Dear Diary: The Day My Life Changed Forever. Behind The Door

October 2019

***TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE***

On the 4th October 2019 I came home from work to find my husband had taken his own life. I walked in to find his lifeless body on the sofa, head back from where the drugs had taken over and stopped his heart. We can all ask ourselves and each other "how do you get through that?". Well, I have no idea. I knew I needed to put the dogs in the kitchen. I knew I had to ring 999, I knew I had to check his body and see if I could save him... I knew I couldn't. I knew before I got home he was dead. I don't know why and I can't explain it but the thought entered my head and I couldn't shake it off... Before I entered the house I looked through the window... Computer on, music playing, dogs sleeping... Kurt motionless... Something wasn't right.... But I was.

I pulled his 110kg dead body off the sofa and started performing CPR. The first few compressions allowed him to exhale the rattle breath. It's not the first time I've heard it. I was once with an elderly lady while she passed away and at the time I was more sad that this lady had a stranger for company. At least Kurt had the dogs, his best friends, next to him. Whether he wanted to be alone will never be known but I'm going to go with it being his choice and what he wanted. To have the silence to be free to make his choice. Free to be free. When the rattle came I stopped and wondered for a quick moment if I had got it all wrong and he was in fact still alive... This moment vanished as quickly as it came and everything came back into focus. The smell, the look, the scene.... I was witnessing the last breath and I knew it. I kept going with CPR... The emergency operator was on the phone talking me through and guiding me through something I knew like the back of my hand... I knew what to do. I pumped hard. I cried, I shouted, I thought... My mind raced with the thoughts...

Flo needs collecting from school, I need a wee, Kurt is dead, this smell is horrendous, what has happened?, when did this happen?, my life has changed, this weekend is our first wedding anniversary and then relief...

This is really where my story begins. With relief. When I first met Kurt he embodied everything I ever wanted in a partner. He was my best friend. We laughed and acted like a drug to each other. The passion for each other was so consuming. I was genuinely happy. Completely and utterly in love. I had never imagined I would find a love like it and have that feeling. It was so pure, so real, so... utterly madly in love. What I did not know when I first met Kurt was that he had his demons. At the time meeting me kind of pushed those demons to one side and he was able to feel the same as me and he was genuinely in love and I know he loved me with his whole entire heart. The reality of this is that Kurt's heart wasn't the same as mine, or other peoples and I was not aware of this. His smile would light up a room. His warmth and stature would make me feel safe and comforted and I felt like I could just sit next to him and always feel like I was home. He was so funny and we would laugh for hours. He taught me so much about myself and at times I felt like he knew me better than I knew myself. He was intelligent and everyone that had the pleasure of meeting him loved him. He was my perfect man. Until the arguments started. Until I would come to him with an issue or a problem and expect to have a rational, logical conversation and be met with a completely irrational response. At first, with the way the arguments went, I felt like maybe what I was saying was wrong and his response was normal but over the course of 4 years, and the same pattern in every single argument and every single discussion, bit by bit my soul was destroyed.

I no longer knew who I was. I didn't know what my identity was and I lived in the shadow of someone else's ideology of me. I was scared to bring up a subject or ask anything. That would cause more arguments because I was then accused of not caring about his feelings and hiding things from him but the reality was it didn't matter what I said, how I said it, and on what subject, I was always met with an irrational response. To give a very small example of something that personally to me has little impact on my life but ended up being a constant in my life... ... I would message Kurt while he was at work and suggest something for dinner to which he would agree. Between the time of me sending that message and dinner coming around (6 hours) something may have changed, or I had realised there was other food to be eaten so I would change the dinner plans on the basis something else took priority. I would tell him the next time I spoke to him and he would either: Refuse to eat it, argue that I never thought about anyone else other than myself, buy something else on the way home in protest, or sit there and eat it but make a point of not liking it and commenting that he would have much preferred the first option.

When you live with someone who responds to everything you do in the manner he did, you don't realise what you're living is wrong. It happens so slowly and in such a manner you start to believe that it is in fact you that has the issue. I thought I was in the wrong all the time. I would swallow my pride on a daily basis and apologise after an argument just so it didn't continue for 3 days. I am a strong person and sometimes I wouldn't but sometimes I would just for my own sanity and strength to get through every day. I was constantly exhausted. My life around me was chaotic. My friends didn't recognise me. My family didn't hear from me and I began to withdraw from life. I still loved my husband but I loved the man I had met, not the man I had married. I will address the reasons for my feelings and my journey to the day he died in another post but when I found him dead I felt relief. Relief that I was free. Relief that he was free. Relief that my nightmare was finally over. I haven't changed from that emotion. I still feel relief and I expect I always will.

Suicide has many complications but most of the time someone doesn't just out of the blue kill themselves. It may come as a shock to friends and family that don't live with the person everyday and I like that. I like that they can remember all the good times and they can grieve for the amazing person that he was. I'm glad that the good memories of him can be kept alive through them because he really was amazing. Unfortunately those memories don't live through me because of the damage that was caused along the way.