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iceboundeve · 7 years

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It’s been nine month since since my boyfriend took his life, and it still has me as fucked up as when I was first processing the news. The debilitating grief and loss I have been experiencing has evolved with a continuous ebb and flow, but the gnawing void in my life has not become anymore manageable. It simply exists alongside everything that I do. It’s still so hard to understand that he is gone, and he’s not coming back, and that the circumstances with which he left this earth under leave me suffocated by these profound unknowns.

I wish I could say this is normal grief. I wish I could say the only challenge I am facing is mourning the loss of my soulmate. The reality is, there is a substantial amount of additional pain that I am forced to navigate simultaneously. And if I could have just one thing, it would be to resolve the feelings of invalidity I have had to face at the hands of people not willing to understand my side of the story.

For the last year of his life, my boyfriend grappled with the throes of alcohol addiction. In the time that I knew him before our relationship when we were friends, and even within the commencement of our relationship, this struggle of his was something unbeknownst to me. It required an intervention from one of my boyfriend’s very close coworkers, a father figure one could even say, for me to have any inkling that addiction existed in his life. Upon finding out, my gut instinct immediately made me want to make sure that he got help. No matter how much he tried to pass off this stumble as something insignificant, some residual depression compiled upon stress from a high intensity job, I couldn’t help but feel like help was what he needed, and recognizing a root cause would be the only way to abolish this problem completely.

Fast forward to when a lot of changes started taking place in our lives. I moved across the country, from the east coast to Alaska, so that we could live together. This was a turning point in our relationship, and in the sense of all the build up that had taken place in the year leading to that point, our dreams were about to unfold. Head over heels does not even begin to explain how in love we were with each other. We were not shy about planning our future together, talking about living together, building relationships with each other’s friends and family, becoming engaged, getting married, having children; there was no detail too vast or unreachable.

We had a fleeting taste of what that life we planned was going to be like, and then that lingering addiction began to creep forward from the shadows again. I admit that at first I was extremely naive to to the mechanisms, behavior, and psychology of addiction. Having never been subjected to it before, how was I supposed to be confident that I knew anything? Quickly, I had no other choice but to learn. In just a matter of days, my boyfriend quit his job without warning and showed up at our doorstep severely inebriated and in a very bewildered state, as if even he didn’t know what it was he had done. From there is were the rest started.

Being in a relationship with someone who struggles with addiction is like being committed to one person while someone else waits in the wings and does everything in their power to make you two breakup. The first, is person you fell in love with. He comes around and makes you smile, holds you close and reminds you that everything will be okay. But his presence tends to be infrequent. The antagonist, on the other hand, tends to be the one who comes around more often. He’s there in the house, but makes you feel alone because he’s always sleeping, or gazing off into space. He never asks you about your day, but instead likes to fixate on asking if anyone else has been talking to you, or if you’ve been talking to other people. He loves to project his insecurities and faults onto any aspect of your life he can catch within his grasp.

Being in a relationship with someone who struggles with addiction is like being afraid to feel happiness. As the companion of someone with an addiction, you are not in control, but rather under control. So long as this battle exists, your life revolves around putting out fires and trying to get ahead of all the triggers that causes your loved one to succumb to their vice. You convince yourself that it’ll get better if you can only outsmart the grips of the addictions. If I could bar him from having any access to alcohol, we could stop this downfall that seemed to be escalating profusely. You convince yourself once you get the upper hand, you are going to be consciously meticulous and gentle about assessing the damage, and will handle your fragile significant other with care in hopes of coaxing them to want to get help. The reality is, you have no control. You are at the mercy of being forced to relinquish your autonomy to avoid having another relapse on your hands.

Weeks turned into months, and there was no end in sight. What came next was tensions building between my boyfriend and his family. In the beginning, I tried doing what I could to make sure they knew what was going on, after all, I was the one coming home to finding my boyfriend at the end of a binge, or passed out, or severely ill, or even beat up from some sort of unknown brawl. It wasn’t long before I felt like an inconvenience if I brought up something gone wrong from my boyfriend’s addiction. It wasn’t long either before my boyfriend continually got angry at me for getting his family involved and letting them in on something he seemed to want to remain a secret. What was I supposed to do? Was it the right thing to stand by my boyfriend’s side and be the one to support him on my own? Or was it the right thing to disregard his wishes, potentially inflaming the situation more in order to keep his family updated to everything going on, and have them intervene?

