel guilty. I feel like if I understood that feeling better, the feeling he felt that day, I would understand him better, and I would understand the choice he made better, and maybe I would know what to feel right now on his birthday, instead of having all these turning thoughts and feelings.
But I am afraid of dying. I am not afraid of living. I just will never understand it. So these thoughts and feelings will keep turning, and they will keep turning another year older, as he would have if he had lived.
As a suicide survivor, when I was in that frame of mind.. absolutely nothing crossed my mind. I truly don’t believe anyone could have changed my mind at the point, please dear don’t beat yourself up. You’ve gone through a lot, and you are one strong Women. 💗
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. I struggle with this. I mostly get really upset that I didn't know his history of suicide, and like if I had known maybe I would have done something that would have made a difference.
DeleteThis really resonated with me. I’ve always felt the same about life and living. Now that I’m a single parent I feel that I must live to help my young daughter get through life. She really has no one else. Selfishly I too want to see her grow up but there is never a thought for a single second about not living.
ReplyDeleteDoes it help to remember and concentrate on how you felt when you met him? When you loved him?
ReplyDeleteYour story is resonating with me. My ex wife unexpectedly died suddenly a few weeks ago (suicide looking likely circumstantially, coroner tox review still in process).
ReplyDeleteThis shock leaves our two college kids shellshocked, dumbstruck empty.
I was among those helping them, in a haze, clean out her apartment this past month.
As an echo shock, she left them with no money. Apparently she inexplicably used up the substantial funds we each had upon divorce. And left them with zero life insurance (despite divorce agreement requirements, and my badgering a few years ago).
Not the intensity of your situation, but I saw your story on Twitter (where my kids follow me), so I came here to your blog. Thank you for indulging this vent-y comment . . .
I am so sorry for what you and your kids are going through. It sounds like she was in a bad place, a place that is very very familiar to me (my husband had bought a truck we could not afford shortly before the suicide). You must have all the feelings I have - sadness, anger, confusion... it is all there and it is all valid. Mental illness is not a person's choice, but the effects still are so hurtful to the people around those who are suffering. I remember in the first year following my husband's suicide I really felt like he had taken my life away with his own. I hope your children can find help at college - that the support is in place to assist them through their feelings. I also know that sadly, there is not a lot of "resolution" to the feelings with this kind of loss. It just morphs, but it doesn't go away. Sending you and your children lots of love and strength. And if you can provide your Twitter handle I would love to reach out so we can be in touch.
DeleteThank you so much for such a thoughtful reply (and obviously wish you hadn’t the experiences you’ve had to feel these things so personally).
DeleteMy own sadness and anger are there (knew her since we were kids, and now view her frustrating role in our marital unraveling in a bigger, sadder picture ) but oddly muted given a few years of hard non-communication from her post-divorce; the confusion however is strong, disorienting. I’m retroactively sympathetic and sad for her (“had I known - then ... ??) and ultimately just stumped. I don’t feel guilty as such, and wish you the ability to shake free from that ingredient in your emotional cocktail shaker, but you were obviously more deeply mixed into his feelings plus an existing marriage so I appreciate how hard that may be to forgive yourself, to look clearly and know you did exactly what you were capable of and that’s all that can realistically expected of anyone as the days roll on.
My kids naturally are the gut punch for me, they’re hit full force. Trying desperately to provide them with resources (therapy, grief groups) ... with a light enough touch that will penetrate their defiantly independent college-age selves. And struggling to improvise how I can suddenly become “more” for them, even though I well know I can’t possibly be their mom for them. Not much easy resolution to be had for them, given the sudden and empty lot she dropped them with. One of them tends toward recklessness and the other to ‘shutting down’ and I fear this calamity will exacerbate those tendencies.
I’ve figured in my gallows humor realism that ‘they’ll stumble through this just as badly as everyone else, and be “fine” ‘. I mean, that’s what we’ve all got I guess - the lot before us - however damaged and fraught while also full with the ever present openness of Life & Possibility.
