Last 10 Months of my Marriage

This month last year started my late wife's downward spiral that completed the destruction of our marriage and led to her death.

This month last year is when I started telling my older step-son everything that was going on and all of the history that had gotten us here.

This month last year is when I started to question my ability to continue to be married given the length and depth of the problems we had. I found myself starting to be torn between the formal vows I had made, the implicit promises I had made over 8 years to my step-sons, my own image as someone who does what is right, and a situation that I had no control of and that was going to kill me from side effects of stress.

Things got steadily worse for 4 more months. My wife's addiction spun out of control - slowly through August and September, gaining exponential speed through October and November. The relationship between us became nothing but adversarial. The kids emotionally went into hiding, when they weren't angry at me for the words they heard between me and their mom.

I'm being lied to every day, and I can no longer deny it or excuse it. Our bank account is being drained within days after payday with cash withdrawals that are denied.

There is no trust left between her and I. She thinks I'm on "their" side - they being anyone who has the nerve to suggest that she's an addict. I know that I can no longer trust her to manage her own meds or trust her with any role in our marriage. She can't be trusted to perform even simple tasks.

I have essentially become a single father to two boys dragging a semi-conscious partner occasionally along for the ride.

She manages to hold a job from the previous January through October and every time she drives off I wonder if she's going to make it back home. I see her cell phone in the caller ID and I wonder if it's going to be her or someone at the scene of her death. Every day. Every time she leaves the house.

In early October I get a call from her phone and it isn't her. She has hit the ground at work. Hard. When they find her she's covered in her own blood and seizing. She physically fights the first EMTs and goes into another round of seizures. They life-flight her to the hospital here in Phoenix that specializes in trauma and head injuries. I beat the chopper to the hospital and spend 90 minutes in a pea green waiting room with no word and no idea what condition she's in.

When they take me back, she's in better condition than I feared. She's banged up - broken nose, chipped teeth, scrapes and cuts all over her face - offensive bruising from fighting the EMTs and arm bruising from the restraints it took to get her into the life-flight chopper. But she's lucid other than remembering nothing between walking to the bathroom at work and being in the hospital. They decide to keep her for a couple of days.

The first night I don't stay in the hospital with her - the boys are home being my excuse.

I take advantage of having our bedroom to myself, and I've got all her personal belongings from the hospital. I buy a small key-locked fire safe and collect all of her meds. She's got some pretty creative stashes around the house. Into the safe they go. The key goes around my neck.

I spend the next 2 nights in the hospital with her (as is my norm) and we talk about how to get her recovered from this. Again we find ourselves in a position where we think she can't make herself any worse and she agrees it's time to deal with the reliance on the pain meds, muscle relaxers, and sleeping pills.

They release her and I bring her home. The theory, and what we agreed to in the hospital, is that I have control of her meds again. This had worked for a year. Just to bring things full circle, it had worked until this month last year.

This time around, it failed pretty much from the start. Because of her injuries from the fall, she was after me for meds every two hours. She would give me no peace (a disadvantage to working from home). She would threaten me. She screamed, yelled, called me nastier names than I've ever been called. She accused me of using control of her meds to "punish" her. I would occasionally give in - I knew she was hurting and I hated to see her in pain.

Two weeks from her pain management appointment I counted meds to ensure we had enough to get her through to her appointment. We didn't if we kept her at prescribed dose. We'd have to reduce some of them so she didn't run out. I go to tell her this and she's asleep hard in my chair. She's a little *too* asleep so I go through her purse. And there's another stash.

She wakes up and I make sure that she's actually awake enough to understand what I'm going to tell her.

I confront her with the stash of sleeping pills I found in her purse. She initially denies them so I offer to flush them since they aren't hers. Then she remembers putting "a couple" in her purse "for emergencies."

I tell her she has to make a choice. She hasn't given me control of her meds as agreed and she does not have control of them either. I tell her rehab or out. I tell her that the choices she continues to make are a slow suicide and I will not allow her to make the boys watch anymore.

She chooses to leave. She comes back downstairs with a small suitcase and lets me know that our nephew is coming to pick her up. She informs me that she'll be back for the boys. I tell her she can't take the boys - there's no place for them to stay at her sister's house - being out of work from the fall she can't afford food for them - not being able to drive she has no way of getting the younger boy to school. She agrees that the boys will stay with me.

