Waiting

Father’s Day is fast approaching and there is not one single thing I can do about it. This is painful and annoying.

I am taking the children away for the weekend to spend with family. It doesn’t matter. I could take them to the North Pole and it wouldn’t be far enough. I am running away from the neighborhood but no matter where we go – I am still me, the children are the same and there will still be no daddy.

This might be the worst day of the year for us forever. Any other day or any other holiday I can distract the children with something, anything. I can give them presents or cake and hope they will forget, for the moment, that you are dead.

But Father’s Day – there is nothing I can do or say. This is the one day that is all about you – their father – there is no way to get around you being dead this year. Cake is just not going to save me this time – not even a little. This may be the first Father’s Day we have to get through – but this holiday comes every year. I don’t think we will be able to run away every year. Though it sounds appealing. Part of me wants to face the day head on and just deal with the tears and anger or whatever emotions come our way. Another part of me wants to just cry and hide and pretend like this is not happening.

I had therapy on Wednesday and it was maybe the best meeting I have ever had. It was a small group. Although originally I was nervous and worried that with so few people there was no way to hide. In the end, this intimate setting with people who know my story was truly helpful. It reminded me that I need to be in therapy no matter how many good days I have. It reminded me that the rest of the world just doesn’t get me or my pain. Simply the very idea of walking into a room and not having to explain so much of what I go through everyday – is so very helpful all on its own. The way I see it, the rest of the world should stop trying to solve every one of my problems. Instead they should all just count their blessings that they have no idea what it truly feels like to be me.

Over the course of eight months several people I would call acquaintances have confided some of their most painful and awful secrets to me. Maybe they feel like because they know the worst skeleton in my closet they feel more comfortable confiding in me. I don’t know. It humbles me when people choose to share such intimate details with me and I listen and let them talk. Maybe they don’t have many people to share with. Maybe they feel bad for me and want me to know I am not alone in feeling pain in this life.

Yesterday a woman I know sat down beside me in the park and while our children played she told me her suicide story. Her father killed himself when she was 21. We talked about all the guilt and the pain you feel and it was terrible to hear and yet comforting. She is now happily married to a great man and is a wonderful mother. It gave me hope for my children. I asked about her mother and how she dealt with it. Her mom didn’t go to therapy, never remarried and never got over the guilt. Unfortunately, I understood everything her mother went through.

The thing about dealing with death by suicide is that it is just not like any other death. Everyone tells me stories about woman who lost their husbands at a young age, with small children and then they remarried and still had wonderful lives. How did their husband’s die? I will ask. If the reason isn’t suicide I am no longer interested in the rest of the story. Death by natural causes or some terrible accident is of course tragic – but it is not the same to me. I can’t explain it. You just have to be me to understand what I must deal with day after day after awful day; the guilt and sorrow and questions without answers and sadness. Not every death is the same is the same to me anymore.

I have been trying very hard not to think about you this week. I have been trying very hard to focus on my children and myself and deal with my own madness. I have moments where I will laugh and smile and think I am going to someday be O.K. Then I have moments, like today, sitting in the park under a tree looking into the blue sky and my heart is aching for you. I miss you and I hate you and I love you and I am angry and I am sad and I feel terrible awful guilt and I miss you and hate you and love you some more and possibly only thirty seconds went by. This is how I feel most of the time.

So I am waiting for the worst day ever to arrive with anxious stressful anticipation. How will I feel when my children look at me on the day everyone is spending with their daddy and you are dead? How will I feel when they look at me with longing and sad eyes and I have to make them feel better when there is no possible way?

Maybe next year we will go to the cemetery on Father’s Day. Maybe instead of running away we will visit you, but I will definitely bring a huge chocolate cake. Just in case.

Complaining

Anything out of my mouth tonight will just be complaining. It has been a rotten day and my husband is dead so I have no one to complain to. Therefore I am forced to write a blog to hopefully feel better. Good luck to me.

The day started with my cell phone ringing at work and some person looking for my dead husband. Really – what is wrong with everyone? Eight months later and you still call for him – did you not get my million phone calls? Do you not read my blog? WTF!

