In our conversations those weeks before he took his life, I kept guiding him back to the professionals who surrounded him. I’m not clear as to how much help he sought out after our conversations from those professionals, or if these professionals could help like they “should” have. I may never get answers to those questions because there is so much secrecy behind depression and suicide. Mental health patient records are private, suicide is spoken in whispers, and depression has become more about marketing. So the question I went to after all of the harmful “shoulds”, was whether I could find some peace for myself. Though my boyfriend had to have been in far more pain to choose to take his own life, I was left to live out his pain. And if I wanted peace, the only way I would find it was to talk it out with others. With those people who also knew this pain. I dialed the number.
What followed were eight weeks of hour and a half sessions on Monday nights. There were eight of us. Five of us had lost our partners, the ones we had loved for many years. Three of us had left our relationships out of self-care, so in this first session I already saw how I wasn’t alone. There were two other women whose partners had acted the same as mine had in our last six months of our relationships. The others’ partners had all had childhood trauma. Every single one of us in the room was known in our families and groups of friends as the one who was nice to everyone. We were the ones who let things roll off our backs. We were open and friendly. We resolved conflict. We were the ones who quietly pushed when our partners wouldn’t agree to seek help. We were the loyal partners who kept their secrets. We were the ones left behind to now tell their stories which started to sound exactly the same, minus the manners in which they chose to take their lives.
