Hi,
I've been reading the recent posts and I wanted to respond. I want to
express my gratitude to those who share so much of themselves here on
a subject that has taken me years to understand. Frankly, years to
forget. It was on Nov. 2, 1986 that I came home and found my husband
nude, bound,and hanging...it was only last year that I came full
circle in understanding and remembering exactly what happened. I can
assure you from my experience there is much out there to distract
yourself from pain, from crying, from feeling. My son who was a year
old who was in the room behind where my husband died was there would
be protected, we thought, by listing the death as a suicide. Of
course it was much easier for all of us to accept then. After numbing
the pain with antidepressants, therapy and alcohol, I found a second
marriage 4 years later. It was what I thought it to be, I forgot the
previous life. Another child 2 years later. Now many years later I
find I married a man with hidden similar addictions and now going
through a divorce. During the divorce trial I was blamed for the
suicide of my husband. My oldest son wanted to find out about his Dad
and by the grace of God, the officer who was there that night who
assisted me was still on the force and now a Lt. spoke with me and
told me to visit him. He told me the events of that night, the
coronors report and what they found to validate it. The Officer told
me to have my son speak with him. He did. My son now wants to be an
Officer. My son enlisted in the Army and is now in Baghdad. Pain is
the body's way of healing. Looking back, I stopped the pain any way
that I could. I made bad decisions based on a false gauge of my own
feelings. Oprah Winfrey had a show that year, perhaps a month after
my husband died about this. My inlaws wanted me to watch it as they
taped it for me, so they obviously knew he was doing something. My
sister in law said that he drilled a hole through his brothers
bedroom wall to watch them have sex. Are these indicators of AEA? I
don't know. But I sure needed validation of something after all the
lies I told and believed about his death, that it wasn't me who
killed him. My inlaws stuck with the suicide eventually. I want to
now take responsibility for exactly what I did and didn't do but I
will no longer take the blame for any of this. My Mother In Law died
2 months ago. My sons grandmother. The pain surfaced again. They did
not tell me that she died. They told my husband whom I'm divorcing,
this man told my son that "I made my first husband go crazy, that's
why he killed himself."

Thank you for letting me express this, as pain does subside. It
doesn't go away if you do not deal with it though as I've learned the
hard way. And time changes everything. Including reality.

I am in a beautiful place now. The Universe has given me a new lease
on life. This has been the hardest experience of my life. It's like I
had to re do my experience with my husbands death to move through the
pain with all the losses in my life. Truth is really all that
matters, and the old adage, "To thine own self be true" is what saved
me. Perhaps now someone going through this horror will know that pain
is really the body healing. Pain is good. When my heart felt like
someone took it out and threw it on a frying pan and put it back in
my stomach, I sat down. I called someone. I lit candles. Keep a
journal of pain and joyful moments when you feel your loved one! And
you will. Sometimes I have to force myself just to be still. To stop
the busy work. I found my calling many years ago shortly after my
husband died. It's as if God, the universe our bodies have a natural
individual salve to gather us on our path where we're supposed to go
and pain is part of it so that joy can be recieved.

God Bless