Death Anniversary Of Suicide Coming Up

[Kintsugi]

I feel for you Simply Simon. I am so sorry that Bill committed suicide. I have a lot of feelings about it. I have been there to that point. I am so glad you are talking to us. Keep posting.

I am overwhelmed (in a good way) by all who have posted support here. I want to respond individually, but I'm in a funk these past few days.

I went to the grocery store yesterday. I'm a literary type, you know. I went to get some milk, and the expiration dates were just staring me down, rows of 1/27/15. I dug through to find a different date, rearranging the milk like a madwoman.

When I worked at a convenience store, there was a woman who would spend a good hour looking through our eggs. She would take out almost each one, looking at the dates, and re-stack them. Maybe she just had more dates to avoid.


He didn't leave a note. It's out of character for him to just up and make a decision with no explanation left behind. @scout86 , I know he did not think his death would hurt anyone. I've been there before. But now I see the truth, and I wish I didn't have to come to that conclusion through experience.

B got off of the phone, eyes wild, posture immaculately tense, and said "Bill is dead." He walked out of the house, ran around the block to his mother's house. My head was spinning. I kept thinking I heard him wrong. But that thought came over me, and wouldn't leave. It wanted to overtake all other possibilities. I knew it almost instantly. Bill had struggled with depression his whole life. My head would fight with itself:

He was fixing something, and he fell.
He killed himself.
I didn't hear him right.
He killed himself.
He had a heart attack.
He killed himself.

When B came back, he was giving us instructions. Hide the drugs. Hide the paraphenelia. Stay here. And then,

He hung himself in the basement.

And he left. And my stupid brain thinks, Hanged. You hung a coat. You hanged yourself. He hanged himself in the basement.

But the diction stays with me today. Bill hung himself in the basement.

Afterward, when people started arriving the next day, I wanted to know how he died. It was important to me. It still is. I asked B's grandmother.

"He hung himself," she said.
"I know," I said, "I mean how did he die?"

She didn't know. I wanted to know if he had made it high enough somehow to break his neck. I wanted to know that he did not asphyxiate. I see it--gruesomely, in impossible detail--in my head. Bill stepping off a platform. Bill's face turning red, his feet struggling for height. Thinking what have I done. Wanting to undo it.

I think part of me thinks that if he asphyxiated, we are all so much more to blame. I know that's not fair, but my head wants to argue that if someone had been there, we could have undone it before it was finished.

I think of a section of one of my favorite poems, "Whale Watch" by Dean Young.

You may try to hang yourself but be saved
By a kid come home early from school
Or you may be that kid who'll always remember
His mother that day in the basement
How she seemed to know he'd done something wrong
Before he even knew
And already forgave him,
The way she hugged him and cried.

There is a very popular show called Community. In one episode, the six characters are sitting around a table waiting for a pizza to be delivered to the apartment. When the buzzer rings for the delivery, no one wants to get it, and they ask one character to roll a di. The character with the di warns that once he rolls the di, seven different timelines will instantly be created, one for each side and one where it is never rolled.

The episode plays out all seven timelines when the di is tossed. In one timeline, everything goes as wrong as possible, and it forever alters that reality. This is the timeline they call The Darkest Timeline.

"This is the darkest timeline," B says after Bill's death, after the funeral, all of us still somewhat frozen in place by the loss.
"I don't think it's the darkest timeline," I say, trying to reason that the darkest timeline has everything, everything, go wrong.
B yells "This is the darkest f*cking timeline!"

It is nearly one year later, and so much is going so well. All of my success mocks me.

The last thing I remember Bill saying to me was the Saturday before his Monday death. He was hanging curtains in my guest room. He came up to me and said he was proud of me, that he was proud of both of us.

The next day, he discovered his beehive was dead.

