Imagine if you will, pain so great that every beat of your heart feels like a burning knife being plunged into your skull. For years this was my reality due to blood clots in my brain causing massive bruising. All I could do was lay in bed and sleep, to even dare sitting up, much less bending over to pick something up or tie my shoes, was to cause the already unbearable pain to seer through my head with each pulse of my heart.
I could only live like this for so long.
I was told by everyone around me that I would heal in time. I would feel better in time. I would feel like me again… in time. No one could give a hard date, but even if they could it wouldn't have helped because I had such bad memory loss that I couldn't even recall events from earlier in the day. All I remembered were emotions; all I knew was pain.
Eventually I could no longer sustain living in such a condition. I could not see the end to my suffering, though in reality my doctors and my husband were right, time would heal this wound. I however, could not see this end; the only end I could see was the grave.
I knew where the pistol was kept in the house, that would be a quick and effective way to go… but that is so gory, I couldn't do that to my husband… We had rope for rock climbing, it wouldn't be difficult to learn how to tie a noose and hang myself from a tree in the back yard… but how traumatizing would that be for my husband to find his lifeless wife hanging from a tree… there was a bottle of Benadryl sitting on the nightstand, that would do the trick… I picked up the bottle and held it in my hand, in that moment I was flooded with memories of happiness that I had shared with my spouse… how he had stayed by my side through this ordeal. He never left me, though it would have been easier to do so. He never left me even though I wanted and was about to attempt to leave him.
Alarmed by how close I was to actually attempting suicide I immediately found my husband and told him what happened, and why I didn't want to live any more. For the following months he didn't let me out of his sight (or had someone else keep me company). He watched over me and made sure that I was never alone. He didn't have any solutions to my anguish, but he sat by my side and made sure that I didn't have to endure it alone.
Now that several years have passed and I've had time to reflect upon this event, I've come to understand intellectually what I knew in my heart at the time. Suicide would only take my suffering and pass it onto those who loved me most in this life. If I had killed myself that day, my husband would live the rest of his life with the grief of his wife surviving against all odds having Deep Vein Thrombosis develop in the venous system of the brain only to kill herself a few months later. Suicide wouldn't have resolved my suffering, it only would have passed it to the one who loved me most. This was what I could not live with, I could live with the pain.