Suicide

[samjane999]

Hi,
I have wrote my story here coupe of days ago (see Sam and Jane).  I have got many emotions and griefs going on, sometimes I find it very difficult to copy with them all. Sadness, emptiness, anger, feeling guilty, etc, etc.. I m sure those who lost their partner, felt the same.
I really dont see the future, I dont see a point being here cos the person I wanted to sped the rest of my life, is gone. And I want to be gone too. Yes, I have my son, but I see him only every 2 weeks, so our connection is not as strong as if he lived with me.
What I wanted to say is that I have been considering a suicide. I know it is silly, I have to carry on, but the feelings I got now...a suicide sounds like a good idea. Just to shut my eyes, and get peace forever.
Has any of you, had the same feelings and idea after the death of your partner?

[Karena]

Yes i did, and please dont try and carry on without some help - i went to my GP who got me bereavement counselling after antidepressants reacted badly - and other people found the samaritans helped. If you dont want to phone they have e-mail service now,and in some areas they have support groups as well.

My husbands death co incided with an empty nest, my eldest had just emigrated across the world, the youngest had just split up from her husband and moved away as well and  i was about to lose my home, my community my life as i knew it the only thing left, my job served no useful purpose that i could see except to my boss,s wallet and as i had been a carer in some form since i was 16 i had no idea how to not be a carer and could see absolutely no point in my life at all.

Three things stopped me -

Firstly.I had a very close friend who killed himself  i know how much it hurts and why would i want to inflict the pain i was feeling on bereavement on other people - just because i was redundant as a carer didnt mean people didnt care about me as well, how could i do that to my kids and grandkids,and not just them but others who had tried to help, and even the people here who i had never met but replied and tried to help while they were also experincing this pain.

Secondly - what about the person who found me - even if it was a policeman or paramedic and not a friend or neighbour they are human too, they may see it a lot but it still takes a toll on them  - what about their feelings what if it was the one that pushed them over the edge and wrecked their lives.

Thirdly - If there is any kind of afterlife - if we ever met up again in a different life or place  - that loving reunion i yearned for wouldnt be so loving when he saw what i had done because they were his grandchildren and his friends i would hurt, and also because i threw away life after he had faught so hard to keep his which was disrepectful.

Your son is 11 now and only sees you once a fortnight but that doesnt mean he doent value that time, that he doesnt need to see you, or that he doesnt need you because he does, and it doesnt meant that in the future he wont need you to be there more, and that in a time that is shorter than you can even imagine, he might want you to be at his graduation cermony or his passing out parade, before then he might need you to help with some gcse homework, he might need you to take him somewhere that helps him understand physics or history or anything else he studies, he might need you kick a ball around or to sit and play computer games with him to get away from all that stuff, he might want to introduce you too his first girlfriend or boyfriend and to turn up in your suit and buy him a pint as he is about to go into his wedding ceremony.

I know it different for eveyone but i know for all of us we cant see the way forward and we dont know how to take that first step. For me It was that thing that third thing that also started the turn around - imagining that awful  conversation if i met him because i had killed myself ,lead to  also imagining the conversation if i just sat around crying and didnt try and do something about it and so the idea was born that if i couldnt see a way to  live my life for myself then i would live it for him - do the things we loved to do and those we talked of doing but didnt have time too and  do the things he would like to have done, and also keep his memory alive for those grandchildren didnt they deserve to know more of him than vague memorys didnt he deserve to be remebered as they moved forward in their lives. And that way, if there was any chance of having any kind of conversation it would be a much longer one and a much livelier one than the one where i just sat and wept and waited to die , and if nothing exists and we never have that chance i wont have lost anything by trying.

I am not saying it was easy, i still did plenty of sitting around crying,but it started with a handful of wild daffodil bulbs - because every morning when he was ill he asked me of the daffodills had come out yet, he loved the spring and it had been a long hard winter   -but  they didnt come out, not until his funeral, and those were the flowers we chose for that - so i wanted to think,  if there is any way for him to see the world and revisit his favourite places he would know what i had done,  or if anyone else, a random stranger was cheered by them and it made their day better, then there was a point to my life even though i would never know it had happened

It was a simple thing to do but i had to plan, i had to get to these places i had to go back to where we had been together and this time go on my own - there were a lot of hurdles to get round or get over but i was doing it for him and so i was still caring for him and that drove me on and i planted the first bulbs on his brithday as a way to mark that.

After that there was always another thing to do,i walked up a mountain, i went back to the Dolphin observation volunteering we spent out holidays doing, i fixed the campervan and got back out in that and everytime i did something for him i was embracing life for myself as well, even though i didnt necessarilly realise that at the time.
Sometimes i frightened myself doing the things he would have loved to do that i would have watched from safe ground but i had to now do them  - my reward when terrified beyond belief  zip wiring across a gorge in Africa was a rainbow in the waterfall in front of me, something i had always wanted to see, and he, when we were first together had said he hoped one day i would - and there it was my rainbow.
There are stiil things to see and do and things to plan how i can get there, the useless job is not useless because it pays for me to do them, but i also started doing online courses - just random free ones to pass the time staring at the walls or the tv, but they became less random and then a path opened up for ways i can help others -so now i am involved with a school gardens project, again in Africa - i cant be there all the time i cant be hands on all the time - but my useless job  making adverts for software, also gave me the skills to do their marketing from here for free, and again it is something he would be proud of because he spent his working life helping deprived kids.

