Tag: loss

Knowing She Wanted Me to Suicide… Kept Me Alive

I wasn’t looking to get married.  I had been down that road before and I had gotten burned, badly.  I started to date Lena in 2010 and I fell for her hard and quickly, but it wasn’t me that pushed to get married.  Lena wanted to get married and so we did.  I don’t remember when this conversation happened, but we were sitting on a bark bench looking out on the Hudson River in Rivertown.  It was either shortly before we got married or shortly afterwards.  I remember Lena asking how long it would take for my walls to come down and for me to fully trust that she loved me and would always be there for me.  Lena said disparaging things about the women in my life prior to her… things along the lines of, “These women really fucked you up.  I am not those women.”  Lena went on to reiterate that she would not hurt me and that she was in this for the long haul.  Furthermore, she said, “I am going to love you like no other woman ever has.  I’m gonna love you better.”  That should have been a huge red flag, and it probably was… but I ignored it because I did love her, and I did want to spend the rest of my life with her.

Life happened and seven and a half years later Lena no longer wanted to be by my side.  Lena no longer wanted to be married to me.  Lena wanted a divorce; just like Ava and several of “those women from my past,” who had destroyed my heart and my trust in love.  When Ava wanted the divorce, she told me point blank and it was over.  Lena didn’t end things that way.  Lena told me to leave and then things stayed that way for a few months.  I had hired a matrimony lawyer to represent my interests in the divorce.  The lawyer had Lena served with papers and Lena totally freaked out.  How could I do this to her?  Couldn’t we deal with this just the two of us without lawyers?  Lena convinced me to fire my lawyer against everyone’s advice.  I did fire my lawyer.  Lena immediately started pressuring me to sign a legal separation agreement without the counsel of a lawyer; just weeks after the death of my father. 

After the death of my father, asking me when I will be coming down to Rivertown next because she supposedly wanted to see me and spend time with me. It was all lies and manipulation. I fell for all of it.

 

Then Lena said that she needed a legal separation so that she could rediscover who she was and who we were to each other.  This was the first calculated vicious manipulation towards getting me to commit suicide.  I didn’t understand what Lena was asking for.  Yes, of course I know what a legal separation is, but I did not understand what she meant when she said that she needed this so we could rediscover who we were to each other.  I asked her, “What does that mean?  Are we going to sign a legal separation agreement and then start dating each other?”  She answered that she did not know… maybe.  Seriously.  And I, the love blind idiot I was, agreed.  Luckily, I did ad some language to the separation agreement that made it non-binding. 

All my friends and family said that I was being manipulated and that I was being an idiot. Part of me thought it was ridiculous and that I probably was being an idiot… but Lena had said that I was the love of her life.  She said she still loved me.  She still proclaimed that I was the love of her life as we were signing the separation agreement.  I have hundreds of pages of texts between us filled with proclamations of love from her to me and me to her.  In these texts she tells me she still loves me.  She tells me that I am still the love of her life.  She tells me that she needs this separation for herself so that she can rebuild herself and discover who she now is.

Just days before getting me to sign a separation agreement.

I went down to Rivertown a month or so before we signed the separation agreement and Lena and I met in a park down by the Hudson.  We spoke for a couple of hours sitting on a bench.  She put her arms around me.  She put her arms around my neck.  She held my hand… and when we parted, she kissed me passionately… I mean deep tongue kiss like we did when we first started to date… with tears in her eyes telling me that she loved me.  This happened again on the day we signed the separation agreement… After signing the document in front of a notary, we were out in the bank parking lot and she hugged me… tightly… with tears running down her face and she kissed me deeply passionately again.  As we parted, she told me that she loved me.  I never saw her again until we both had to show up to divorce court.

The separation agreement clearly states that Lena had to maintain my health insurance.  Within a few months she cancelled my insurance.  I no longer had access to doctors or prescription medications unless I could pay cash out of pocket.  Lena switched jobs and claimed that her new employer wouldn’t cover me; I don’t know if that is true.  Regardless, she was legally required to maintain health insurance for me, and she did not.  She did buy some totally bogus health plan that supposedly covers 4 or 5 doctor visits a year and some medications.  Every doctor I showed the card to said it was fake and I had to pay cash out of pocket. 

When Lena and I first started to date I was 100% honest with her about all my mental health issues and history.  She knows all about my suicidality and suicide attempts and anxieties over abandonment issues.  During our marriage Lena experienced both my depression and suicidal ideation.  I was totally honest and open with her more than I had ever been with anyone in my life.  When we separated, she used all of what I had told her against me.  I don’t mean that she used it against me in court… she used it to manipulate me into signing a separation agreement under totally false pretenses (that we would date and that she still loved me).  She used my unconditional love of her and her children to convince me to fire my attorney.  Then after the death of my father, which she knew was devastating to me, she cancelled my health insurance cutting me off from doctors and antidepressant medications and my pain medications. 

How could anyone look at the lies and manipulations Lena perpetrated combined with cutting off necessary medical care and not conclude that she wanted me to kill myself?  Being a widow to a dead husband you no longer love, need, or care about, is certainly easier than being a two-time divorcee.  Yes, I think that Lena would prefer for me to kill myself and that she has done her best to manipulate both my mood and my access to health care towards that goal.  I won’t give her the satisfaction.  Knowing that she wants me to suicide has pissed me off enough that although I have been suicidally depressed at times, I won’t give her the satisfaction!  So, I am alive 😛  

Mental Illness is a Thief

Sitting here this afternoon, needing to fill out legal paperwork for my divorce, I found myself thinking of all of the things that have been stolen from me by mental illness.  Mental illness is a silent shrewd and cunning interloper that steels into our lives and before we realize what’s happening, it steals from us.  Mental illness steals opportunities, stability, family, friendships, love and sometimes, even life itself.  Let me clarify that for the sake of this writing I am not using “mental illness” in a clinical sense with exacting definitions and diagnoses.  I am using the term to refer to deep psychological issues that seriously affected the people I am writing about; some have had actual mental illness diagnoses and some have lived their lives without an official diagnosis.

