I'm officially a widow as of this afternoon--update [View all]

[mnhtnbb]

Last edited Fri Dec 14, 2018, 08:00 PM - Edit history (1)

when my estranged husband killed himself. Used a gun.

My oldest son called me. He had received a phone call from his brother's partner. So he went up to the retirement facility where my husband was living and found police tape cordoning off his father's room. Talked to the police.

I can't say I was surprised. We saw this coming. As recently as a few weeks ago my husband had asked both his sons to get in on a conversation with a woman from an assisted suicide group. He wanted my oldest to order the parts on-line for a suicide machine. Both boys declined to help him.

It's not just the separation/divorce. He was sick. He had been diagnosed about a year ago with probable Lewy Body disease (what Robin Williams had) and had been being followed for several years before that by a neurologist who was well known in the field.

Both boys were initially really angry with me when I left him a year ago because they thought I was pulling a Newt and leaving a sick man. The problem was, that my husband was in total and absolute denial that there was anything wrong with him besides normal aging. He made me keep the possible diagnosis a secret from the boys for a year. He wouldn't close his practice (he was a psychiatrist). He wouldn't talk about selling the house. He wouldn't discuss making plans for how he wanted to spend the last best years...or talk about what I wanted when he was gone. He rejected my observations, fired the neurologist when he was given the probable diagnosis, and then went over to the other medical school across town and withheld his history from two neurologists there so he could manipulate them into saying they saw no sign of either Lewy body disease or Parkinson's. The whole thing was one great big denial and manipulation of everybody to believe there was nothing wrong with him, and an attempt to convince others that I was neurotic and in need of a shrink because I was making mountains out of mole hills.

I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't stay with a man who had so little respect for me. He was bullying, verbally abusive, and lied about anything and everything all the time. I was so angry and stressed all the time that I figured I would be dead before he was. The love was long gone, because the nasty behaviors weren't a result of the disease, they'd been there all along and I'd been the recipient of them for about 30 years of our 32 year marriage whenever we would have serious disagreements. I learned to bury my feelings, keep things to myself, go along to get along.

So. It ends. Leaving a mess for our sons. The sale of the house now waiting for the attorneys to weigh in on whether it can go forward (due to close a week from today). UPDATE: The attorneys have determined that based on how we held title, title passed to me upon his death and the sale can go forward. That's a huge relief.

It didn't have to end this way. Perhaps it was just more than he could bear. The man had spent his whole life devoted to understanding the mind, and in the end, he was going to lose his. It is a horrible way to go letting a progressive, degenerative, neurological disease run to the very end.

I hope he found peace in those last moments before he pulled the trigger.