Daily check-in helps me find hope after husband’s suicide

“Michael?”

I moved closer to my husband. He was on his stomach, his face a mottled purple. It was morning and I thought he might have passed out drunk the night before. Maybe he had alcohol poisoning.

“Michael.”

I shook him. Nothing.

Again. Still no movement.

His body was stiff, arms stretched overhead.

I checked his neck for a pulse and it felt warm, but I couldn’t detect a pulse. Still, his neck was turned toward his shoulder — maybe I just wasn’t feeling for it in the right place.

“Michael! Michael! MICHAEL!”

I pried his eyelids open and flinched. They were not Michael’s eyes. They were blue, yes, but fixed in the distance, like the glass eyes a taxidermist might use.

I clung to hope. There are all kinds of stories where a person turns out to have a low pulse. Perhaps he was in a coma.

I couldn’t remember the emergency number in Australia, where we’d moved five months earlier. Michael’s computer was open. Should I try to google it? No, I couldn’t concentrate enough. I ran down the hall, banging on apartment doors until I found a neighbor home. “Triple zero,” she told me, and came to help.

I dialed the number and a woman told me over the phone how to resuscitate Michael. I tried, to no avail. When the ambulance showed up, the EMTs pronounced him dead. It must have happened four or five hours earlier, they said, judging from the rigor mortis.

What? I couldn’t grasp what had happened. How could Michael do this? We were supposed to pick up patio furniture from the hardware store that afternoon. I couldn’t carry it myself. He would have to come back. I needed him.

The night before we’d fought. I asked him to sleep on the sofa-bed because he’d been snoring a lot. He had a cold and didn’t want to sleep there, but I was unsympathetic. I was always the one who slept on the couch, and I didn’t find it so comfortable either.

I was tired and ready to go to bed, and he wanted to stay up late working. Since the light from the dining room, which was also his office, shone over the living room, it seemed only fair that he should sleep on the couch this time. But when I asked, he’d been drinking and his glassy eyes looked defiant. We exchanged a few words and then he told me to go to bed.

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“GO to BED,” he demanded. I complied, thinking it was the alcohol talking. I’d let him sleep it off.

Suicide? Or accidental overdose?

The cause of Michael’s death was not clear to me for more than a year. I wasn’t sure if it was an accidental overdose or suicide. He’d drunk about three-quarters of a bottle of Jägermeister, judging from the bottle I found later.

A bottle of the sleep medication Ambien also stood on his desk, empty except for two tablets. If he’d wanted to kill himself, wouldn’t he have taken all of them? Maybe he just got drunk, forgot he’d already taken a sleeping pill, and then took an extra one or two tablets.

I didn’t believe he’d killed himself. He had once tried to, 15 years earlier, before I knew him. The attempt had hurt his parents so badly that he’d promised never to try again. He had gotten help then, in his native Denmark, and again in the U.S. when the black moods showed up during our marriage. Anti-depressants and therapy helped him immensely.

In the weeks before his death, he’d seemed a little down, but nothing severe. We had moved to Sydney from the U.S. after applying for residency status. Michael and I had met in Hong Kong in 2001 and then moved to New Jersey for six years. We’d worked hard to get residency permits for Australia, where we both wanted to have a new adventure.

I spent lots of time and energy wishing and halfway believing that this was a cosmic mistake, that the laws of nature would make an exception for me. Just this once, I’d ask the universe, let him come back.

After we finally made it to Australia in November 2009, we spent the first few months living in a sublet, looking for a more permanent apartment to rent. We had to get driver’s licenses, sign up for the national health insurance program and attend to all the other administrative matters that go with moving to a new country.

When the activity subsided, Michael seemed let down. “Now what?” he’d asked me a few weeks before he died. I reminded him that we still had a whole continent to explore and friends to meet. He wasn’t seeing a therapist, and it had been on my to-do list to help him find someone. But the situation didn’t seem urgent.

For all of these reasons, I convinced myself that he must have overdosed accidentally. Michael was very close to his parents. I couldn’t believe he’d break his promise. Besides, there was no note.

