is the silence I sit in. I have never been able to sit quietly in silence and be comfortable but since T left I can. I’m not comfortable in a good way but it’s not completely uncomfortable. The world sounds so loud sometimes. I have trouble sleeping. Last night was the first night in a month I have been able to sleep well. Tomorrow I start therapy so I can strengthen myself… as I said repeatedly, the therapist in me understands what happened to by husband but the spouse in me doesn’t. I hope that he changes back just as quickly as he changed to a violent hateful man and that he comes home and gets the help he admitted he needed just days before he left.Â
I wish the laws for mentally ill people were different. I am limited in what I can actually do and I can’t force him to stay married to me, I can’t force him to take his meds, but I can do my damnedest to get him into the hospital for treatment. Nobody understands how deep my love runs.
I have been looking for a good discussion board to… tell my story? Get help? Figure out what the hell is happening. I will try to make it short but in order to understand I guess you need some details.
My husband of almost 4 years is Bipolar (although I think he may have something different unless there are things I don’t know about Bipolar). More or less we have had a good marriage, we rarely fight and when we do it’s mostly because he’s going through something and it gets resolves pretty quickly. In 4 years he has been hospitalized twice. Most recently at the beginning of this last month. Here’s the long story short – we found out that a family friend who he’s known for 35 years is abusing her daughter. We tried to talk to his friend and she basically threw a ***** fit and told us to get lost. My husband spoke to his mom about this and she said she supported our decision to call CPS and try to get this friend help. Well, when the time came to call my husband told his mom we did and she denied ever saying she supported us, she criticized him, insulted him, and then hung up on him. I had predicted this because his mom is all talk and no action but he never saw that because he was close to her.
Well, the next day after this happened he said he was suicidal and after an emergency therapy session he wanted to go to the ER because he couldn’t make a verbal contract. He was court ordered (but that’s a whole other issue) committed to a psych hospital where he was for 6 days. He got on meds – but he doesn’t stay on them long – when he got back he was better than I’d seen in him a long time. He said he actually liked the meds, he felt like he could think clearly, he said he understood now how unhealthy his parents are and he didn’t want anything to do with them anymore, which was fine by me. I encouraged him to take some time and write a letter to his parents telling them everything he’s never said out of fear to them, this way he would have closure and he hates confrontation so this would be a baby step dealing with that.
On the day he was supposed to mail the letter he also had an appt. with a new therapist (community since we couldn’t afford his usual one anymore). When he came back he was acting weird, distant, and I knew something wasn’t right with him. We spent the evening together, holding hands, it was a good night then I asked him if he was going to put up the new shower curtain like he said he would. So he’s putting it up and I said while he took the old one down I would clean the tub, he said “you’re not going to clean it while I’m standing in it right?” and I asked why he would say something stupid like that, of course I wasn’t going to. I didn’t mean it in an malicious way but it set him off and he said I was verbally abusing him and that he wasn’t stupid. I thought I would just walk away and let him vent, I went to lay down on the bed and when he was done he came in and laid his head down on my chest and said he was sorry and he loved me. I apologized and said I wasn’t calling him stupid it was just an odd remark to make then I said I was worried about him because he was acting weird all day. Next thing I know he’s packing a suitcase saying he hates my guts and wants to leave. He packed his Xbox, games, computer…no clothes, no medication (he’s on heart meds for a heart attack he had in Feb ’10 and insulin too). He said he was done with this marriage and left. This has never happened before!
I had been keeping tabs on his mood since he was on the new meds I thought maybe that he was having a reaction. I tracked him down at his friends house and said I thought it was the meds and let’s just rule it out, if he still hates me that’s fine I will give him space but to let me take him to the ER to get checked out. He reluctantly agreed and I took him there and the whole way he was insulting me, saying I was crazy, and he didn’t look like himself. His eyes were different, he was full of hate and he is VERY passive. While in the ER he kept it up and I said I know it’s not him talking it was the Bipolar/meds and that I loved him no matter what he said to me and he said to keep telling myself that but it’s not Bipolar it’s me and that there is nothing wrong with him. Well… it’s been almost 4 weeks and he has not returned. We have communicated briefly by email and when I finally got an answer as to why he left he said because I was a liar and his mother would never do anything to hurt him, he denied she hung up on him etc… now he’s asking for a divorce. We’ve never discussed divorce, like I said we had a good loving marriage, he’s a wonderful husband. I tried to petition to have his hospitalized again but I was laughed out of court. Apparently the court order he had was never filed with the county so he wasn’t in the system and I was denied. Now he’s living (last I heard) with this friend in a nasty environment, he’s drained our bank account, he isn’t seeing his doctors and some of his meds are still here so I he’s not on them. His personality has changed completely and he HATES me. Just the day prior the his he was telling me I was the best thing he’s ever done and he couldn’t wait to grow old together….
