I will never understand suicide, never. I have spent the past five years trying to understand why my husband of 21+ years chose to do end his life, therefore robbing his children and me of his presence in our lives. I had so many questions that I wanted answers for and I lived in a cloud of confusion until I finally understood one thing; I will never get my answers.
I will never get them because the one person who can answer them for me is no longer with us. I though for a long time that someone, anyone could fill in the blanks for me but I was wrong. I knew him best and I still can't figure out what could have been so terrible that night that he put that gun to his head and pulled that trigger.
Step One: Console Your Children and Be There For Them
My children were devastated. They were both real live “daddy's girls” and this was the first true tragedy that either of them had experienced. They still had both sets of grandparents and have never really had to deal with death, let alone the death of their daddy. My first priority was to make sure that they knew how much their daddy loved them. I made certain to sit down with them right after the police left from notifying us that his body had been found and that he was indeed deceased.
It was another of those numbing moments that you don't know how you are going to handle, but with the love I had for our children, it came to me somehow. It will with you also. The main thing is to be extremely honest without tarnishing their father's memory. I simply told them the truth in a way that children of their ages would understand. If you need to speak to your children separately, please do so if it is going to help them to understand in their own way. My children were 14 and 8 at the time. I was able to speak to them both and made it come from my heart and told them that their father, while loving them more than he ever loved anything in this world, was ill.
They had dealt with his depression symptoms for the past couple of years and knew that there was something wrong with the way dad dealt with things lately. They knew of his decision to stop his anti-depressants and they also saw the effects it had on our family as a whole. He was no longer the "happy-go-lucky guy we were used to having around. He no longer found any joy in our family life. He lost interest in most everything that had once been important to him. We saw this, he did not. He felt only weakness for having been on those medications for those two years. To us it was not a weakness but something that was saving our family, we only wish he could have seen that also.
It is amazing how resilient children can be when they need to be. This was one time though that I hoped they wouldn't be so resilient. I wanted them to feel the sadness, for it they did not feel it now, they surely would at some point down the road and I didn't want them to have to continue to grieve because they had not dealt with it from the beginning. Too many problems would come up later if we did not begin our grieving now.
Step Two: Don't Deny
I continued to deny the fact that my husband was dead. Death is such a crazy thing to deal with. On one hand, it's obvious that they are gone. They no longer are within your reach. You no longer hear their voice, you no longer smell the scent of them and most of all you no longer have their support.
The memorial service was a fog. I barely remember anything that happened that day. There were a few points that stick in my foggy memory. The one I remember most is when the couple that had been our very best friends; the two people who also knew him best, arrived. They had been out of town during the time of his death and managed to make some arrangements and get back quickly for his memorial. I saw them drive up and that's when I think it really HIT me as to where I was and what I was doing.
I was allowing his friends and family to say their good-byes in this quiet but public way. I had not even begun to say my good-byes yet. This would come later, much later. I knew that I would have to come to grips with this memorial service, but I just felt so alone even though there were hundreds of his family and friends right there beside me. Feeling alone was something I was beginning to feel a lot of and I didn't care much for it.