My darkest days

In the coming weeks, my shock would eventually give way to anguish. When the tears finally came, they came hard. I cried deep, sobbing wails from a place saturated in pain. I drank the rest of the Jägermeister and lay on the ground where I’d found Michael, hoping that his spirit would come back to me or I’d understand what he’d felt the night of his death. I thrashed my limbs and yelled until my voice was hoarse. “Please come back to me. Please, please, please Michael, please!”

The pain was unrelenting. Alcohol didn’t numb it; in fact, it made me sadder. The only relief I got was watching movies. Every night I’d watch two or three films — the darker the better. Seeing the suffering of other people made me feel less alone.

That first year, I spent lots of time and energy wishing and halfway believing that this was a cosmic mistake, that the laws of nature would make an exception for me. Just this once, I’d ask the universe, let him come back. At least give me five minutes to say goodbye.

I was slipping into despair. I had no identity. I hadn’t gotten a job before Michael died, and I knew I couldn’t take on a stressful new position while grieving. A few close friends did whatever they could to support me, but I’d lost my sense of who I was. I was a stranger in a new land, with no job, no connection, and the anchor of my existence — Michael — was gone. I was adrift.

I began to doubt I had any purpose in being alive.

Michael hadn’t had life insurance, but he’d had a few bank accounts. I was spending that money being unemployed and grieving. Wouldn’t the world be better off if I left that money to his parents and mine, whose funds were stretched bare in retirement?

I knew my family would be sad if I killed myself, but it wouldn’t be like the pain I felt in losing my life partner. My parents were both still alive and had each other. My sister had her husband, four children and a successful career. I hadn’t lived in the same state as my family for decades, and for many years I hadn’t been in the same country. They weren’t used to seeing me or even talking to me that often.

I sat in my living room, buzzed on chardonnay, and contemplated what it would take. Logistically, how would I do it? The choices seemed gruesome. And did I really never want to wake up? When I thought about it, the room dimmed. It was the darkest, loneliest feeling I’ve ever experienced. Worse than the despair I was already feeling over my husband’s death.

Ultimately, that’s what saved me. It was too scary to sit with those thoughts for long enough to carry out a plan to kill myself.

I’d walk to the bus stop beneath Sydney’s cheer-up-mate sunshine, and every once in a while, the rays penetrated my clouds.

I recommitted myself to getting better. I already had one fantastic therapist and got another one through a university program that was researching depression. In weekly appointments, they helped me process my grief and tackle my sense of worthlessness.

I’d walk from the bus stop to my appointments beneath Sydney’s Tempera-paint blue skies and cheer-up-mate sunshine, and every once in a while, the rays actually penetrated my clouds.

I went to a widow’s group and a suicide survivors’ meeting — still unsure whether Michael’s death even was a suicide. From those, I got a sense that I wasn’t alone. And I met my dear friend Lisa Holland, whose husband had killed himself six weeks after Michael’s death. Together, we walked through those dark days. Her naturally positive attitude helped buoy me.

Cause of death confirmed

Thirteen months after Michael died, I finally got the coroner’s report. It said there were many different medications in his system, but the cause of death was Ambien. They didn’t call it suicide, and they wouldn’t give me an estimate of how many pills he’d taken. They just gave me a blood level. With the help of a retired pathologist I met at a suicide survivors’ group, I discovered he’d probably taken 100 pills. This was no accidental overdose.

The scab ripped off, I went through a whole new round of grieving. I’d spent all those months asking Michael to come back to me, but he didn’t want to come back. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be with me.

I moved to Austin to be with my sister. We are only 11 months apart in age and have been close friends ever since we were teens. My grief followed me, though. I still didn’t know how to live with what had happened. How could I make sense of it?

Guilt is the poison sprayed by suicide as it lifts its tail on the way out the door.

Some people deal with their feelings by being angry with their loved one for committing suicide. I tried that on for a week, but it didn’t fit. I loved Michael. I didn’t want to be mad at him.