She ends up at her sister's house where her mom also lives.

How do I explain to a 10 year old why mom isn't in the house anymore? I tell him that mom and I no longer agree on how to best take care of her health problems. I tell him that she's going to spend some time with grandma until her and I can figure out how to get her better.

It's not completely a lie.

The first night she's out of the house I get a call from my brother-in-law. EMTs have just taken my wife to a hospital. She was unresponsive and having a "seizure." I'm being summoned to the hospital. Not that they are there. This event happens in their house and they can call 911 but it's apparently my responsibility to be at the hospital.

I go. I'm suspicious that the "seizure" is just the normal after-effects of what my wife and I have come to call her "knockout dose." It's a crafted overdose of pain meds, a muscle relaxer, and 2 different sleeping pills - all prescription. It gives her a whole 4 hours of sleep and when it hits, it turns her off like a switch and gives her palsy-like shakes. She never feels it coming and has never figured out that she shouldn't try to do anything after she takes it. I suspect this is what my in-laws have seen and not being used to it, they panicked.

I get to the hospital and she's groggy but awake and slowly getting more lucid. Yup - this was just the knock-out dose. Hours later after her blood work comes back and shows exactly what is expected for the meds she is on she is released. She says she wants to come home. I tell her no and take her back to her sister's. Unknown to me, she takes another knock-out dose in the hospital bathroom before we leave and I have to carry/drag her into her sister's house. I'm furious and wonder why I don't just leave her in their front lawn to sleep it off.

The next night I get another call from my brother-in-law. EMTs are taking my wife back to the hospital for the same reason. I ask why he's calling me since this is happening in his house and she left me voluntarily - we are technically separated. He gives me a non-answer and hangs up.

I go back to the hospital and ask to speak to whoever is in charge of the floor that night. Two hospital admins come out to talk to me. I let them know what is really happening. They make sure that a counselor talks to her before they release her. I know it's not an attempted suicide, but I tell them to treat it like one, hoping they would be able to keep her at least overnight. They can't - they do not have a psych department so once she's medically clear they have to release her. I don't see my wife that night but she makes it back to her sister's when she's released.

I take the boys over to visit her. I talk to my in-laws as her and the boys get caught up. They are still unwilling to accept that she's taking more meds than they realize and that the lucidity they see is a front.

The hostility between us is palpable and alive - singeing the air between us.

My wife and I spend some time talking. She wants to come home and we discuss conditions for her return. She has to give me control of her pain meds without fights. She has to have made the first counseling appointment and she has to keep it. She has to let me take her to her next pain management appointment and we're going to talk about getting her off the meds she has the strongest addiction to (which were not her base pain management meds). She agrees to the conditions and I tell her to let me know when the appointments are set up and she can come home. This is a Wednesday. I bring her home on Friday.

Counseling appointments aren't kept. She maneuvers me out of going to her pain management appointment.

I've planned a trip back to Ohio over Thanksgiving weekend for a high school reunion. It's the week before turkey day.

I wake up just before 6AM and go down to the garage to get her next 12 hours of meds. The latch on the safe is open. There's a pry mark on it that exactly matches my big flat-blade screwdriver. I die inside. I know that I have reached my personal limit of distrust and the numbness that has been eating the edges of my life moves the rest of the way into my heart.

I take her meds out of the useless safe and put them on her nightstand. I get back into bed. She wakes up and goes to the bathroom. On her way back she asks why her meds are out of the safe.

I tell her I'm done, that she's on her own, and that I want a divorce. She breaks down and tells me that the safe "dropped" and opened. I ask her about the pry mark. She ammends her story that the drop only partially popped the latch and she "might" have opened it the rest of the way. I tell her that I can't even trust her to tell me the truth when she knows she's busted and repeat that we're done. She begs me to not do anything until I come back from Ohio.

I give her that concession.

I make sure that grandma will be at the house while I'm in Ohio to take care of the boys and I'm gone for 5 days. I spend a lot of time talking to my parents and my closest friend about the choices I have already made and those I still face.