The next morning, he did not go to sleep. He was supposed to go to sleep. On Mondays he would have been up for a good 24 hours, waking up at a normal time on Sunday, then working at a factory all night. A man with an MA in social work, assembling little parts of cars for 8-12 hours a shift. And he would come home on Monday morning, walk the dog, have a drink, and go to sleep. He was drinking a martini when my MIL left for work that day. She said she asked him if he was all right. He said he was fine, and she left.

A couple hours later, he made a noose.

When we would smoke in the basement with him, B was always using pieces of rope to make a noose, and he would talk about it. He would say, A true noose has thirteen rungs of rope. We would all laugh.

I'm sorry if this long thing belongs in my diary but I have no energy to move it and no concentration to make it better.

 

[Kintsugi]

More, because my head won't stop.

I stood outside on the porch chain smoking and pacing. I kept staring at the ambulance. I could see it from my house. There was never a siren, just lights. I kept staring at it and thinking, MOVE. Go! Hurry! And it stayed still. Finally, after I don't know how long--hours?--they turned the lights off. I was fuming mad. It was just sitting there, mute and without color, without urgency. I heard the doors open and close. Finally they left.

When my MIL came over that night, she sat on our couch with her phone in a nest of used tissues. I was completely silent. B put Community on, a funny show. Suicide references are everywhere, jokes and everything. Did you know that? Everywhere. You can't get away from them. All these lines I would have never thought of, even as a suicidal person. Everytime such a joke came and went, we all just got very still and tense, like a powerful wind was coming through that threatened to knock us over if we relaxed.

That feeling has never fully gone away.

Sometimes I think Bill can hear me, even though I don't really believe in an afterlife. I think he might laugh at us. Or maybe he would cry. I think he would want to tell us it's okay to keep laughing.

I sat in the funeral service and thought I would not cry. But I did. And I wanted to laugh and scream. But instead, tears just poured endlessly down my immobilized face. I don't know what the minister or whatever you call him said, I don't remember it. I just remember sitting there and thinking that all the shit he was spewing was stuff Bill would probably laugh at. I kept thinking, You clearly didn't know him, or you would shut your goddamn mouth and stop rattling off all this peace and heaven nonsense.

If you knew Bill, you would have preached about bees, or about plants, about wood, about building something. You would preach about how f*cked up some people's lives are, and how sometimes people have an existence that is fraught with tragedy, one after the other, until finally you get your big break with someone who makes you happy. And then you would preach about how you can't be happy even when you should be, because all of this trauma is pressing down on your skull, stealing the breath from your laughter and making you love feel like a burden you hand to someone instead of a gift. You would preach that those who have always been made to feel guilty will feel guilty when all bad things happen, like bees in a hive dying because of a sudden frost, even when you did everything right to make sure they survived. You would preach about how you can love someone so much you leave the life you love for the person you love, and you grin and bear it, and you find little joys, but more frustration than the joy can smother, and about how when you leave a life you love for the person you love, and you can't feel that person's joy to stack with your own, to overwhelm the bad, there's very little to hold onto as you sink.

You wouldn't be sitting there preaching about God's embrace, some sort of sick pat on the back for those in attendance, something to comfort them.

When my grandfather died, I didn't want to tell anyone. Finally, B said something verging on mean to me, and I just broke down, and he was pissed because he thought I was being overly emotional, and I blurted out that my grandfather was dead. Then he was pissed and sorry, because he would have wanted to know that. So he tried to be nice but he was still pissed. I told him not to tell anyone, but he told his mother anyway, and his mother told Bill. I was depressed and suicidal anyway at the time.

Bill said he heard my grandfather died. I was still living with Bill at the time. I confirmed the rumor. I was cold and numb and angry and only a little bit truly sad. He asked if we were close, and I said no. I should have just told him everything. Bill would understand. I should have said my grandfather tried to be a good man but was a bad father. I should have told him that my grandfather tormented my mother, that he rejected my grandmother's schizophrenia, and her variable functioning, and that he was someone who simply put women down all the time if they were not what he envisioned as perfect and right and proper. I should have told him I was crying for my mother. I was crying because she would have to cope with all of her mixed emotions but she would never tell a soul, not in the foreseeable future, anyway.

