It would have been a relief...

This is a really hard post to share but its an important one because its about the trauma that others suffer from when someone they love tries and/or kill themselves.  

About a month or two after my unsuccessful attempt, we went to see our marriage counselor.  A side note about her, she is the greatest counselor I ever met.  She has helped me more than any other person on this earth.  You will be lucky to find a therapist half as good as this woman, but I digress.. 

We sat down in Jennifer's office and began to tell the story.  We had been seeing her for about 6 years because of the impact that my depression had had on our marriage.  I talked about what was going on and what led me to that point.  I was pretty upfront about the fact that I had stopped taking my antidepressants.  She then asked my wife what her thoughts were.  She talked about her fear and how it impacted everyone in the family.  I totally got that and I realized just how selfish of an act it would have been.  The fallout and collateral damage would have been significant, to say the least.

But then my wife said something else that shook me.

"It would have been a relief if he had been successful".  

She was crying when she said that and it came from a very emotional place.  Her feelings were very raw and I get that.  She went on to share how it felt when she arrived at the scene and that they wouldn't let her see me.  And that seeing 20 cop cars scared her because they were adamant that she not be allowed anywhere near me.  Then she talked about walking into the ER and seeing me alone in a room, in handcuffs with a cop standing outside the room, as if I was criminal.  How she knew I had been struggling over the past several weeks but had no idea it would get to this point.  

She paused and collected herself and then said that she and the kids would have been forced to move forward but now they didn't know what to do.  That they were uncertain what to say or do around me.  That I had shaken everyone to their very core and no longer felt any sense of emotional safety with me.

I have tried every which way to make sense of that one and I still struggle with it.  Yes, things had been hard for us.  I have never been a picnic to live with.  My depression had a major impact on us and I was not always my best self.  I have owned that.  But this one stung quite a bit.  I was not myself and I was imploding.  

And then I realized that it wasn't just about me.  I had been so consumed with my own hurt and emotional fog that I failed to see the situation through anyone else's eyes.  When you are seriously depressed, it is nearly impossible to think of someone other than yourself.  And I don't say that in a mean way, you just can't see through someone else's eyes.  When the dark clouds of depression come over you, all you see is darkness and 2 feet in front of you.  Now, as I was beginning have some distance from the event, I was able to have some perspective.  And it wasn't good. Well, it was the mess I created.  

Did my wife want me dead?  No.  But she didn't know what to do or say now.  She wasn't able to just snap her fingers and say that everything is so much better now because I wasn't dead.  There was a mess to clean up.  My children were traumatized by have 4 cops cars show up at the house and being told by a complete stranger that their father was trying to kill himself and they needed to know if there were more guns in the house.  My wife was trying to make sense of how quickly everything fell off the rails and she was sitting in the ER with her husband in handcuffs.  Hell, now she even had to figure out how to explain to friends why I was "unavailable" for a week while I was sitting in a psych ward.  Not exactly a light topic of conversation. 

Depression is not something to take lightly.  You cannot do it alone.  And you will leave a terrible mess behind.  If you think you won't, you are wrong.  People love you, more than you realize.  Ask for help. Suicide is probably the most selfish thing you can do.  You aren't going to fix things, you will make matters worse.  There is a new number to call; 988.  You can also text it.  You can learn more about it here at https://988lifeline.org/.  

Someone give a shit about you.  Believe it or not.