Soon I had no choice, and my boyfriend drew a clear line between myself and his family. And the side he chose to stand on was mine. Instead of it being myself and his family against his addiction, it was now his family being pitted against me. Against my wishes, I was held captive in a very toxic situation. The attention veered from trying to help my boyfriend through his addiction, to being the target of a family that lost their son in what appeared to be the workings of a manipulative girlfriend. I wanted nothing more than to help him, so refrained from filling in his family on every gritty detail of how he was doing, but as a result, the less I made sure I involved them, the more it looked like I was trying to coax their son away.

And so it stayed for months on end as I tried to just hold on and keep my boyfriend safe. We moved from place to place, we fell apart and continued to glue shattered pieces back together, and still his addiction persisted. It got dangerous on many occasions, and I was forced to be the negotiator of multiple suicide attempts. My life was not mine. I existed purely to just be the facet that kept my boyfriend alive, no matter the detriment to my life. This was not a situation I could just walk away from if I wanted to.

To be frank, his family hated me. They hated my place in his life, they hated that I had something he found so irresistible that he would venture to turn his back on them and cut contact in order to remain with a woman he wanted, and they hated that he turned to me for help. Everything that happened looked like it was by my control. It looked like I wanted to push them away, it looked like I wanted to make sure he remained far away from them. No matter which way I cut it, I was fucked. I found myself involved in a situation that would never be improved. And it seemed like I was the only person who could realize this was all because of an addiction. That the person at the center of this all was not in their right mind, was not a pawn to be played, was not a prize to be won, but a fucking human being who was suffering an unimaginable amount.

When my safety was put on the line, and when my boyfriend began to make threats against my life, I had no other choice but to file a restraining order. I was exhausted, I was terrified, and I was falling apart. For 20 days, I had silence. But even silence and safety felt debilitating. How was I supposed to function when all I had known up until that point was how to care for someone else instead of myself? When our court date came, it was nerve wracking. I shook like a leaf as I talked to the judge and described the situation. When given the choice to extend the order for an entire year, I declined.

Finally, there was a break in the storm. In the days after the order was filed, it seemed as if my boyfriend finally started making amends with his family under his own jurisdiction. I had to thank God that this took place. It also seemed like he made massive strides in keeping himself sober. For the next four days, we were at peace. We approached each other gently, we spoke softly, we negotiated these foreign waters of not having alcohol be at the forefront of everything. For once, things were good. For once we could be happy and not be scared that it wouldn’t last.

On September 5, 2016, my boyfriend killed himself. Just hours before, he had been spending time with me, and it was like a day out of one of our dreams we thought we had lost.

I didn’t find out he had passed until two days later. No one called me. No one texted me. All his friends and coworkers knew about what happened at least a day before I had any clue. I found out via a post someone had commented on that happened to come up on my newsfeed.

No one fucking told me.

From that point forward, his family was making every advance to make it so I would be erased from his life. To them it seemed like I made their son do this, I took away his happiness, it was my presence and my influence that made him take his own life.

They forbid me from attending his funeral. I didn’t get to say my last goodbye. I didn’t get to shed tears before his casket when he was buried. I wasn’t permitted the release of being able to witness him being laid to rest. I was robbed of something I so truly needed to have just a small shred of peace within this devastating experience. To them, my pain, my grief, my heartbreak, and my sadness were completely invalid. There was no amount of remorse in the wake of his death that would inspire them to lay down their defenses.

I struggle every single day with all of this. Some days more than others. Today is just one of those days where I can’t hold back the tears that well up within me. I’ve come a long way with getting my life back towards some towards of deliberate direction, but there is still a long way to go. And at times that thought is overwhelming. There’s a lot I wish had not happened. There is a lot I wish I could change. But if it came down to just being granted one thing, I wish I didn’t have to suffer so much at the hands of those who just really have no comprehension of what I have been through.

#grief #loss #suicide #depression #personal #Thoughts

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