Sometimes I think if I had been more open with Bill about the complexity of my emotions, about my symptoms, about my family, we would not have clashed so badly when we lived together. I knew that above anyone else, Bill would understand me, my perspective, and he had the tools and experience to handle such disclosures, and he did not shy away from earnesty in suffering. But instead, I shut him out. I didn't want to be associated with him. I felt his every flaw as my own. I saw him and was terrified that I would be like him. His passive aggression, his sloppiness, his oblivious nature, his inability to hug someone he loves, his ebbing and flowing depressive cycles, his shadow of a past, the family he never talked about, all the people he loved and lost and refused to mention, the people who had abused him and died he never, ever discussed.

This winter has been so much warmer than the last. His beehive is doing wonderfully.

 

[The Albatross]

Glad you checked back in Simon as I was intending to do a fly by on your profile or diary to check on you. Got distracted. Roll it out as you need to whether it belongs in your diary or not... it's okay. This is the first anniversary... but they can and do get easier. Honest. Comfortable? Not always, but easier as we learn how to manage and cope with grief.

P.S. Get rid of the thoughts that imply guilt. Tell them to shut the hell up.

 

[The Albatross]

My first husband found his favorite boss at a sub shop (hoagies) hung/suicide in the basement over a Memorial day weekend ... the rats got to him. He was the opener on Tuesday after the holiday and found him. As you work through this for yourself, any thoughts about giving assistance to his wife/B's mom?

 

[The Albatross]

I used to tie nooses a lot myself at a teen. Nixed the ideation in my 20's when I was in the military and two students hung themselves. Once on purpose, a Dear John letter and once by accident, had secured the noose, stood on a chair, had porn spread all over the floor and a leg tied to a "buffer". I was very naive and didn't understand it was a sort of sexual thing.

 

[scout86]

I have no energy to move it and no concentration to make it better.

I don't know how you could make it better. That's quite eloquent.

"The darkest timeline"! I like that. And I like that image of all the different timelines. Life is like. You make a choice, you turn a corner, and the world changes. I wish I'd known Bill!

@Simply Simon , all we can ever do is the best that we can. And what we do? It IS the best that we can. Maybe we can see other options. Roads not taken, so to speak. But when we make a choice, we make the very best choice we know how to make at that moment. All we can see and all we can know is what we see and know right then. We can't see the other timelines.

When my friend's wife called me, she just said, "H shot himself", nothing else. And I said, "What?" because I was totally, innocently SURE that I hadn't heard what I thought I'd heard. I had talked to him a couple weeks earlier. He sounded better. We ran through an old running joke that we hadn't visited in a couple years. We had talked about suicide. He believed in an afterlife, as do I. He was SURE you went to Hell if you killed yourself. We had a long running debate about that. (My line was, "If God is that mean spirited and hard hearted then I want NOTHING to do with him!') Well, I guess now he knows I was right and he was wrong and I can't even say "I told you so!" His faith was so important to him that I stupidly assumed he'd stick around whether he wanted to or not......

You're describing the weird unreality of reality so well! And talking about it DOES seem to help make the transition, doesn't it?

 

[Kintsugi]

@The Albatross After Bill died, I poured all of my energy into helping B and his mother but especially his mother.

There was a support group for grief starting one week after Bill's death. I attended it with her. I would work from 6-2pm, or 7-3, and then I would pack up from there and go to the hospital to meet with almost exclusively a group of widows twice a week for a couple hours. It was so raw for us that it was difficult to participate.

I spent two weeks, basically from the weekend after Bill's death to Valentine's Day, making my MIL a Valentine's day card and bag of presents. I didn't know how to help her cope except to try and fill the holes he left behind. I walked the dog in the afternoon. I take care of all her animals when she's gone. I got a better job and made more money so that B could quit his.

