Guilt

I have been thinking quite a bit about my life lately. I have figured one thing out. Besides post traumatic stress and blah blah blah that I suffer from – I have one enormous problem – guilt.

Guilt is what keeps me up at night and haunts my dreams when I finally fall asleep. Guilt is what makes me stop moments after I start singing along to a song. Guilt is what makes me weep at any given moment in the day and guilt is the driving force to my constant misery.

Do I think I drove my husband to suicide? No. But I certainly feel like I was in the passenger seat.

Now I could go to a million therapists and talk to my family and friends and they will all tell me the same thing. My husband made his own decision that awful day. It was his choice, not mine – I have nothing to feel guilty about. You can all tell me this till you are blue in the face. The fact remains that only one person can alleviate this guilt from me and he is dead.

I have gone over the last few years in my head, the last few months and even the last few minutes I had with my husband. There were things he said to me, that in light of his death, now make me wonder. What if he had never met me, or if we had never made certain decisions together, would he still be alive? What if the financial pressures of having a second family or me leaving the restaurant to raise our children or buying our house was too much for him - this is partly my fault.

I wish I could talk to him for just five minutes. Ask him a few questions that agonizes my soul. Maybe I am just looking for an easy way out. Maybe I am just scared to look even deeper into my heart and see that part of his death is my fault.

There are reasons he killed himself that are unknown to me - but the reasons I know or suspect – these are the thoughts that haunt me daily.

I cannot move forward with my life feeling this way. I cannot escape the blame and guilt I feel and have felt for over seven months. It is sad, but true.

I have lived through a million emotions over the course of his suicide. I have dealt with the shock and anger the sadness and despair and even more anger. Some how time and raising my two children have either washed these emotions away or they just got pushed out of my head for lack of time to truly deal with them. But the guilt is not going anywhere any time soon. It has been with me since day one and I feel will be with me forever.

Do I just have to learn to live feeling awful and guilty? Do I eventually just learn to accept feeling guilty and move on? It feels wrong to ignore the guilt and even worse to keep it in my pocket everyday. I feel like these guilty feelings will forever taint my outlook on life and just keep me face to the ground, unable to look upward with any kind of hope for a happy future. This is a terrible way to feel and I don't want to be like this. But I feel guilty, feel terrible and responsible and wish I could somehow make me not feel this way.

But for now I must take sleeping pills to keep the demons away, visit the cemetery once a week and cry whenever the tears come – the guilt has left me no other choice.