Jenny,
I miss you. I miss you so much that my bones are aching. My lungs can’t take in the air they need to breathe when I think of you. Without you I am lost adrift in this terrible sea of life and I don’t want to be here anymore. The world is darker without you. There is more pain and more suffering, only maybe that’s just in me. It’s not fair that I’m stuck here while you’re gone. I should’ve seen this coming. I should’ve been able to stop it.
The kids are quiet. It’s hard to look into their faces and not just see yours looking back at me. June asks me if you’re coming back, sometimes. How do you tell a four year old that no, their mommy is not coming back? Henry hasn’t said much at all, if I’m honest. I’m thinking about sending them to live with Margaret for a while. I know it’s not the right thing to do, when children lose a parent the remaining one shouldn’t just send them to live with their aunt but I don’t know if I can do this without you, Jen. Every part of you is what made me the father I was.
I’m sorry for falling to pieces like this. I know you would want me to stay strong for the kids. You’d want me to hold down the fort until this new normal starts to feel less horrible. Well, I want you to be alive so we can’t all have what we want, can we? You left us, and so you forfeited your right to decide how we deal with what’s left.
I love you so much. I miss you so fucking much. I hate what you did but I hate more that I didn’t stop you. I will never stop missing you or loving you or thinking about you.
Yours always and forever,
Jaime
Jenny,
It’s been 455 days since you took your last breath. 432 days since I wrote to you last. I have thought about you every day since, it just hurts too much to put pen to paper and write a letter that will never be read.
I didn’t send the kids to live with my sister. I wanted to, God, I wanted to. But I knew that if they couldn’t have both parents, they needed the one they were left with to be strong. So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve been strong. I get up every day and I make them breakfast and I take them to school and over dinner, I ask them how their days were.
You missed their birthdays. June is five, or as she likes to say, “a whole hand,” now. We had a tea party with the kids from her pre-school class. She wore a crown and saved a seat next to her for her mommy.
Henry is officially a teenager now. He had a party at the movie theater; they saw Spiderman 2. He didn’t save a seat for you, but in the movie, Spiderman loses someone really special to him. Henry would never admit it, but I’m pretty sure he got choked up. I know I did.
Every day is easier, and then when I think things like that, it feels infinitely harder. Feeling better feels like forgetting you. Feeling better feels like accepting it, and how can I accept that my wife killed herself?
It drives me insane when people refer to it as you passing away. Or worse, when they say that I lost someone. I didn’t lose you. I found you, actually; in a bathtub half full of water, half full of blood. You didn’t pass away and you aren’t in a better place. You’re dead. You murdered yourself.
My therapist (Can you believe I’m seeing a therapist?) says I need to work on forgiveness. He says that it’s holding me back from moving on. He says if I can forgive you, I can forgive myself.
I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. I’ll let you know how it goes with trying to forgive you though.
Jaime
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