But as far as emotionally? I don't know how to reach out to them. I just have no idea. I think B knows better than his mother that I was truly close to Bill. I don't know. It's hard to say. I feel such overwhelming guilt when I want to reach out to my MIL. I know she knows I picked on him a lot. I felt like I couldn't help it at the time. When we moved out, I was very hostile about Bill coming over. I just wanted some peace and quiet after the terrible upheaval of moving we'd been through, after living in B's parents house for months and being so depressed and frustrated and scared.

Anyway, I have no idea how to even open my mouth around her sometimes. She said she didn't know if she would take that day off or just go to work. I wanted to tell her it was insane to go to work. She had just taken a day with a friend of hers whose husband died right before Bill. They made paper machet together. I told my MIL, You could go to ***** with B and do gocarts. It sounded so stupid when it hit the open air, but I was being entirely serious. Bill would want them to do something fun. Bill would want his beloved wife and the only son he ever had to go and celebrate their lives somehow.

I don't know how to reach out to her without feeling guilty, stupid, cold, ignorant. I want to just hug her and cry, but I'm scared the tears won't come. I'm scared she thinks I've been unscathed, even though I KNOW she knows I have been. I want to tell her I always loved Bill and that I suspected he loved me, and that he was the single most important person who reached out to me in my darkest moments at college, that he gave me the sort of bare, honest advice only someone who understands trauma and suicide could give me. But I just feel so foolish, my pain at his loss so dwarfed by her own.

 

[The Albatross]

It has been direct personal experience, with my own mother in law, and the loss of my father in law who I was very close to... that any attempt, however awkward is most usually graciously accepted.

I still do that for my mom every year, now my mother in law too because it "honors" to me their relationship. Don't know if this will make sense. But it does to me.

 

[Tinyflame]

Dear @Simply Simon , I'm sorry for you, & for Bill. :(

Not much helpful to say, except I can feel it from both sides. :(

I do think it is necessary (& very good, & brave) to 'say' it out loud. I do think he didn't know he was loved, though that's no one's fault.

Oddly, when it comes to suicidality, I've noticed (just for myself) the method in my thoughts, beyond trying to 'ensure' it would work (at those times), involves overcoming what I fear- almost a strange, misguided attempt to not only stop the pain & burdensomeness (of myself), but even in the chosen action face ('overcome'-?) that which I fear. For example, I fear both water & the moment of my death being entirely alone.

I don't think you have to fear for him now @SimplySimon, but I think he would truly feel very badly to think it's caused this pain.

Yes, I get the 'eggs'. I think tht's why it's so important to not ever think we know what's others have gone through or the depth of their pain & struggle.

I wish you great peace.

 

[The Albatross]

Find out what she's doing? Arrange a meal or a meal out? It will honor B, honor his mom, and bring you three together in grief over something very fundamental and life sustaining. Food.

I made a boatload of dry soups for my Mother in law to give out as expressions of gratitudes and we (my mister and I) chose to focus on our mothers and support them by being there... over our private ruminations about the deceased. Not trying to negate your recollections in any way... but you are clearly processing or attempting to reprocess that. It is healthy, natural... but awkward is better than nothing? Shift from the introversion toward or two the survivors and corporeal grief can be very healing.

 

[scout86]

Anyway, I have no idea how to even open my mouth around her sometimes

I can relate to that! But, I think @The Albatross is right, the attempt is what matters, both to her and to you. My T tells me "I wish you could avoid being distracted by worrying about what's 'right' and just learn to be ok being who you are." You too, maybe?

and that he was the single most important person who reached out to me in my darkest moments at college, that he gave me the sort of bare, honest advice only someone who understands trauma and suicide could give me.

That's a wonderful thought! I wonder it that's not something your MIL might like to hear?

 

[The Albatross]

P.S. I can relate to not knowing how to be, most all of the time... but I am finding ever increasingly... that people can and do appreciate genuineness rather than finesse.