I make it right with myself that by letting her go I am potentially letting her die. I say with no arrogance that I knew then that I was her best chance if she had ever truly made the decision to get better. I understood the problem in all its dimensions. I understood the interactions of the physical problems, her medical history, the addiction, the depression, and how to differentiate the different types of episodes (we could never bring ourselves to call them seizures) she regularly had.

I start to try to make right in my mind the effect this will have on the boys. Truth be told, I still struggle with making this part of it right in my mind.

I return the Monday after Thanksgiving. The boys will spend the coming weekend with their father and I will wait until the weekend to force my wife out of the house.

December 6: I tell her that it's time for her to go. That I was not kidding about being done and wanting a divorce. She tells me it will take her a week or so to find somewhere to live. I tell her she better suck up to her family - she needs to be out that night. She's had almost 3 weeks to prep for this and I am completely out of sympathy.

I tell her the boys are welcome to stay with me until she is back to work and is able to provide them a place to live. The younger one's school is within walking distance of the house and I tell her I'll stay in the house as long as he's in school or until she takes him with her.

This also gives her big stuff someplace to live until she gets a place of her own.

Her sister comes to pick her up and asks me the most and last relevant question I hear from her in 6 months.

"Is it permanent this time?"

"Afraid so."

And I lose the first of my in-laws. My mother-in-law is next after a couple of phone calls that convinces her that I'm not taking my wife back, even if she cleans up. I don't hear from my brother-in-law at all. People I have called family for 9 years, people that became my support system 2000 miles from home, gone from my life other than to berate me about dumping their daughter/sister when she needed the most help.

The locks are changed and the back gate padlocked before nightfall.

The boys and I settle into a new life pattern. The only real change is that mom isn't physically present. She had not been emotionally present for 18 months. The older boy and I spend a lot of lunch times talking. He spends time with mom but doesn't like what they are saying about me. He starts to defend me to them. He becomes my only supporter - a boy/man whose family I just started the process of destroying.

I tell him that it makes me happy and proud that he wants to defend me but ask him not to. I tell him it's not his fight. I tell him I expected mom's family to take her side regardless of what they see. I tell him I expected to be the bad guy and if that was the role I had to play to save my own life, then I was prepared to take it on. "Blood will side with blood."

January 18: Mom shows up at the house and announces that she's taking the boys to live with her. I know I can't stop her but ask her to make sure that she's doing what is right for the boys - that it somehow puts them into a better situation.

She tells me that the younger boy doesn't want to live with me. That he is afraid of me. That he thinks I no longer love him. That he wants to come live with mom. I tell her I see nothing in his behavior that would indicate that and point out that between living with mom and grandma and living with step-dad who makes him go to school and do homework, the choice is obvious and has nothing to do with him feeling loved.

The boys go with mom.

January 20: The older boy is back with me.

My wife spends 2 days calling him and berating him for "siding with your stepfather" by coming back to live with me. During the last of these calls I take the phone away from him and tell her to leave him alone. He's over 18 and she told him he had a choice. You don't get to tell him he has a choice and then tell him his choice is wrong.

I get steady irate calls from my wife and sister-in-law that I'm "brainwashing" him and turning him against her. They tell me that I'm not "letting" him see his mom. I even hear this from the younger boy.

The younger boy stops going to school. Mom is unable to take him. I offer to come pick him up and take him every morning and she declines. She assures me that she is going to have him transferred to the school within walking distance of her sister's house.

Life settles into a quiet pattern punctuated by screaming phone calls. I work through the day. The older boy and I eat lunch together most days. Another break to make and eat dinner and then I bring the laptop downstairs and it's back to work and watching movies until I pass out in my recliner.

I encourage my wife to come over and pack her stuff. My only condition is that I be home so we can deal with decisions. Since I work from home it is not much of a restriction. I also offer to pick her up between my meetings on days she wants to pack.

My wife and I make the major division of stuff decisions. By phone. She has yet to show up at the house to pack. I tell my wife she needs to get her stuff packed and out or it will end up being sold by the property management company that manages the house (we were renting) at the end of the lease.

Her sister calls me every couple of days and asks when I'm going to "allow" my wife to come pack. I repeatedly tell her that I'm trying to get her to do exactly that and have even offered to come get her.