Finally back to your son.
Children take things on in ways we dont forsee - my daughters friend spent his life for many years feeling guilty because his mum asked him to cut the grass, he didnt so she did and died from a severe ashma attak as a result - he was eight when that happened -he couldnt see that it wasnt his fault, so how can you ever be sure that your sone wont take something on and blame himslef too - even just the idea that you felt he wasnt worth hanging around for can affect his life.
As well as what he may need  in practical ways in the future,  Right now he needs you to show him how he can move forward from the most terrible stuff that happens in life by showing him  not deluding him that it is easy and being all "manly" in the old fashioned sense of pretending every thing is ok, but allowing him to see you are sad, but also that you can rebuild some kind of life from even the worst situations - if he sees that now, then if. heaven forbid something awful happens to him and he ends up in the thought patterns you have now,  he can see that there is another way out, and just as there was a future for you, there is a future for him.

[samjane999]

Thank you for your long reply.
Of course, when thinking about suicide, I always stop myself cos of my son. It is not fair on him to see me go when he is so young.
But once he is old enough, on his own 2 feet, then I think I can go then.
Maybe I m just a drama queen, but I know I will never find anybody like my Jane and to be honest I dont want to. I will do best for my son and then I will go.
That;s my plan.

[Karena]

No you are not a drama queen at all and no you will never find anybody like your Jane,that doesnt mean you will never find some-one or some thing that makes life worth living in the future.
I have been widowed twice and i loved both of them very much, it feels like a tragedy and it is, but at the same time i have been lucky to have had two people who really loved me sometimes people never find that real love at all. You dont stop loving someone when they die,but it doesnt mean that there will never be room in your heart for some-one else as well.

But not doing so doesnt mean all your life has to be totally  miserable either, i doubt very much i will again, and yes it can be lonely and it can be depressing, the reminders that you are not part of a couple, and "fitting in" can be really difficult which is something i find even now,As a widow it seems you are expected to become the proverbial "merry widow" or the mad cat lady - i dont have cats but i cant vouch for all the rest of that stereotype, but life can also be fulfilling in other ways finding those ways is a difficult journey as well as finding your way through the grief journey.
If one thing comes out of this it is that we cant plan the future we can only really live in the present and at the moment your present is very painful and lonely and frightening but that doesnt mean it always will be, you will always love and miss her and that grief becomes something you learn to live with,sometimes when i laugh it feels hollow even to myself,i know i will never be the same person i was, but i can also get lost in doing other things which take me away from that all consuming grief of the early days of this journey.   

[Sandra61]

I think it is easy to think it might be good not to have to be here anymore when you are in the early stages of grief, but what you also have to remember is that you are not really in your right mind for a long while after a loss. Eighteen months is still no time at all after you have lost someone and you are still in the early months. I know it is hard, your world feels like it has fallen apart around you and you are lonely and don't know what to do. I am glad you have your son to give you a reason to keep on trying, but there is much more reason to keep on living than for him. You need to live for you too. Life is a gift, even when it is at it's worst. There is always something good to live for, even if it is hard to find. I often advise people that it helped me to have flowers around when I lost my mum. I think that was because they were a reminder of how many good and beautiful things there are still in the world to live for - and there are. I do think you have to make an effort to find them and I think you have to make a choice to look for ways to make something good of the rest of your life. That isn't easy either, but it is important and I think getting out a couple of times a week really helps with that, especially if it can be with someone you can talk to.

I am old enough to have had parents who lived through WWll and perhaps that makes me sound ancient now and is becoming something that most people can no longer relate to, but that generation suffered loss and witnessed the worst of life on a scale we can hardly imagine and the result was that they clung to life and appreciated it and became better people through that experience than we do with our, by comparison, pampered existence today. Yes, it is hard to lose anyone and yes, it does feel unbearable in those first few months and years, and yes it is hard to lose your home and loss does make you look back and see all the mistakes you may have made in the past that you wish you had done differently, but despite all that, you must also realise that you were loved by someone who chose to spend her life with you because she thought you were worth everything that that entailed - and you still are! You are not a different person. You are still the person she thought more important than anyone else in her life, the person she chose to be with, so now it is up to you to value yourself as much as she valued you and would still want you to do and up to you to make the rest of your life as great as she would have wanted it to be for you.

This is not a time to give up, but to cling to life, rebuild, recover as best you can and keep going, as she would expect you to do. Yes, that is hard. But you owe it to her, to your son, but actually, most of all, you owe it to you. Your life is precious and important, probably in ways you don't yet know and cannot see and probably in ways that have not happened yet, but it is. So it is your responsibility to make her proud now and make something of it. You have to stay as positive as you can and value yourself and work towards a future that is as good as you can make it. It may be hard to see now, but the future can still hold lots of good things for you so, slowly, start getting out there and finding them. They do exist, but it is up to you to find them. Giving up is never the answer. You are worth the trouble, but you are the one who will have to put in the work too.

Try to stay positive and stop looking down the wrong path. Ending your life is never the answer. There will never be a 'right time' for that either. Don't make that choice. It is the wrong one. I know. I have known people who have taken that path. Nothing good ever came of it. Please bear with all this and do the practical things you have to do and slowly the light will seep back into your life.

Loss is part of life and grief a part of love. It is not a reason to end life. Love is a precious jewel in our lives that we have to have been grateful that we had for a while, but there are other things worth living for. Keep hold of that and go out and look for them. You may find a few more jewels along the way.