My own experience of contemplating suicide gave me empathy for him. I’ve heard the idea that suicide is the most selfish thing a person can do. But that’s too facile. When someone is in that much emotional pain, they aren’t thinking straight. Many of them think they’re doing the world a favor.

I think Michael would not have swallowed the Ambien if he hadn’t been drinking. He was down, yes, but the alcohol made him reckless. My counselors told me that’s a fairly common situation. It’s no secret that alcohol lowers your inhibitions and clouds your judgment.

If I couldn’t blame Michael for killing himself, I figured the only way to make sense of things was to blame myself. I’d read some of Michael’s journals in which he’d written about my shortcomings. If only I’d been more supportive, he wouldn’t have done this. We’d fought right before his death. How much more evidence did I need?

Guilt is the poison sprayed by suicide as it lifts its tail on the way out the door. It took over my attempts to find reason. With the narrative that I was at fault, I could at least do something — try to be a better person, so I didn’t inspire people to kill themselves.

I spoke to a counselor about it and told her I didn’t know how else to make sense of this experience. Who could I blame, if not him and not myself? “Couldn’t you just blame the disease?” she asked.

It seems so obvious now, but I’d never thought of it that way. Yes, depression was to blame. And I could do something about that. It could be my cause (and that’s part of why I started this website).

Getting back to ‘normal’

The biggest thing that helped me get back to some semblance of normality was getting a full-time job. Rising in the morning, going to an office, making friends, being productive and earning a living all helped to lighten the intense pain I’d felt.

The darkness would still nevertheless descend occasionally. I saw more therapists in Austin. The practice that’s helped me the most is an exercise one of them gave me in the form of an email template that contains questions for reflection. I fill it out, email it to myself, then open it the next day and copy/paste/edit it in a new email. (Download the email template here.)

Most days I have hope — that feeling that eluded me during my darkest hours — which I nourish every day.

The template asks me to list five things I’m grateful for. Many days I have double that. The sun is shining. I have meaningful work. I made a friend. I went for a great run. My dad is healthy, and he’s one of the most interesting people I know. My lists are full.

There are other questions on the template that help, too. What do I get to pat myself on the back for in the past 24 hours? What would I Iike to do better? What words of wisdom am I reminded of? Here, if I’m down, I often repeat mantras like, “This too shall pass.” Or, “You’re right where you need to be right now.”

Another item on the template asks what I’m thinking now. For this, I often turn to journaling, which these days involves speaking my thoughts into the Notes app on my phone. I almost always end up with my thoughts more organized, which sometimes leads to insights or problem-solving. If nothing else, it is cathartic.

There’s lots more I’ve found that helps. I know that physical exercise is vital to my mental health, and I run outdoors whenever the weather permits. I do strength training at the gym and dance classes that have revived my sense of joy.

Connection with other people is also extremely important to my everyday health. I work from home, so I have to make an effort some days to get out and be with people. Luckily, I now live within five minutes of both my sister and dad, so I can see them almost whenever I want.

I also need to have something to look forward to. For years, travel has been that thing. I love planning a trip almost more than I like taking it because I get to anticipate it for months. But it’s also important to have smaller things to look forward to, so I try to keep my schedule full. Meetings with friends, dinners out, a play or concert, a hike, a race to train for. My latest ambition is a triathlon.

I can’t meditate for any real length of time, but I occasionally do a three-minute guided meditation using an app called Aura. That and deep breathing work wonders when I’m anxious.

All of these things are vital to my mental health, so I make them a priority. Time has healed the deep, acute pain I felt. I’ve since had other romantic relationships that have also helped me build new memories so that my identity isn’t so tied up in being a widow.

Not that I’ll ever forget Michael. He’s still the love of my life. I’ll never “get over” his death. It’s not a broken arm that heals straight. Michael’s suicide changed who I am.

His death and my recovery from it helped me build my resiliency muscle, which has helped me to get through other downturns in life. I’m stronger now, more durable. I’ve built skills that will help me over the inevitable bumps that lie ahead. And most days I have hope — that feeling that eluded me during my darkest hours — which I nourish every day.