So…here I am, broke, confused, I don’t want a divorce but our state is a no-fault so if he files I can’t fight it. I want to get him help and get him back in the hospital but nobody is willing to help me. I sound like a disgruntled wife who’s pissed her husband left, but I’m not. I don’t understand what kind of episode this. I don’t know what to do….I have never seen him act like this and he’s never left. Is this a Bipolar behaviour? What can I do?
I swore I would never become one of “those†people. The people who was in the system, the people who gets old donated food, who faced homelessness… the people who I said were victims and just didn’t want to work and have a better life. Today I am one of them. Yesterday was horrible. After breaking down last night I cried myself to sleep once again asking why this was happening to me. I must have slept a few hours before being woke up by what was either the voice of God giving me a message or a prophetic warning of what is to come. The vividness of sleep paralysis was painful enough but then the power went out in our rubbled remains. I was able to finally get out of bed where I braced myself between the hall walls and headed for the livingroom.
I heard the voice of two men outside the door. Assuming they were from the electric company I opened the door slightly and asked that they use their flashlights to prove who they were then they pushed their way through the door, put a shotgun to my head, and as I fell to my knees feeling the barrel between my eyes, I sighed “thank youâ€.
Then I woke up.
           The relief I spoke of terrified me when I came to. Although my heart wants to die, it just lies bleeding in a pool of my own fears, demons, and pain. I try to hate T for what he’s done but I am incapable of hating the man who brought me so much joy over the years. The hardest part of it all is not that I have to learn to do things myself again or even that I am alone, it’s that I couldn’t save my husband from himself. That the one thing that brought us together, tore us apart in the end. I’ve been told there are thousands upon thousands of women who have been or are in my very position but I still feel alienated. In order to survive I need to fight myself hour by hour, I need to get out of my head and use what little anger I have to resist drowning even further. Sometimes I wish I was consumed by T’s illness too so I could switch my emotions on and off as needed, it would make this transition easier.
It’s been 14 days since I made love to my husband and 7 days since he died. Although his body remains in a proximal location to mine, his mind is six feet deep. The hardest part is knowing I will never feel his touch again, never look into his big beautiful eyes, and never hear his voice again as he calls me “sweetie†or  says “guess what? I love you.â€Â  The nights are the worst, I wish for one more hug, one more hold, one more kiss, despite the anger I feel. Normally I write to heal but like eating, sleeping, and smiling right now, it doesn’t feel natural. There is a pack of smokes, a bottle of Xanax, and a book next to me that says what I’m feeling is normal, healthy; there is nothing normal or healthy about losing the love of your life.
Today I learned the meaning of “one day at a timeâ€, however it feels like an hour at a time. The crying spells get shorter but do not hurt any less. The last one happened about an hour ago when I went to grab my husband’s hand as we sat in “our spots†on the couch and he wasn’t there. Our home is just a house now, there is no family here, just memories of a happy of a hell and dreams of what could have been.  Despite the dangers I wish he would come out of his darkness and return to my arms but he’s too far gone now.
This may be the hardest pain I will ever endure.
So what happens next? Although dawn is mere hours away it feels like the sun will never rise again, but it does and maybe day eight will be brighter. The irony, if  appropriate is that on May 24, 2010, Paul Gray, the bass player of Slipknot passed away. I had a brief kinship with Paul and I knew it was coming but still, death is a surprise. I remember telling my husband T that I couldn’t imagine what Paul’s wife was going through and for awhile we talked about the injustice of love and life and how no good deed goes unpunished… seventeen days later what I couldn’t imagine, I was going through.  If you haven’t figured it out yet, my husband is mentally ill and while his body still walks the earth he abandoned his self-proclaimed world for a life of impulsiveness birthed by his Oedipus complex.
