Apparently, the time has come.  Years ago, a Writer friend of mine told me I should write about this.  I dismissed it because she is a Writer in that way that means her whole life revolves around writing and she doesn’t really understand non-Writers.  I am neither a Writer or particularly even a writer (although I have both in my family) so I offer that as a caveat or perhaps an apology to those who read further.  The “this” to which I refer is the suicide of my husband.  It’s been almost 14 years now and I suspect I’ve managed to “recover” pretty well.  But of course there are aspects of it that I’ve kept to myself because they are just too painful to recount.  There are the things I’ve never told anyone I met afterward and that I wish I could make those around at the time forget as well.  The recent post by Jennifer Rogers Ruden brought that up again.  There was a “Merideth” in my life too.  Only, it went a bit further than my insecurity.  He fell in love with her, or at least he thought he did.  That was pretty much the last thing in a long timeline of my husband’s depression.   His was probably a pretty common story for the most part.  Abuse, drugs, broken home, moving to a new school at least once a year; all stuff that makes it a lot  easier to shut down than to try to make friends.   When we met in high school, he was sitting off by himself and I was the “I wanna fix everyone” girl.  I gained his trust by actually letting him “be alone” when he wanted to.  We got very close very quickly.  Somewhere I still have the note he wrote saying he loved me but that if I chose to stay with him, my life wouldn’t be easy.  It wasn’t a threat at all, just his completely open and full realization that his life was pretty messed up.  I took that in as best and fully as a high schooler can do.  And in case you’ve forgotten, the minutiae of emotions are the forte of the teenage girl.  To this day, I know it was true love.  We stayed together even though my father hated him.  We stayed together when he joined the Army [(serial mover+serial schools) + (bad grades+low income)=low college potential-->Army].  I was his only stability during that phase of basic training where they break you down.  He was already broken and the Army just made it worse.  Then, he got sent off to Iraq (Oh, forgive me.  We’re supposed to believe they were only in Saudi Arabia during the “good” Gulf War).  There, he didn’t receive any of the daily letters I sent him but I received all the things he sent including the unexplained box of his remaining charred belongings after his tent burned down.  He felt so alone because he thought I wasn’t writing.  When he finally got back to the US, he spent some time floating around because they couldn’t assign him to a unit; something about losing everything that identified him in the fire.  Then, to our surprise, he got stationed about the farthest away from our goals in life as possible.  I proceeded to break my parents’ hearts by moving across the country to marry him.   There I became another cog in the poverty machine that is the US Army.  It was nothing less than awful and I was plagued by extremely vivid nightmares of a day when I would wake up and my husband would just be gone, with no explanation at all.   He was completely miserable being forced to live a life he hated.  He was in an accident that left him in constant pain but his superiors belittled his inability to do “Army work” and instead of helping, wrote him up at every possible opportunity.  He couldn’t wait to get out but even our pleas to the chaplain fell on deaf ears.  When he finally timed out, he  couldn’t find a job and felt horrible about himself.  That’s when he met her.  She was younger.  Younger girls like older guys.  Older guys like being hit on by younger girls.  She made him feel special at a time when nothing else did.  Including me.  I was pretty depressed at the time as well.  