Then the calls just kept coming. Each and every one of them contained different bad news. My children’s Hebrew school burnt down. The amazing family, who has taken my kids under their wings, protected them, who was the Rabbi at my husband’s funeral are all condemned out of their house and with nothing. I am devastated for them and their children. I am only thankful that no one got hurt.

I cried after I heard the news – it is not fair. The horrible things that happened to wonderful people.

Forgot all the other phone calls – I am just pushing it all away. I can only deal with one crisis at a time – everyone else who has it in for me can take a number.

Then I got home and opened the mail. Still most of it has my dead husband’s name on it – just great. Then there was a letter from school. My daughter got into the kindergarten program I was praying for. I was so excited and picked up my phone and didn’t know what to do. All I wanted was to call and tell you this amazing and exciting news. All I wanted was to share this moment with her daddy – but you are freaking dead – so I couldn’t.

Instead I sent a text to my family and friends and tried not to think about you.

Then the second half of an already crazy day begins as the children are home from school. Your precious daughter – your sweet lovable daughter is an absolute nightmare – no doubt about it. She pushes me to the brink of insanity day after day after day.

After hours of crying and screaming and teasing her brother - I finally took her dinner away, put her into bed fully dressed and told her to cry and scream I wasn’t going back in and go to sleep.

She cried, she screamed, she howled forever. Then she started crying for you. I want my daddy! I want my daddy! Over and over and over until I was sobbing beyond belief as I sat outside her door – feeling horrible, helpless and so very very alone. I did go back. I know I should not have - but I did. I held her in my arms and let her cry for you till she passed out. All I kept thinking is that is should have been you comforting her – not me!

I know I should not complain. This life I lead is not as horrible as some – and yet all I want to do today is cry and scream – just like my four year old. It was not one bad thing that occurred today - it was just a lot of little things that grate on my already on the edge existence. My emotions are wrapped in shards of glass and they scrape and hurt me if one single thing goes totally off kilter.

I am a mess today and it is not even your fault – not really.

I think I may have to go visit you this week. I just need some alone time and miss throwing rocks at you. At the very least I can show you the letter our daughter got – maybe it will make me feel better.

Eight Months

Nothing amazing has happened this week. Nothing terrible, nothing wonderful. Just life. Yet everyday this week I thought about Saturday. How tomorrow marks eight months that you are dead and gone. It seems impossible once again that I have spent this much time apart from you.

This has been a tough week, though there have been worse. It is just difficult navigating through the week with two children who lead busy lives. My life is no more difficult than most people I know. Many of my friends have husbands who work odd hours or late nights – so I am not alone in my mom does it all life.

But then I will get home after a very busy day, and get dinner, homework and the bathing done. I will tuck the kids into bed and then walk out of their room and sigh. It is just me – all alone. Sometimes friends call me at night to just talk. It used to be to make sure I wasn’t going insane – now the routine is to probably keep in touch with my daily goings on and to keep me from feeling not so alone. Some nights no one calls. Then I will sit outside and stare into the night sky wondering where you are.

This week I missed you but during random times. I missed you when I couldn’t get the window to close. I missed you when I needed help with the kids. I missed you when our son wrote me a letter saying I am the meanest mom in the entire world and I didn’t know what to do. I miss you the most when it comes to dealing with the children.

There are times when raising the two of them seems like an impossible task. That I am doing a truly horrible job and only yell and scream at them. I miss you being here to intervene for all of us. Even if you always got to be the good guy – I miss your presence and your ability to calm me down and talk some sense into me. I miss that you aren’t here at all.

I wonder sometimes if you are truly watching me from heaven and if you are shaking your head at some of the stuff going on. I wonder if you feel bad for me or think I deserve all this insanity.

I am sorry that I said I hate you last weekend. I don’t hate you at all. In fact, I miss you terribly and still love you very much – despite the awful terrible thing you have done to my life.

I yelled at a woman the other day in Costco. I was changing the address and asked her to take your name off the account. Well she said, that name is the primary account holder. I looked at her and said, well he is dead! I totally shocked her and she looked down and mumbled sorry and took your name off right away. I wondered later if I sounded callous. If my just announcing that you are dead without tears sounded terrible to a stranger.