February 18: My wife's family finally realize they are being lied to and that she isn't going to get better without rehab. I have been watching them play out the same scenarios I had months ago and they come to the same conclusions - she has to go through a detox program to give anyone a chance to reach her and the state of Arizona says she has to go willingly. They tell the boys' father that he needs to take the younger boy as my wife is not fit to care for him.

I end up with the younger boy for the night - his father needs a night to "get the house ready" which I interpret to mean "make it right with his live-in girlfriend."

I spend the evening reassuring the younger boy that yes, he really is going to live with his father and he only has to spend one more night with me.

February 19: I take the younger boy to his new school. This is the first day he has been back in school since my wife took him. His father picks him up and the new living arrangements begin.

My wife's family have decided they have had enough. She won't control her med use, her mom's pills are missing, she won't go into rehab and refuses to acknowledge that she has a a problem. I can't help but gloat a little - I tried to tell them in December what they were up against. Hell, I had been telling them since July 2007 that her addiction had become severe and they always expressed that it couldn't possibly be as bad as I was making it out to be.

They throw her out when they find one of her mom's prescription bottles in her purse - picked up that day, half the pills gone. She packs a small suitcase, packs her medical records into a wheeled cart and disappears.

No one hears from her. She doesn't answer phone calls.

Her family apologizes to me. For not believing me 2 years ago. For not supporting my attempts at forcing her into detox. For taking her side despite what their eyes saw. It's a start. I tell them it will take me a while to not be pissed at them, but I accept their apologies.

It becomes obvious that the younger boy will remain with his father and I start to look for someplace smaller to live. I don't need a 2500 square foot house, even if I keep the older boy with me.

I tell the older boy that he's welcome to make the next move with me. I just need to know so I can find the correct sized apartment.

I also decide that I will only get a 6 month lease and then move back to Ohio at that time. Moving back home had been the plan for 2 years as my parents get older, I just hadn't been able to make it happen with the other problems we had been facing.

But I will be moving out on my own. The boys' father is already pressuring the older boy to move in with him. This is the inevitable result of the impending divorce and their dad wants the built-in babysitter for the younger boy.

February 23: My wife surfaces at a hotel. She's been there the whole time and the boys' father has been helping her grocery shop and get around - he just failed to tell anyone else he knew where she was.

She wants to come to the house and do laundry. She adds the magic words "and pack." I agree and pick her up from the hotel she's been staying in.

She looks lost and smaller than I remember. She's haggard and drawn and stripped of her normal bravado. She's got that look of not having slept for 3 or 4 nights that I had come to know well when she ran herself out of meds.

I know she is one night from being out of money. She's one night away from being truly homeless. I know letting her become homeless will cause her death. Phoenix is not the safest place to be homeless, even for those with a lifetime on the streets. In her current state it would be a race between her body shutting down and her becoming prey.

In November I accepted that she would die without treatment and made my peace with having to adopt a passive role in the outcome. But treatment remained available to her. I have a worse choice in front of me now.

Can I accept passiveness in myself knowing that she will lose any hope of treatment if I don't intervene? Can I trust that she has finally hit bottom and has accepted that she needs help? Can I believe the words I am hearing - the words I have heard many times before?

The hope still lived in me - it had never left me completely. I did still love her - this had never been about hate.

But can I trust?

Can I live with myself if I don't?

I tell her this is not reconciliation. I tell her that the divorce is still happening. I tell her to think about this overnight - she's going back to the hotel tonight.

And I tell her that she can move back into the house as an alternative to trying to live on the street. I tell her there are going to be harsh conditions and there will be no room for mistakes. I tell her it will feel like prison but my promise is that I will do everything I know how to help her make progress against the problems she faces. But it has to be my way until either progress is made or we fail - no half-tries. I remind her that she'll be moving back into a situation harsher than she couldn't live with just 4 days before at her sister's. I remind her that I'll continue to be harder on her than her family had been. She is to have no contact with her friends that "help" with her meds when she runs out.

