February 7, 2006

February 7

I haven't written in several weeks. I'm not sure why, or why the story stalled right where it did. Perhaps I feel within me an inability to ever accurately convey what happened in mere words.

B was not doing well that morning when he went to work. He was in tears. But, that happened a lot. We had argued. I hadn't been very sympathetic that morning. Sometimes when he got into one of his "despair states" he would come at me almost aggressively as though I were supposed to "fix things", but then if I tried to suggest anything he would go negative again and resist. I had gotten to a point where I recognized these moods and didn't know how to cope with them anymore. I was totally burned out, frustrated beyond belief and in a sort of despair myself. We had both been having a few especially bad days, but it was almost becoming routine in a horrible sort of way. When he left in tears I knew that things were escalating somehow, but I didn't know how to stop whatever was coming.

Only a week or two before, at dinner, he had told me that I shouldn't worry about him ever actually committing suicide because he didn't believe he'd ever really have the nerve to do it. I have no idea why I'd let him reassure me with that, but I had. I guess I wanted to believe him. He was terrible at lying and didn't usually manage to decieve me very well about anything. He had seemed very sincere and I was actually feeling better on that score. So perhaps I almost saw "things escalating" in a hopeful sort of light. Something had to give. We needed more help. Somewhere deep down inside I suppose I knew it was all more than B and I could handle and that sooner or later "the world" would catch on to this and perhaps hospitalize B for a while until they could really figure out what was going wrong with him and how it should be treated.

After B left for work, I dried my tears and pulled it together well enough to pay a couple of bills and bring them to the post office. We had just recently purchased my cell phone and I wasn't all that used to it yet. As I was driving to the post office the cell started ringing. It was B. He didn't sound angry at me at all...just sort of scared and anxious. I told him I was driving and didn't feel safe so could I call him back as soon as I got home from the post office and we could talk as much as he wanted. He just said, "Okay....thank you!" in a wavery voice and hung up. That was the last I ever heard from him. When I got home I couldn't seem to get through to him on his cell phone. This wasn't unusual as at times he would be in certain work situations where he couldn't answer, so I left him a couple of voicemails to call me back...but he never did. I think he must have turned off his phone; decided against talking to me again for some reason.

I can't say I was entirely surprised when a police officer showed up at my door in the late afternoon. All he told me was that something had happened with my husband and that I should contact my sister. He said he didn't have any details and he just left. You must understand that I had been through this sort of thing before. I was thinking that B had phoned 911 again or just had a breakdown out there somewhere and behaved oddly enough that someone had gotten involved... I was entirely expecting to have to go down to some hospital emergency room again...and hopefully this time they would at least keep him for long enough to figure him out. My feelings were mixed. I was very upset, but also felt a small stirring of hope. Maybe this would cause something to change for the better.
But then my sister arrived and came into my house...looked me in the eyes and said, "B did it."

This is the part I find so hard to describe. I didn't black out. I didn't even sit down. I just stood there, just inside my front door, and wailed like an animal for about five minutes. It all hit me at once. Incredible pain, unimaginable guilt, sorrow, fear, horror, agony. But something strange happened...something I find it very difficult to put into words.

It was as though I were standing on the edge of a huge, black pit. Call the pit complete despair and insanity. It beckoned. I WANTED it. I wanted to hurl myself into it and lose myself completely and never emerge. It seemed the natural thing to do; the ONLY thing to do. I deserved it in both the positive and negative senses of that word. But something "not me" was holding me back. Another Presence was right there in my mind with me, holding me firmly. I struggled. I didn't want to be held. I wanted to die or go mad; whichever came first. This Presence allowed me to have a very good look into the absolute blackness of that pit, but would simply not allow me to jump in. After a moment or two the force of this Presence actually turned me around and would not then even let me look at this pit again. I tried. I tried to make my mind go where I felt it deserved to go, but I couldn't even find that same place again. He, God, had hidden it from me.

Oh, I wasn't quite ready to admit that God was there. Not yet. That took a couple of hours. Although there is a blurry, unreal quality to my memories of that first evening, I distinctly remember telling my sister, a wonderful Christian, not to talk to me about God because it wouldn't help me since I didn't believe in Him. Nevertheless, He was holding me, gently but firmly, and even this added barb of denial of Him never loosened His grip on me in the slightest.

I think that the Lord was telling my sister not to talk; just to listen. Or else she simply couldn't get a word in edgewise. But she listened, and listened, and listened. She listened all afternoon and nearly all night. She told me later that from her perspective it looked initially as though I were someone who had been run through with a sword...and then all of this poison came gushing out. Hours and hours of poison. I don't remember what I said. I think that probably all of the pain and the hurt, the worry and fear, the guilt and the horror of the last three or four years came pouring out of my mouth in one long, unstoppable stream. My sister said next to nothing. She just listened, and cried with me and cared.

By early morning I had somehow been given an understanding that my husband had committed the sin of taking a life. His own. But the grace that we'd learned together came flooding back in with a new life of it's own. B's sins had been washed away; forgiven two thousand years before he was even born. So, even though B had taken it on himself to make a horrible, desperate, flying leap into God's arms...God had not neglected to catch him. Not only that, He'd caught me too for good measure. It hadn't really mattered that B had worried himself into a frenzy of despair and done the unthinkable, or that I had tried to handle things in my own bitter way and turned my back on God and questioned not only His love but His very existence. Those things didn't cancel out the fact that we simply belonged to Him and nothing could ever change that. It was never actually about us. It was about Him.