Then came the day.  I woke up and my husband was already up.  I thought it was kinda weird but he did something I thought was sweet.  He made my lunch.  He seemed really happy, much happier than recent days.  We took pictures of each other.  We had sex, although he couldn’t reach orgasm.  He said he was in pain.  Nothing new there.  He fed me oranges.  I put orange sections between my breasts and fed them to him.  To this day, I can’t eat or stand the smell of oranges.  He gave me an incredible hug and kiss when I left for work.  When I asked him what was up, he just said he had decided “today will be a happy day for me”.  I was so desperate for happiness that I took it at face value.  I drove to work with a smile on my face.  It was a sunny day and I was even running a little early.  I got to work and went to the lunch room to put away my lovingly packed lunch.  As I pulled the ham on a roll, red jello, and an orange out of my little cooler, the note fell out.   I haven’t read it since that day.  It said he loved me very much and he was sorry to hurt me like this and he was going to kill himself down by the river.  It was a place we loved to go.   The only time he was truly happy was when he was out in the woods hiking, fishing, hunting or camping.  So, I knew exactly where he went.  My mouth instantly went dry when I read the note.  I ran to a phone to try to call home but got no answer.  I ran to my car and took off.  I realized after a few miles that I needed to call the police.  I stopped at a phone booth and called them.  I told them where I was going and what I was driving.  I told them I’d be driving very fast and no one should try to stop me.  It was the longest drive.  When I got there, I had to park at the road because there was a gate and it was a good ½ hour hike down to the river.  I got out of the car and ran but my body went limp.  I tried screaming his name but I couldn’t speak.  Then the police showed up.  I’m not sure how but I got back to my car.  And then the officer had me sit there.  While he sat in his car and didn’t speak to me.  I tried to eat the jello to quench my thirst.  Yes, somehow I remembered to bring my lunch.  I just sat there for an eternity.  Then I heard the gunshot.  It echoed from the river.  I told myself it was a garbage truck .  Out in the woods.  I didn’t know what to do but I couldn’t move anyway.  I continued to be paralyzed through the arrival of the ambulance and when they took away my husband.  Given how far away the river was, it didn’t just feel like an eternity, it was.  I have no idea how I got back home, absolutely none at all.  I don’t think I was taken in a cop car but why would they have let me drive?  I know that when I got home, my husband’s younger brother was there (he was living with us)  and so was “she”.  She had gotten a note too.  We called my father-in-law and my parents.  That was all kind of a blur.  The three of us spent the night in various stages of fitful sleep and uncontrollable sobbing.   Somewhere along the line, parents started to arrive.  “She” ended up in a psych ward for taking her stepfather’s gun and threatening to kill herself.  The next few days were intense.  I went with my father-in-law to the funeral home where they led us to a small room that held my husband’s body.  I wasn’t ready for it.  He was cold and stiff and there was a pillow over his head.  Except that it wasn’t raised up like it should be.  His head was not there.  

My husband and I were not religious but rather put our faith in Mother Nature.  He wanted only to “return to the earth from whence he came” which was not legally possible so he was cremated.  But the man at the funeral home realized that a regular funeral wasn’t going to be what we wanted.  He put me in touch with a Native American woman who performed a smudge ceremony with all our friends and family down at the river.  It was exactly what he would have wanted.  She continued to be a help to me as a leader of the local Survivors of Suicide group. 

I came to realize pretty quickly that my husband was so happy that last morning because he knew he finally was going to be free of his physical and emotional pain.  I started seeing him in my dreams and always in places where he had been happiest.  I know he was letting me know that he was finally free to be in control of his happiness.  But I was still lost and miserable.  

A month or so later, I had some photos developed.  I had forgotten about the pictures we took that morning and it all came flooding back to me when I saw his smiling face and the posed photos.  I started doing some stupid things and hanging out with people I shouldn’t have.  I drank a lot and slept around.  It was  nice to dull the pain.  I don’t really regret much of it, to tell the truth.   I think I did everything I had to do to survive.  Unfortunately, part of that was shutting out my parents and telling them everything was ok.  I didn’t want to hurt them but I just couldn’t open up the way they wanted me to.  Then one day I got a call from a very close family friend who has known me longer than anyone who isn’t family.  Somehow, it was easy to open up to him and he suggested I read “The River Why?” by David James Duncan.  I did and it turned my life around. Right place, right time, I guess. It started the true healing process.   I gained some self-respect and self-reliance and gradually, a new life.  I am now almost 14 years into that new life.  I don’t know who I’d be today if my husband had lived but I know I miss him like hell and I wish there had been some other way to stop his pain.    I wish there was a way to stop all the pain.  I don't know if I've helped anyone or even myself with this extremely abridged version of events but I hope that maybe to at least one person it will be the right thing at the right time.