My kids follow me on Twitter, so I wouldn’t dare touch these topics on my public timeline there. Though I’ve pointedly retweeted a couple of general “lost a parent” grief things in last few weeks so they’d see it. I’m ‘west is west’ ... admittedly a place mostly for my political ranting along with the odd miscellany. :)
DeleteThanks for writing the stuff that you do. But I wanted to post on twitter, but it would be too identifying.
ReplyDeleteYou have popped up a few times when I search for suicide, suicidal thoughts, etc.
I'm struggling with depression and just looking for a sign. I guess that the people left behind will be ok.
I heard people say that those that go think those let behind will be better off.
I know better, I know that's not true, but sometimes it just feels like I can't take the pain and the fear.
I've even had a psychiatrist tell me. "You're friends will get over it, even your wife will get over it, but your kids will NEVER get over it.
I'm just a coward who can't do the right thing.
You’re not a coward, you’re facing tough stuff that’s what it is. I’m just a guy commenting on a blog, but I’m here to tell you to stay. Please, even though it isn’t easy.
DeleteSee my comment just above yours. My kids are devastated, they’re shellshocked and will never be the same. There are people in your life that you mean SO very much to.
More importantly, I’m optimistic that there’s a path — pharmacological, therapeutic or otherwise — that can work for you if you find it. Easy for me to say I know. But I’m saying it, I believe it
Hang in there buddy, K?
Thank you for taking the time to respond
DeleteAdrian, I am so sorry for the feelings you have. Truly nobody should ever feel that way, and I just wish like hell you didn't.
DeleteI can tell you from my experience that the wounds left behind are deep. My children are terrified of anything happening to me because it feels like I am their only person, and one of their parents disappeared on them suddenly, one day when they were at summer camp. They are scared that I will also disappear, and that they will have nobody left to take care of them.
I myself swing between anger and sadness and missing him and confusion pretty constantly. Mostly I just wish he had tried harder to get help.
It sounds like you ARE getting help, but sometimes that doesn't feel like enough. Maybe a lot of the time. I cannot pretend to know what it feels like to face those feelings, and to fight with that fear and sadness. It seems really, really exhausting, and that must feel completely unfair. I also know that what my children have been left with - the absence of the love of a father - feels really not fair for them. I also feel like it is not fair of me to say you have to not give up, when I don't know the feelings you feel and how hard that is.
I agree with "S," - I am hopeful that there is SOME solution out there that will ease your pain and sadness, and if I could bottle up that hope and give it to you, I would. I hope you can see your own value, because you have enormous value to your kids and I am sure to many other people. Sending you so much love and strength.
Thank you for taking the time to create such a detailed response.
DeleteAnd let me say that I feel for you. I take something from these responses. I know it's almost ghoulish, and it doesn't help you, but it does help me "play out the tape" of these thoughts in my head.
I wish there was something I could do to help you, some good dead, anything. I wish I had more meaningful connection in my life
Something is wrong with me, I have no resilience to stress anymore. I panic, to the point of throwing up at the things of this life. Death seems like the ultimate drug almost.
This is going to sound messed up, but if you've ever slipped into a hot tub on a cold day, or stood by a wood stove after being out it the snow, that's the feeling I get when I think about not being here.
I know those feelings, but I get the opposite feeling when I think about not being here. I think about standing by a wood stove after being out in the snow, and it makes me want to... stand by a wood stove after being out in the snow. Because those are feelings I know from life, and I love in life, and I don't want those feelings to go away because they are beautiful.
DeleteSometimes I feel like I feel things too much, too. But I guess the hard feelings are balanced out by the joyful feelings. What I am about to say is so ridiculously Hallmark card and I hate it for that, but I live in Vermont, and even on days when shit seems so fucking hard, I can go outside and look at the thousands of stars in the sky and it is all worth it, and I never want to let go of the way the stars look in the sky.
Just as you wish you could do something to help me, I really really wish there was something I could do to help you. I wish I could give you some of my hope, because I know that helps buoy me. It is what stops the tears before I throw up. I want hope for you, and if I could give it to you I would wrap you up in it like a blanket.