I Wish My Husband Had Dropped Dead on the Tennis Court
[NOTE: If you’re struggling, please get help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1–800–273–8255.]
A few months after my husband’s suicide, we were at a restaurant and ran into some friends who were with a woman who’d been widowed the year before.
Our mutual friends introduced us, and mentioned that I, too, had lost my husband.
“I know just how you feel!” said their friend. “My husband dropped dead on the tennis court last year.”
I told her how sorry I was to hear that, and we returned to our table. Since then, “my husband dropped dead on the tennis court” has kind of become my go-to explanation to people as to why, in my opinion, the idea that “we shouldn’t compare our grief” — and that however each person is feeling is equally valid — is a crock, borne of our society’s need to give everyone a trophy.
I’m NOT saying that my grief is “better” than yours
But what I am saying is that if your husband dropped dead on the tennis court, died in a car crash, succumbed to a fatal disease, that is an infinitely easier thing to tell people about. There’s no shame in any of those. And there’s no second-guessing about what you might have missed in what you thought was the best marriage in the world.
There is huge shame in telling people that your husband took his own life
Right or wrong, that’s how it is. We can’t help but feel like it was preventable, like the people left behind should have seen it coming and, most important, should have stopped it from happening. While I mostly believe that that’s nonsense — each of us is ultimately responsible for their own actions — the self-doubt and questioning will never go away.
As opposed to a tragic accident or illness, when you tell someone your husband took his own life, their responses to this news generally go something like this:
Were there signs?
Did you know he was depressed?
Was he on any medication?
Had he been acting strangely?
Were there problems in [your marriage], [his work], [his life]?
[my personal least favorite] Why do you think he did it?
For the record, the answer to the first five is a resounding “no”; my answer to the last is “I have no effing idea.”
And that’s the worst part, of course
You can *almost* understand someone who’d suffered through years of depression, illness, problems at work, problems at home…although I personally will never understand a desire to end one’s life.
Anyway, when I think back to that chance meeting, I often envy the tennis court widow; that is the ugly truth. What a simple explanation, one that everyone understands: we know that terrible things happen to people every day. What’s harder to wrap our brains around is that some people choose to make this awful exit, to leave behind people who loved and valued them so much that it remains unbearable to think of this gaping hole in our lives. And yes, I understand (with the logical part of my brain, anyway) mental illness, and that our brains can turn against us in the most horrid of ways.
But still. Our society has a long way to go before we see this as no different than any other terrible tragedy that befalls people.
As my unicorn of a therapist reminds me, I already know why he did it. It’s a simple, elegant explanation, and someday I might even be able to say this to people who ask “why”, if I can ever get up the nerve: “He did it because he chose to.”
But honestly?
I’d still give anything to be the widow of someone who dropped dead on the tennis court. Not only would it be so much easier to tell people what happened, but I also suspect that I’d probably be fully recovered from this tragic loss by now if it had indeed just been a random act of fate that took him from me.
I suppose, in a way, it was a random act of fate. It just feels so much different than that.