How Dare You
Early this morning, these words spilled out of my mind, almost faster than I could write them down. Surviving the suicide of a spouse is a dreadful rollercoaster; from moment to moment, I go from angry to sad to hopeful to joyous to lost and back around again for another heart-stopping ride.
But I know, too, that these moment pass. And, on occasion, I even dare to look forward to a life that is again filled with love and hope.
If you’re struggling, get help. Please.
How Dare You
How dare you do this in our bedroom, our sanctuary.
How dare you do this eight days before Christmas. You know how much I loved Christmas, and in time, I saw how you came to love it too.
How dare you do this without leaving a note, sentencing us to a lifetime of asking “Why?”
How dare you do this to our son; every piece of advice you ever gave him is now tarred with the brush of your suicide.
How dare you do this to your stepdaughters; did you know that they’d call you their “bonus dad” in your obituary? Do you see, looking down on them, how much you meant to them? Do you know how much I wonder if maybe you should never have had the right to be their “bonus dad”, if this is how it was going to end? Do you know how much I hate myself for wondering?
How dare you do this to my granddaughter who, at six years old, misses you terribly, and still asks what happened to you. What are we to tell her?
How dare you do this to our pets; you were their “Dr. Dolittle,” and I can see in their faces that they’re as pained and lost as the rest of us.
How dare you do this to your parents, who will never be the same.
How dare you do this to your colleagues; did you know they called you their “silent warrior”? If you’d known how many of them would show up at your service, shocked and sad, would that have mattered?
How dare you ruin the much-anticipated “best years of our lives,” when we could finally enjoy our empty nest and the fruit of all our hard work.
How dare you do this out of nowhere, after making plans for the future just two hours earlier.
How dare you do this in the middle of our home remodel, while the workers were here. To say that they went above and beyond in the days, weeks and months following does not even begin to describe their grace, courage and support.
How dare you do this to our neighbors, whose first Christmas without you was not really Christmas at all. And you’ve cast what seems like an indelible pall over our infrequent but much-loved neighborhood gatherings.
How dare you do this to me. How dare you leave me, the eternal optimist, dreading every day, sitting on the floor and doing jigsaw puzzle after jigsaw puzzle, binge-watching Law & Order: SVU because made-up horror stories distract my mind from my real-life horror story.
How dare you make it so hard for me to do so many things that I used to love.
How dare you turn the beach, my lifelong refuge, into a place I now go to pray to unseen gods for peace and strength.
How dare you turn me into the kind of person I fear I’m becoming: an angry, bitter introvert who fears the future. I fight against this every day; it’s a war I never expected to have to fight.
How dare you leave me here to answer the unanswerable, comfort others, forge a path alone.
How dare you be the reason for the incredibly kind messages that continue to fill my heart and empty it at the same time, messages of love. Hope. Encouragement. Rainbows and lollipops.
How dare you make it all about me. And our son. And our pets. And my daughters, my neighbors, my granddaughter.
In one awful moment, you turned “ours” into “mine”; “we” into “I”; “us” into “me.”
How dare you leave us to deal with the fallout, the whispers, the glances, the questions.
How dare you be the reason I have to search for “Is suicide a manner of death or a cause of death?”, because no matter how many times I have to provide one of those gruesome death certificates, I can never remember the difference.
How dare you have turned me into the kind of person who has to put “feed animals” on my calendar, because I fear I won’t remember to do so.
You could have made so many different choices; reached out to so many different people; walked down so many different paths. You left us here to walk a path none of us would have chosen, a path strewn with rocks and roots and obstacles both real and imagined.
How dare you.