I am....

Today could have been my 10th wedding anniversary if my husband hadn’t killed himself.  But, to be honest, we never would have made it that long. I had considered leaving for several months, I knew I had to leave when he disappeared for a second time. I needed to get away from his addiction and mental illness for my own wellbeing. This is not to say I didn’t love him or wish that we could have had a long life together. I just don’t want to pretend that I’m grieving for a happy marriage. It’s a complicated set of emotions. I mourned the loss of my husband many times before his actual death. When he checked himself into rehab in 2016 — who am I kidding, when his daughters and I checked him into rehab — I prepared divorce papers. But rehab brought out the best parts of him, the parts that I fell in love with, and so, I threw those papers away, gave it another shot, trusted that sobriety might take hold and our plans of growing old together would work out.  What didn’t get addressed at reh

This may seem sacrilegious to say but I did not like my husband the day he died. Or the day before. Or maybe even for most of the few weeks ahead of his death. I loved him, yes, but I did not like the version of him that I was living with at all. Not even a little bit.  I was hopeful that after he worked through the grief, and the mania, and the relapses that I could figure out a way back to the comfortable camaraderie we had for much of our marriage but that I also needed to be a realist and understand that I was losing a lot of my own mental health gains in this relationship and needed to protect myself.  This may seem insulting to the dead but when I bemoaned to my therapist that “I did not understand how spouses who actually liked their partners went back to work quickly after their death because I still feel somewhat disembodied by the whole thing” she said “It’s actually often easier for people that are in healthy relationships.”  I sat with that for a minute and said “maybe that

There’s nothing quite like when you find yourself having a full conversation about the day with your dog and truly wonder how long you’ve been talking.  My brain, even prior to the death/cancer/suicide trifecta of 2022, was never been a quiet place to exist. I’ve described the world in there as a place where I’m reading an entire orchestral score, with a stock market ticker tape running across the top, a perpetually refreshing Instagram feed on the side, but I’m riding a unicycle while doing long division and juggling Rubix cubes. On the outside, generally, I appear fairly calm. I have a reputation of being a very aggressive (and creative) problem solver.  Navigating those worlds, internal and external, takes a lot of energy.  I’ve been very open that I see a therapist regularly. However, I did not initially visit her for the chaos in my head or even the sexual assaults I’ve experienced. I went to her because I was having bad dreams about a jury trial and wanted a quick fix and because

I am a 46 year old widow. I am neither a young widow, with a life of tragic possibility and young children to raise, or an older widow mourning the loss of the only love she’s ever known. I am someone who deeply loved a very damaged man for ten years before he took his own life.  I am finding that I am struggling to not quantify our relationship by the limited amount of years together that we actually had. I did plan on growing old with this man. I’d stopped dying my hair, stopped wearing anything that wasn’t designed for cozy living, hell, I started wearing Crocs.  I was comfortable in my skin for, maybe, the first time in my life. He was my favorite travel companion. We had found a peaceful home that we both loved. He had his first grand baby and another on the way - I got to be “Grandrea”.  He was a protector, a bit of a clown, definitely rough around the edges. We challenged each other, we were both in our own therapy, battling our own demons, talking them through, getting stronger