After eight months it still just feels like something I say – not something I feel or believe. Maybe I find it easy to say you are dead because it still feels like something that just did not happen to me.

But it did. Tomorrow will be another busy crazy filled with lots of drama and stuff day. It will be eight months that you are dead and that will be my day.

Different

Something is different and I don’t know what it is. I don’t feel anger or sadness today. I don’t feel numb. I don’t know what I feel. It is not acceptance, as I don’t think I will ever accept what you did. It is just that I woke up this morning used to my life.

I have come to terms that it is just me getting everyone ready for school and me off to work. I am used to the fact that it is just me for the rest of the day. I spent the weekend running around with the kids making sure they had fun and I was used to the realization that it was just me.

I miss you but I can’t go on this way anymore. I can’t lie in bed at night saying your name over and over, hoping somehow it will trigger a dream that you will be in. I can’t sit in the cemetery week after week looking for ghosts.

Maybe because I have read over my last two blogs and I dislike what I read. I don’t want to be filled with guilt and hate. These are not qualities I find appealing or productive. I don’t think my heart will ever recover from losing you – but my head is yelling at me to stop the torture.

I have two beautiful children to worry about. A wonderful family and a million friends who care for me. I need to focus on the good in my life and not the misery and suffering I have been feeling. I don’t know how to do this exactly, but I am trying to push away the bad thoughts. Label them in my mind, put them in a box and just try not to remember where they are stored.

Nothing good can come from me reliving your death every day. Nothing good can come from asking myself “what if” over and over. I have to look at the right now and realize that despite my loss, I have a lot to be thankful for.

I took the kids strawberry picking this weekend. Of course I got lost. As we were driving around, who knows where, the kids asked me when we would get there. I said I don’t know I am lost. My son asked me why I was lost. I looked in the rear view mirror and said, because daddy always did the driving and now it is just me and I am trying just to find our way. The kids actually laughed at my ineptness. Then I laughed too.

Maybe this is just the rest of our lives – me driving the kids through life trying to find the right road and hoping at some point we do get there.

I am used to the children saying things like, too bad daddy is dead he loved strawberries or too bad daddy is dead he would have liked my pretty dress. These comments hurt my heart, but not as much as they once did. Maybe I am jaded or maybe I am just accepting that we are always going to talk about you – it is simply going to be in the past tense from now on.

I still want to take my kids to therapy. I think that they need to meet other children just like them. I still think they are scarred in some awful way and only hope that someday we can open out hearts again and embrace the love we lost.

I will still go to therapy as I don’t think I am anywhere near being healed. I am still going to cry, but maybe not everyday. I will still frequent the cemetery, but maybe not every week. I will still miss you everyday, but maybe without anger, guilt or hate. Quite possibly the gaping hole that was once my heart is starting to scab a bit. Or quite possibly I don’t want to walk around anymore with my insides oozing for all to see.

I am not sure why I feel the way I do today. Why I feel like something is different. Maybe tomorrow will be a terrible day and I will be back here agonizing over something trivial. Then again maybe I won’t.

Hate

Three separate times this week all three of your children spoke the same words. “It is not fair that you are dead.”

How – how do I possibly work around this impossible situation you dumped in my lap and your ex-wife? How do either of us figure out how to save our children from the selfish stupid idiotic really upsetting and terrible thing you have done to your children?

I am so angry with you right now I want to scream. I want to run to the cemetery and chuck your stone as far as I can throw it. I want to see you so I can yell at you face to face. I am livid. Mostly because I feel helpless and so sad and frustrated. Forget about me – I am done feeling sorry for me. But your children are going to feel your absence forever – and this is just one minute too long.

You had three children who only worshipped the ground you walked on on. Who lived for your smile, love, hugs and kisses - and you killed yourself. How dare you do such a thing to them! How dare you ruin such perfect innocent children!

How could you taint their little hearts with a sadness most people never know? How could you - you selfish jerk.

Yesterday I started a blog, (but didn’t finish) about how much I was going to miss you this weekend. How this long weekend was so family oriented and how I remember last year so well and how much fun we had.

