Sadness - A Normal Emotion

For someone who has lost their loved one to suicide after a prolonged mental illness, there is a unique situation where one intense emotion is “traded in” for another.  The trade-off for me was that the last few years before Erik’s death, my days were filled with constant stress of when and what the next crisis would be.  Not if the next crisis would come, but rather when would it come, and what would it be. Would I arrive home and he would be threatening to kill himself? Would the local police department be calling me because he was there saying they should arrest the employees at Time-Warner TV service because they were collaborating with the CIA to spy on us? Would my ex-husband be calling to say Erik was planning on climbing on our roof to dismantle the power lines? So on and so forth. 

As the days and months rolled out after his death, I began realizing that while I was feeling extraordinary grief and sadness, there was also an absence of a group of emotions that had taunted me while he was alive, those emotions amounting to an incredible level of stress, consisting of anxiety, fear, apprehension, loathing to go home and find out what was going on, and sometimes anger.  These feelings became a daily way of life, and allowed little room for or leftover energy for the other tasks of my life.  They were exhausting and draining.  So while the grief process was so very difficult, I also had an extreme sense of relief to not have to feel so much fear and anxiety. 

This would have been great news, except for one thing.  Using my logical brain, I quickly began to realize that it was a relief to not have these circumstances as part of my daily life, and that Erik realized that, and therefore how much of his motivation to leave this world was to relieve me of the stress he caused me? 

For those who have survived suicide loss, you know this means one thing…GUILT. 

To make it worse, the more time goes on, the more I realize how difficult things had become, how much less stress I have now, and therefore…I have more guilt. 

It seems that I should be able to accept my sadness as a good penance for not handling Erik’s illness better, as a punishment for getting so stressed out and letting him see how hard it was to live with him at times, but that thought doesn’t seem to help.

I think that’s because if I had to choose between sadness and stress, sadness is actually in some ways easier to function with.  I have thought about this a lot, and decided that when you come down to it, sadness is a “normal” emotion.  No matter what life style someone lives, or what kind of person they are, they will experience sadness because it is a normal part of life.  I am assuming the even the cave men felt sadness when someone died.  Sadness is a normal part of life.

But mental illness in a strict sense of the word, is not a normal part of life.  We don’t expect it to happen to us or our family.  It does not present us with situations that are readily handled.  And most frustrating of all, there often seems to be no end in sight, nor any way to “fix” the situation.  Money, work, effort, caring, and even medicines, don’t help.  Just when hopes are raised that the situation may be getting better, it gets worse.  And it is relentless.

There is so much knowledge now about how detrimental intense stress is to our minds and bodies, and I think it is because our stress is often man-made or because of unusual circumstances.  Well, I suppose the cave-men were probably stressed if a dinosaur was chasing them, but that would be short-lived. Either he killed them and they didn’t have to worry about it, or they killed the dinosaur, and they had extra meat for the winter. 

So, I guess the daily stress of trying so hard to carry on in a normal fashion when someone we love just isn’t acting “normal”, is an aberration of human functioning.  I think there were a lot of times I didn’t handle it well, but I did my best.  Because I am no longer in the middle of it, I feel like there were so many things I could have done better.  I generally work hard to keep my brain off this yellow brick road to the land of guilt, but it sneaks in every now and again.  My initial thought in writing this was to be positive and say that because sadness is a normal emotion, it is possible to be sad and still function fairly well.  I am able to attend to the work and play of my life so much better now.  I am used to being happy and sad at the same time.

 

Sometimes I wish Erik was here again so I could try to do a better job.  But he isn’t.  So I’ll just be sad.  At least that’s normal, and I can be happy at the same time.