I Watched My Wife Die A Horrific Death. I Thought I’d Never Recover — Until 4 Words Changed My Life.

A little over two years after Lori’s death, I woke up in the middle of the night with a crushing pain in my chest and difficulty breathing. I thought I was dying, and I was ready for death. I actually only called 911 because I had made a promise to Lori years earlier that I would not die in the apartment.

When the EMTs arrived, my symptoms were indicative of a heart attack, and they pumped me full of the drugs to prevent any further damage. After five hours of tests in the hospital, I was told I hadn’t had a heart attack: I was in a constant state of panic. Even while I was sleeping, it was both absolutely shocking and not the least bit surprising. 

I confided in a friend who had been in the military, and he told me, “I know these symptoms; you’re suffering from trauma. You should try EMDR.” Those four words changed my life.

I did a bit of research on EMDR, a treatment that helps people process traumatic memories, and watched some YouTube videos, but I still didn’t really know what it was or how it worked. However, I knew that something needed to change. I couldn’t keep living — if you could call it that — the way I had been. I didn’t want to go through life disengaged, angry, unable to focus, and experiencing my unpredictable and uncontrollable episodes of shaking, crying and headaches. I couldn’t sleep, and when I did, I would awake in the middle of the night from nightmares that I had to remind myself were not real. Worst of all, I was completely indifferent to everyone and everything. I felt like I was trapped inside a box with no door, alone with years of agonizing memories flashing in front of me over and over again.

My first EMDR session was simple enough. My therapist had a gentle demeanor and a kind face. She directed me to a brown couch with two small pillows, beside a small table with a box of tissues. I noticed there was no coffee table, and my therapist was seated directly in front of me.

She began the session by explaining how the process would work. Each time we met, I would spend up to two hours reliving all of the memories that haunted me in excruciating detail. She emphasized that this would not be talk therapy and that I was going to re-experience my trauma in a safe place. 

She told me that when some people suffer extreme trauma, their brain doesn’t organize their memories so that they remain in the past. Instead, they keep reliving them as if they’re still happening. I asked her if I could just forget them.  She kindly and gently explained that I would have to live with those memories forever, but that if I did the work, I could forge a new path and begin life anew. 

I had no idea if EMDR would work for me, or how, but in that moment, I was so desperate for relief, I simply accepted what she was telling me. 

My first few sessions were incredibly hard. I wore earphones and held vibrating stones in each hand. My therapist began the session by asking me to describe a memory. Then she turned on the EMDR machine and told me to notice my thoughts and what I was feeling in my body as I thought them. I initially felt and thought nothing, but soon, I was overcome with waves of physical and emotional reactions: shaking, crying and headaches. Anger, fear and guilt surfaced, and I felt them intensely, but I often couldn’t find the words to describe what I was feeling. 

Sometimes I would ask my therapist if we could stop. She always said yes, but she would also ask me if that was what I really wanted. My response was usually no, but sometimes I felt completely overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. She taught me how to recover from the sessions and ground myself. For a long time, I couldn’t tell if I was making any progress, but about six months into my therapy, something happened: I found the strength to buy a new bed. I know this sounds trivial, but I was still sleeping in the bed where Lori died, and it was the place where she had suffered the most.

Towards the end of Lori’s life, she could not swallow and would vomit uncontrollably while she slept. Because of this, she would aspirate constantly, and that liquid poured into her lungs, but due to her paralysis, there was no way to know that she was having difficulty. There was no coughing — nothing. Once in a while, a tear drop might fall from her eye, and I knew that she was suffering.

The day that Lori died in that bed, she was drowning in her own body fluids.  There was nothing I could do except watch as she suffered for hours until it was over. I knew I should have bought a new bed the day after she died, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Finally, six months in EMDR, I finally could, and I did.