Day One

It’s the first day of my fourth blog.

I started the first one when he was trying to lose hundreds of pounds, and I was trying to help him.  I kept that blog for years, through a lot of weight loss, through my mother’s death, through Michael getting sick, and all the way until he’d gained the weight back.  And then it seemed pointless.

I started the second one as someplace to write things that I was thinking about.  But it didn’t have much of a purpose, and so it didn’t really get written in.

I started the third one when things were worst last fall, because I had a notion of how to make things in my head a little brighter… thinking of living each day with an intent to find joy.  I called it A Thousand Weeks, a take on something an ancient Greek said about a man’s life consisting of a thousand months.  And I wrote… not a lot, but I tried to write well.  I wrote about my life and trying to get through it.  I wrote about someone I once loved, and how his ghost still haunted me.  I wrote about some life mistakes I made.  I wrote about unhappiness, and about wondering if I could ever bear to live with anyone ever again.  And on the last day of his life, my husband decided to try to discover corners that he’d never been interested in before, and he read it.  And on that day, he chose to complete his long-standing plan to kill himself.

That was two weeks ago.

I can’t bear to look at that blog again.  I doubt that it had any impact on the mind of someone who was already ill and fixed in ideas that I could not change, but it breaks my heart to think of him reading words in no way intended for him, words without context, words that were all about trying to release some of the pain in my heart and let me get through another day.  I don’t blame him for killing himself.  Every day was pain and torture and fear for him, and he could not seem to do anything to change the momentum, the waves that started to overwhelm him.  He was drowning, and I could not help him.  I could barely stay above water myself.  But I loved him, I will always love him, and that I contributed in any direct way to that pain is unbearable to think about.

So I have to figure out how to start over.

I don’t have any idea.  This has been twelve years in the making, six years together long-distance, nearly six years married.  Twelve years of love.  And of stress and illness and dysfunction and fear.  And more love and compassion and caring.  And anger and so many other things.  I don’t even know where to start telling the story.  I don’t know what to do next, how to stop feeling miserable and ill all the time.  I don’t know how to put the pieces back together.  I know it’s only been two weeks, but every day seems more painful, harder to get up, harder to move at all.