The problems I am taking back on haven't changed, just worsened. There are still two distinct physical causes of pain in her shoulder - a remaining small tear in the rotator cuff coupled with the onset of arthritis and an impacted disk in her neck pinching the shoulder nerve. There is the nervous system's oversensitivity to chronic pain amplifying the physical pain. There is a rebound effect of long-term pain med use also amplifying the physical pain. She is diabetic but has lost the fine control of her daily sugar level she once had. She stops eating for days at a time and her body is starving itself - her doc is suspecting that she is no longer absorbing nutrients again. She has a history of sodium drops that hospitalize her. She has acute insomnia but refuses to follow what the docs and the sleep centers have told her. Underpinning it all is a deep depression that drives her addiction. I could never get her family (or mine) to understand that she didn't become an addict to "get high." The overdoses and fugue states released her from feeling the depression. Her addiction was about escape, not about pleasure.

I take her back to the hotel. I wonder what the hell I just did to myself and spend time talking to the older boy about the offer I just made mom and what it means and what it does not mean.

I spend a mostly sleepless night alternately praying to be strong enough should she say yes and hoping she tells me to fuck off.

She calls in the morning. She's willing to live by my rules to keep herself alive. She thanks me for standing up for her and still being willing to help her.

I pick her up at lunch. Apartment hunting is put on hold.

She relinquishes her meds. I haven't bothered with another safe. She will either play by the rules or not.

February 26: It had been going better than I expected. There have been very few fights about meds. She hasn't been helping herself to them. She's been on the phone with her docs setting up the appointments that should have happened months ago.

In the middle of the day I find her passed out in bed. Well - mostly in bed. She's sitting half-way up and leaning like someone reaching for something on the nightstand. I push her back down into the bed - it's like moving a human-sized blob of silly putty. Exactly like a sugar low or what her knockout dose does to her - I'm used to finding her like this at night. I check her sugars - high normal. I snag her purse and look for a med stash. Nothing. Nothing hiding in the nightstand. I disengage the small pillow she props her arm on and there it is. Hidden between the dual layers of pillow cases. Three different meds. Her primary sleeping med and two that I do not recognize - I have to look them up online to determine what they are. They are the remains of the pills her mom is missing.

Several hours later she comes into the office. It's mid-afternoon and I'm still working.

The "discussion" follows the now-familar pattern. Confrontation. Denial. Physical evidence. Recanting original answer. The tone of this one is different. I'm not yelling. I'm just done. I have no energy left to give to the fight. I'm moving from feeling betrayed to simply not caring any more.

I ask her where she thinks she'll end up now. She wonders why she can't stay and why I won't give her a second chance. I tell her she's had more second chances than I can remember and she has lied through each one. She reminds me of "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health." I tell her the vows only work when both people are holding to them. Same discussion, different day.

She opens the one door left by saying she'd go into rehab but they all expect her to already be in withdrawal to admit her.

I tell her there is one that does not have that requirement. I've already talked to them and they have space for her. She wasn't expecting me to call her bluff, but she agrees to go.

She packs an overnight bag and I let my work know that I'm taking her to rebab - now - before she changes her mind.

They take her in and explain how they work. They can only keep her there 23 hours and they watch for withdrawal to start. At the onset of withdrawal they medically admit her and do a rapid detox. This takes 2-4 days. They let her take nothing with her - not even her diabetes meds.

We complete the intake process and it's 5:00 when I walk back out to the parking lot. I get in the truck and just sob for 5 minutes. I can't shake the fear in her eyes out of my head and pray that I've pushed her into the right thing.

I return the phone calls that I missed - 2 from work and 1 from my wife's family. Since I took her back in, they have gone from engaged in the problem back to observers, calling every couple of days for status reports.

I get home and the older boy and I talk about what happened.

At 11:00 PM I get a call from the detox center. They are releasing her. She has shown no signs of withdrawal. I remind them that we both told them that she would not show physical signs of withdrawal - this has been part of the problem with past detox attempts. I ask what happened to 23 hours - it has been 6. They tell me the decision has been made and ask if I will be who picks her up. I tell them yes, get dressed, and drive into central Phoenix in the middle of the night.

When I get there it becomes a bit more obvious what is going on. They are clearing the less affected people out to make bed space for the people that are fully into various stages of withdrawal. My wife just isn't "sick enough" for them.

This is the third attempt at detox. This is the third failure. Now what do I do? Do I throw her back out even though she went willingly? She does own part of the failure, but not all of it.

I don't remember the next 10 days. I know she stayed in the house with me as we tried to figure out what to do next. I know that things began to slip back to how they were in December when I threw her out.

