When my husband ended his life in 2007, he ended mine, too. We had been married for 33 years, and our lives were completely wrapped up in each other and our two daughters. On his death, I went into a place I had never imagined existed, a limbo world where I was separated from everything I had ever known, alien even to myself. People around me still saw my body but had no clue about where my spirit really lived back then, let alone the kind of pain that accompanied me there.
He was my hero. I was sure I would never be able to connect with the world again, even with the physical world around me, because he was not beside me. Such loss was unfathomable. Everything—from the tiniest moments of homecoming at the end of the day to the future I thought would always be there—had changed.
I did not understand when other survivors of suicide, fellow members of the Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors, wrote posts of hope on the forum. I wondered if they were lying just to make me feel better. In my weakest moments, I begrudged their seeming return to life and to normalcy. How did they do it?
My brain understood that Ron was gone from the earthly life we had shared together, but my heart took far longer to even begin to catch up. As the months turned into years, I began to cobble together moments of peace and comfort. Now, when I look back, I see progress. Now I know what others meant about finding joy in life again, and happiness in memories.
I still have my loss, but the painful emotions and confusion have, for the most part, dropped away, blurred out by the existence of love—both then and now—that my family and I share … and by the uncanny ability of life to find a way through even the most difficult of circumstances.
While every loss is unique, it’s important for survivors to know they can gather strength from each other, no matter the type of loss they suffered. This means so much to me. Without the one I always turned to in every other kind of pain, the life-mate who vowed to stand beside me forsaking all others, the support of other survivors helped me restructure my life as one person instead of one person in a union of two.
