A year ago today, my ex wife killed herself. At the time, we had been divorced for five or six years and I had custody of our three kids, so aside from the shock, there was little practical impact on our daily life – just a lot of mental goings on. Although I had a lot of conflicting feelings, grief was not one of them. I had grieved the loss of our relationship long before, and after a fairly bitter divorce that almost bankrupted me there was certainly no love lost. Most of what I felt was anger. Anger that she had basically taken the easy way out, rather than actually deal with her problems… Anger that she had left owing me thousands in unpaid medical bills and now without child support… But mostly, anger that she had abandoned our children – again, and forever – leaving them irrevocably scarred, for life.
In the year since then, much as I have tried to put that event behind me and move on, there has always been something there to bring it all back home. I spent the first month or so after her death phoning round all of our friends, then phoning round all of the friends that were once our friends but became just her friends after the divorce, and finally contacting all of her friends that I was never really close with, but who I thought would want to know. But even after I thought I had managed to track down everyone – including people I hadn’t heard from in several years – someone else would contact me out of the blue, saying that they had just “heard the news”, and could I tell them what had happened. With each of them, I took the time to tell them what I knew, what facts I had, and what I thought had happened. Every one of them was shocked and upset, but with each time I gave my explanation, I found it was a little easier to do, and the more I was able to detach from what had happened.
Then as the year progressed, it was more a case of shepherding the kids through a seemingly never-ending set of milestones. There was the first Mother’s Day since she died, the first Thanksgiving…Christmas…New Year. Her birthday. Our eldest graduating High School. All the way to today, the first anniversary of her death.
And this latter one has been surprisingly difficult for me. Quite possibly it is a consequence of the temporal distance, but a lot of the anger I had felt during that first year has dissipated. That’s not to say I have forgotten how utterly miserable the final years of our marriage had been, or how difficult she had made our divorce, but I find I am not holding on to those feelings quite so much. Instead, I have been thinking back to how she was before all the craziness. How she was when we first met, how she was during the early years of our marriage, when we were truly in love. It has been a long time since I had those feelings for her, and I haven’t exactly started feeling them again, but now I do at least remember having those feelings. And I remember the woman who inspired them. I remember what a vivacious, funny, strong person she was, and how she endeared herself to so many people over so many years. And as I remember how she was then, I am truly saddened to think of how that woman could succumb to such depths that she felt the only way out was to take her own life. That she felt that nothing – nothing – in her life, not her children, not her new husband (she remarried six months before her death), not the many friends who loved her, was enough to keep her in this world. It depresses me to think that a life could be so hard.
There’s no moral here. No punchline. No lesson learned. Just the (first) anniversary of a life lost, and an unwillingness to let this go by unacknowledged.
(And if you knew her, and this is the first you’ve heard of it, contact me and I’ll tell you what I know.)
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