In November I accepted that I had to let her make her own choices, even if those choices led to her death. During this blank spot I came to accept that she was going to die and that I could not stop it. This had down-stream acceptances. My boys would end up with their father - who does not want them and is emotionally ill-equiped to be a father. I would move back to Ohio alone - financially starting over and emotionally drained.

The next real memory I have is that we are back to screaming at each other daily. I can't even get her to help me sort our stuff with her in the house. She is back out of control, not keeping doc appointments, not eating. I tell her I can't do this again and she has to go.

The boys' father is asking if the younger boy is going to come back to us since "you're back together."

She had been cleared to go back to work and to drive from the fall in October. It's time for her to at least give the appearance of returning to a normal life. Her former job has disappeared - they closed the facility. She supposedly has some people trying to pull her back into a older position. She just needs to work out transportation.

She finds an apartment and gets a move-in date. She still won't pack or even sort. I can't get her out of bed or to eat regular meals and I give up - riding out the 10 days until she can move. I'm finding her on the floor more and more often. She'd dead weight when she knocks herself out and all I can do is move her into a more comfortable position and put something under her head.

She moves out. She takes a couple days of clothes and some basic kitchen stuff.

It's mid-March.

I do our taxes - it's time to bite the bullet and see the damage. Surprisingly we're getting a significant amount back. This is a huge piece of unexpected good news.

I start to sort our stuff. We had moved into the rental house about 18 months ago and never fully unpacked - long story and this is already too long. I started by sorting through the unpacked boxes. Boxes that were completely hers went into the unused front room. Boxes that were completely mine went into the garage. Boxes that needed to be sorted also went into the front room.

My stuff I sort and re-pack. There is the stuff I'll need for the next 6 months in the apartment. Some stuff I know I won't need until I'm back in Ohio and it's packed for the long move. There's a whole lot of other stuff that is earmarked for storage but I want to be able to get to if needed in the next 6 months. I get a storage unit and start moving my stuff into it.

The tax refund is deposited and we divide it in half. I get caught up on bills and put my deposit on my apartment. I'll pick up the keys April 20. I agree to give her an extra $1000 so she can buy a used truck from a friend of hers.

They boy's father is pushing the older boy to pack and get moved. I know that he's going to stay in the house until I'm out. He loves his brother but he's enjoying the relative quiet. The older boy and I have matching temperaments. It's been good having him with me through this.

I hear from my wife every couple of days - generally when she needs the truck. I tell her she needs to figure out where she wants all the boxes of her stuff and where the furniture she is taking is going.

The day before they are going to "set up" my internet and phone in the apartment, I take a couple of small bookshelves and boxes of books over. I need to have something to do during my 8 AM to 5 PM "appointment" time. The older boy comes with me. It's a small apartment and I point out where everything is going. He looks around and makes an observation that I had been avoiding. "This is just gonna be an office for you." "Yeah - yeah it is. There won't be much else in my life for the next 6 months."

Packing and moving. The boys' father packs and moves most of my wife's stuff for her. I help with the big stuff and we convince her to put the big-screen TV into my storage area instead of trying to get it into her third-floor apartment. Same for the hutch.

The younger boy's room gets packed and his stuff moved to his father's. It takes me a couple of days to get used to seeing that room empty and a couple more days before I can go in and clean it. There is it - the first irrevocable physical sign of my failure and of who I failed the most.

I arrange the adoption of my dogs. I've had a pair of Golden Retrievers since they were pups. I go through a Golden Rescue service and they are adopted immediately and adopted together. They'll be together in the Tucson area with plenty of romp-room. Live well, Smokie and Wolfgang.

First week of May I move into my apartment.

The bed is the last thing to go into the apartment - I had been working there the last couple of days and going back to the house to eat dinner, spend some time with the older boy, and sleep. I hate moving pillow-topped California King mattresses - when did they stop putting handles onto large mattresses?

The older boy finally moves in with his father and brother.

I'm working during the day and I'm back at the house in the evenings, cleaning and taking the last of my stuff to storage. I've waited as long as I could for my wife to pack and get her stuff. Most of it is donated. Some of it just goes to the dump along with the other stuff neither of us wants. Some of it goes to my storage area - things that have been in her family a long time and if she ever recovers, she's going to want them.