F*ck that blog.

I don’t care anymore about how great last year was. I hate you and hate what you did to us. Hate with a passion coursing through my veins so strong right now about what you did to my children and my step–son. It is awful how bad I feel right now that I am typing and crying and punching down the keys so hard to get these words out that I am bound to break them.

It doesn’t matter that kids are resilient and it doesn’t matter that time will help them heal. Your eldest son is old enough to feel the pain that I feel. To truly understand what you did. To feel the sorrow and maybe the guilt and have all the unanswered questions we adults must live with. At nineteen he should be looking forward to a wonderful life ahead of him – but now he is devastated by your loss and I am reeling with hate.

Your younger children are too young to understand anything but your absence. This is enough terribleness for such small ones. Someday they will know the truth of your actions. I only hope the anger inside me has subsided before I must face that moment. Becasue I don't want them to remember you with anger - only love.

Your children will never have a father for the rest of their lives. How did you think they would be better off? How could you walk away from them? I just don’t know. It almost doesn’t matter why anymore. The fact is that you did it – you killed yourself and the rest isn’t your problem any more. Thanks so much.

Nothing you deemed bad in your life was worth this. Not one single problem you had was worth leaving three wonderful children without a father – forever.

Today I hate you - I really do.

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.

Couples

Yesterday I was fine. I spent maybe five minutes at home. The rest of the time I was outside enjoying the beautiful day with my children and friends. I knew it was Saturday and I just ignored it. Today I can’t stop crying.

I don’t know what is wrong with me today. I just can’t shake the tears or the sadness. Today I miss you so much it hurts. I miss everything I lost when you died – I miss you so very very much.

Friday I went to the cemetery and it did not help. Maybe it is the presence of your stone. I used to be able to go and pretend I was somewhere else. Outside alone in nature and I could talk to you and it was peaceful. I can’t ignore what is right in front of me any longer. The headstone with your name shouting out to me makes ignoring your death impossible. It is hard to sit there now and talk to you like I once did. It is hard not to see the photo your children left or the little stones they placed everywhere. Everything is different now.

I didn’t stay long on Friday. I didn’t cry and didn’t even talk to you. I just stared at the stone waiting for the tears and waiting for the release of the tension and anxiety that comes after the sobbing. Nothing happened and I left feeling unsettled even more. Maybe this means I go too often. Maybe this means I am never going to find you. After seven and half months I have still not found a trace of you anywhere.

All weekend I have watched couples, well stared at them, while remembering you. Looking at them and trying to figure out where we went wrong. Looking at them and wising you were by my side. Every time a husband took his wife’s hand or put an arm around her shoulder I felt awful, empty and sad. I couldn’t get the feeling to go away.

Today I was at a birthday party and I was miserable. Miserable for being miserable and for always being the sad girl. Tired of people looking at me and thinking, “There is that sad girl”. But I could not find the energy to walk over to people to make small talk and no one approached me. I couldn’t find my fake smile anywhere and after a while I didn’t even care. I just stood off to the side, wringing my hands, pretending like I was watching my children play, when really I was watching all the couples.

My children cried tonight as well. They miss their father so much and it just feels awful. Maybe it feels worse today because yesterday was such a lovely day. There were no tears and no drama and we all just had a nice day. Today your four year old cried in bed because she just misses her daddy. She asked me if she would see you when she dies and the bile in my throat rises when she asks questions like this. Your son is more matter of fact – I do not want to hear the words daddy and death he says. It makes me think about my daddy and it makes me sad.

I can’t undo what is done and I can’t make anything better. I am no better than them. I may be able to say the words daddy and dying in the same sentence but when I look at a husband and wife walking away from a birthday party with their child - I fall apart.

Nothing seems to be working this weekend in making me feel better. Not a beautiful day outside, a trip to the cemetery or even writing this blog. Maybe Monday will come and I will be too busy working, cooking, driving around getting the kids and doing whatever else I do that I just won’t have any time to remember how miserable I am.

A part of me just wants to stay in bed and cry. But that is so not me and I hear it doesn’t work anyway.