Maybe I’ll Always Feel this Way…

The anniversary of Dave’s suicide is on the horizon.  I wasn’t even thinking about that until I started writing this.  What caused me to start writing this will probably sound bizarre: advertisements for the reboot of the series “Mad About You,” on Spectrum, the cable company to which we subscribe.

I had completely put this series out of my mind.  I was never a fan, but I had seen an episode here and there.  This series and the movie “Jerry McGuire” take me right back to the last moments of our marriage and trigger serious anxiety.

Dave was falling apart.  He had worked at Target for 10 years, and gone to school become a medical records tech and transcriptionist.  He got a job at a hospital doing receiving, which is what he had done at Target, but he was such an absolute control freak that he could not handle being told how to do things.  He would come home a trembling mess, swearing and throwing things.  If I hadn’t been so frustrated and ready to be done with our marriage I would have felt sorry for him.  In retrospect, I do feel sorry for him now.

Maybe that’s the thing.  Now I understand anxiety and depression and now I recognize that he was legitimately obsessive compulsive.  Those topics were barely discussed back then, and the Internet was in its infancy.

Back then, I just felt angry, frustrated, guilty and ashamed.  I knew I didn’t want to be married to him anymore, but I didn’t understand why.

So how do “Mad About You” and “Jerry McGuire” come into play?  Dave and I watched Jerry McGuire together.  In the “You had me at ‘hello'” scene, Dave burst into sobs and said, “I just want my wife back.”  His face was twisted in agony, and he cried.  His beautiful upper lip disappeared.  Dave was not a crying man.

In Mad About You, there was an episode in which the wife kisses her boss.  I didn’t watch it because I didn’t like the show, but Dave begged me to watch that episode, which he had recorded.

All of this was breaking my heart for him, but I also felt like I was suffocating.  I kind of felt like it was either him or me.  I chose me.

And now I have been sentenced to a life of guilt, no matter how many times I am told by counselors, friends, family, and myself that what he did was his choice.

If you have ever seriously considered suicide (I have) please know that it is something that will forever mark the survivors.