May 17: Yet again I am summoned to a hospital. In the early afternoon they decide to admit her for severe dehydration and low potassium and magnesium. By evening they decide she has a nasty type of flu (not Swine) that they have 8-10 other people in with. While she's there they find a growth on her lungs. They biopsy it and keep her for another day to watch for problems with the biopsy site. I go to visit her the next day and end up there until she's released. Because she had friends bring her meds she has a full-time babysitter. The three of us talk to kill time. The nurse can't figure out why we aren't together since we don't hate each other. My wife fills in the blanks and I hear for the second time that I'm "unkeepable":http://www.redbubble.com/people/opsdog/writing/3162913-fatal-flaw-part-1-background

My wife becomes a paradox in the next month. Physically she is getting weaker but mentally she seems to be more clear than she has been in a year. She's still waiting for the truck she bought to be ready and is getting pissed - she says it has kept her from 2 job interviews. She is saying all the right things for someone that has finally decided to get better. "I've lost everything, it's my fault, and it's time I started earning my kids back."

May 31: Turns out they gave her an arterial infection (early cellulitis - a form of scarlet fever) with the lung biopsy. Her docs put her on a staggering amount of antibiotics.

June 15: My wife borrows my truck, which she has been doing regularly for the last 2 weeks. She seems to be keeping doctor's appointments and whenever I drop the truck off and she drives me back to my apartment she isn't so impaired that I'm uncomfortable letting her borrow the truck. I notice that she seems to be losing weight again and she tells me that they are scheduling tests to determine if her body has stopped absorbing nutrients again. Taking her back to her apartment when she's done with the truck a song comes on that has always made both of us think of her (_Whiskey Girl_ by Toby Keith). My last living memory of my wife is her smiling and singing along.

June 19: I become "suddenly single":http://www.redbubble.com/people/opsdog/writing/3285524-suddenly-single The boy's father finds my wife dead in her apartment. For reasons I will never understand, especially suspecting what he will find, he took the boys with him to check on her. He did have the foresight to leave the younger one outside on the downstairs landing. But the older boy goes in with him and also sees his mom in bed.

I spend the afternoon with the police, fire department, crisis counselors, the boys, their father, and my sister-in-law answering questions and making phone calls. My wife's dog and cat are brought down and go to their respective new homes. I spend the evening reconnecting with my in-laws.

I meet my in-laws at my wife's apartment the next day to start going through her stuff and to start making decisions about what do with everything.

I'm first in. My sister-in-law is right behind me.

The smell is overwhelming. It's bright, sharp, coppery, and sweet. Gaggingly sweet - it's a smell that lines the inside of your nose and you can taste all the way down your throat. I approach the bedroom, more of the room coming into view in the 3 steps it takes to cross the living room. I pause in the doorway, turn and look at my sister-in-law and tell her "It's bad." She takes a step into the bedroom door with me and we both stop, seeing where and how my wife, her sister died.

The floor for a foot on her side of the bed is covered in a pool of dried blood. It is a deep maroon, so shiny it is almost black. The surface is dried hard and undisturbed, even by the police, fire, and medical examiner. She had been dead 2 or 3 days before we found her. Her bed was directly on the floor and the blood had started to soak up into the box spring along that full side and, it turns out, half way across the top and bottom. The blood starts on her bed, about face high but is mostly on the floor. You can tell where most of it landed and then pooled around the bed. The bedding is splattered and it's hard to tell what was direct contact and what was kicked to the floor.

She wasn't supposed to end up dead. She for damn sure was not supposed to die horribly. The implications of the volume and placement of blood tells me what I had most feared. She bled to death and she was awake and aware of it as it happened. Later finding sheets in the shower as if they had been washed and blood on the shower walls implies that it had started earlier and then recurred. She called no one for help.

Her sister and I are the only ones that can spend any time in her room. Everyone else is in the living room and I start to take boxes and clothes out of the bedroom closet to them to be sorted. Her sister is looking for any of my wife's jewelry - she knows which pieces my wife wanted to go to each boy so I don't give her focus much thought. I'm collecting paperwork, her cell phone, and her computer so I can wrap up any outstanding business and have access to her contact lists.

