Ten-Finger Exercises

Suicide hurts everybody.

This will probably be a wandering page as I go from cooking dinner to eating to cleaning up, answering phone calls or waiting for them. It will probably be more cathartic than edifying. My heart is hurting. Hurting more for the people directly involved than for me, because my relationship with my ex-husband was largely over. Not entirely. I still got email from him every few days, and we'd had good talks together when our daughter was in the hospital last fall. We appreciated each other from a more objective perspective.

Yesterday he went to the VietNam memorial in the big park by the river, or at least near there. He called the police to report finding a dead body. When they arrived, he was the dead body.

I can't get that picture out of my head; not so much the visual as the picture of how worthless he must have felt. I won't go into it here, but he had reason to. And he had just retired.

The terrible loss of someone who could have maybe done something better with his life, who at least at one time had the potential, and who believed in God-- why couldn't he call upon help to make some changes? But then he was the same man who, when we were married and I asked him to do some things differently, said, "Why should I be the one to change?" Because you're hurting people, me, I could have said. Maybe did say it. But to him that was my problem.

I am thankful he's been largely out of my life for fifteen years, thankful that this tragedy didn't happen 'on my watch.' It doesn't surprise me entirely that it happened. He always said he'd rather shoot himself than die a lingering death of cancer or the like. That wasn't what happened though. This time he opted to shoot himself rather than have to change his behavior. I don't know that for a fact, but I know things that led up to it, and that's my guess. Maybe he couldn't change. Maybe he was having some mental disturbances, very possibly. Whatever, it's a crying shame. Even knowing I couldn't have done anything, I feel sorry, even apologetic. I'm sorry I got my kids into this mess, which isn't a bit logical because they wouldn't have been born if I hadn't ever married him. I'm sorry doesn't mean so much that I feel guilty, but that I am sorrowing. I am.