I was born into a family with mental illness.  So, from the start, any chance of a “normal” childhood was stolen from me.  My parents’ mental illnesses made them incapable of dealing with the stresses of life and love, and made them not able to care for or love me in the ways that I needed. 

The combination of my “issues” and my mother’s “issues” led to us not having much of a relationship the first 35 years of my life.  As a little child I didn’t feel loved by my mother and we grew apart.  When my parents divorced, I chose to live with my father and his third wife.  My mother and I didn’t start to be close until about fifteen years ago.  Mental illness stole thirty-five years of a mother-child relationship.

My father also suffered from mental illness and this greatly affected me as both a child and an adult.  As a small child I idealized my father and didn’t see his illnesses for what they were.  I followed in his footsteps; in many ways to my own detriment.  As an adult I saw his actions through the lens of accepting that he was mentally ill, but that did not make his actions and inactions hurt less.  When I moved in with my father and his third wife, she told me, “I married your father, not his children.”  I was fourteen years old.  Natasha’s mental illness led her to being a cruel interfering step-mother and my father’s mental illness caused him to accept her horrible behavior towards me and my brother.  The nature of the relationship between my father and his wife allowed mental illness to steal my father from me the last fifteen years of his life.

By the time I was a teenager my own mental illness was in full swing and often led me to acting like a total schmuck.  In my lifetime there has only been one woman who truly loved me unconditionally, my high school and college sweetheart, Shannon… and I treated her horribly and eventually permanently broke up with her.  I was a dick.  Period.  I have apologized to her and she has very graciously accepted my apology and we are now good friends… but my mental illness stole the only woman who may have ever truly loved me… loved me for me without trying to change me or “fix” me. 

When I was twenty three I married my first wife, Ava.  Like all people, Ava had some issues, but nothing that I would say elevated to the level of being a mental illness.  I think… or I would like to think, that she did love me.  In some ways she tried to save me/change me.  The marriage fell apart mostly due to my acting out because of my mental illness.  At that point in life I was very difficult to live with due to my depression and anger issues.  At this point in life I don’t harbor any ill will towards Ava for divorcing me.  I’m not thrilled with knowing that she cheated on me and ended up marrying the guy… but I was a lunatic at the time and understand her behavior.  Mental illness stole my first wife from me.  With the loss of that marriage I also lost our home in Georgia and everything that connected me to life.  If I had been able to be a different person back then and remained married to Ava, I would have had a much better chance at a “normal” life.  It was during the divorce process that I shot myself in the heart with a 9mm handgun and six months later took 900 pills.

After my “should have died” suicide attempts I ultimately ended up at The Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA.  Austen Riggs is like no other place that I have ever heard of… it’s an open campus mental health hospital, which means patients are never restrained and can and go as they please.  While I patient there I had several romantic relationships with other patients.  One of them, Barbara, shot herself in the head with a rifle up on a hill in Stockbridge.  Barbara was a few years older than me.  She was a lawyer from an extremely wealthy family in California.  She was beautiful.  She was brilliant.  She was an amazing person and had everything going for her.  Mental illness stole this incredible being from the world. 

The CEO of Austen Riggs while I was there was a despicable human being, Dr. Edward Shapiro.  This man’s hubris was so elevated that in my opinion he was mentally ill.  Again, in my opinion, his ego directly played a role in Barbara being able to kill herself.  His mental illness allowed for Barbara’s mental illness to end her life.  I pray Barbara’s needless suicide haunts him.

Due to ongoing legal issues (divorce) I can’t really write about my marriage to Lena right now, let’s just say that we both had serious issues that led to the marriage not working and yet again, mental illness stole love, family and home from me.

At the beginning of this year I started dating a woman, April.  April is a nurse and seemed to be a very caring and loving woman.  When things were good, they were great.  But April suffers from severe insecurity, specifically about infidelity.  I have many female friends.  Several of those female friends are ex-girlfriends.  April’s insecurity led to her acting in very antisocial ways: threatening to beat up women I interacted with, threatening to kill someone and a phone call in which she cursed out an ex, Aubrey, that I have been friends with for more than fifteen years.  April accused me of keeping these ex-girlfriends “on the side” in case we didn’t work out.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  After the phone call, April told me that I had to choose between her and this woman who was nothing more than a good friend to me.  She wanted me to call up Aubrey and tell her that I would never speak to her again.  I refused… and April stormed out of my life.  April’s mental illness stole another love for her and for me.  April wasn’t “the love of my life,” but I did love her and felt very content with her.  It was the first time in my life that I loved someone, without being “crazy” in love and felt content with that.  This was and is a huge deal for me that I will write more about in the future… I thought it was a much healthier form of love, at least for me.  Mental illness stole that cherished contentment and love from me. 

There are many more examples from my own life that I could write about regarding the thefts committed by mental illness, but these were the big ones that came to mind while procrastinating filling out boring legal forms.  The point is that mental illness effects many people in many ways and causes all kinds of loss… real loss… that hurts… and sometimes… kills.