We take 2 loads to be donated and a load to their house to be sorted when the other sister comes in from Maryland later in the week.

The next day repeats and we get the apartment mostly cleared. I strip the bed, stuffing anything that was touching or within 2 feet of the bed into garbage bags and stacking them in the bedroom closet. If it has blood on it, it ends up in the closet. My older nephew offers to help and lasts about 15 seconds - I don't blame him and I didn't ask for help with this part on purpose. There's nothing on this bed that my wife hadn't splattered or dripped onto me after her many surgeries during our life together. And that's how I get through it - I go into "nurse mode."

My sister-in-law is still obsessing about my wife's jewelry, particularly the wedding set. My brother-in-law is obsessing about her SCUBA gear, which disappeared from the house during the move. The boys' father is saying we should sell everything and the money should go to the boys - as long as the in-laws don't end up with anything valuable. Multiple people are asking who is going to end up with her laptop (I did). A friend of my wife's is asking about a bracelet and ring that my wife had borrowed and was probably wearing.

WTF? My wife died with an addiction problem, bank overdrawn, eviction notice on the dining room table, no vehicle, and a stack of expired pawn tickets for the bulk of the marriage jewelry. Exactly what of value do these circling sharks think was left?

And I wonder if I'm the only person that mourns my wife, the person who was once a loving mother and wife (in that order) and whose love of life drew in everyone that knew her. I wonder if I'm the only one that worries for the effect this will have on the boys, particularly after they had to watch and live through the destruction of a family we had built over the course of 9 years.

My in-laws declare that they are done - they have everything out of the apartment that they want.

The place is trashed. I had told them that I had everything I wanted so whatever they didn't want was strewn about. I can't even identify the various pieces of things broken during this thinly disguised ransacking.

I get all the apartment keys back and will be glad to be able to do the bulk of the clean-up alone. This apartment is the last place my wife was ever alive and I want to be able to say goodbye without the vultures - with respect for the person gone from us. I will need some help moving the big furniture into storage, but my nephews have offered to help.

Monday I call the landfill and they tell me to just bring the bed and bedding. Let the front office know so they will radio up to the drop-off point and they'll immediately bulldoze it into the landfill. I arrange a second storage unit. I buy vinyl mattress covers to bag up her mattress and box spring so no one else will have to deal directly with the blood.

Over the next days I clean. I bag the bed and move it out of the bedroom. I sacrifice a new mop to the bedroom floor. It cleans better than I expected. I pick up all the trash. I take what I can move on my own to my storage area. Turns out I can manage a lot more of the bigger things that I expected - rage will do that for you. I even manage to drag/throw/roll her bed down the stairs, gather the remaining trash, and take 2 loads to the dump. I can only spend about 4 hours a day there - I know depression and shock are driving the exhaustion, but it wins each day.

My nephews are good to their word. We take the remaining furniture to my storage area. I do the final cleaning and turn the keys back into the apartment office.

Her cremation has already been arranged and the memorial service will be the next Monday. I am still fielding phone calls from people either just learning or not yet knowing of her death.

One of the hard calls is from one of my wife's ex-co-workers that had been our friend for years. She is absolutely furious with me when the call starts. I don't call her a militant bitch, but the phrase comes to mind. She asks me what happened. I tell her we found my wife in her apartment. She stops me and asks "Apartment? She was living with you." I tell her not since December and then a couple of weeks in February. She tells me my wife told her we were getting back together. I tell her that had stopped being a possibility in December. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, she realizes the depth of the problem and how blindly she accepted my wife's lies. And I regained a friend I had lost.

The day of the memorial service arrives. Family and friends gather. I lead off and invite anyone that wishes to share memories of my wife to do so. Many people do and it's good. We laugh and cry and celebrate her strengths and the way she touched us all for the better. This is supposed to be closure. From this healing should begin.

And yet 2 months later I am haunted by things half-remembered. This is my attempt to bring it to light - everything that I have repressed. Now I can start to break it down into manageable parts and deal with them.



You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
My energy's spent at last
And my armor is destroyed
I have used up all my weapons and
I'm helpless and bereaved
Wounds are all I'm made of
Did I hear you say that this is victory?
- _Veteran of the Psychic Wars_ by Blue Oyster Cult