When My Husband Died Suddenly, One Of His Family Members Said 5 Words That Taunted Me For Years

Most of all I was grateful for my parents.

In their mid-60s, they were now practically raising a toddler and an infant. I was tired all the time and so were they. Our relationship deteriorated even as I suffered crushing guilt over what they were doing for me.

Yet I was certain I could turn everything around. So I prayed daily for acceptance of my situation. “The Secret” became my Bible, and I spewed positive affirmations morning, noon and night. I tried to banish negative thoughts from my head and focus on future abundance, not what I’d lost. 

Nothing changed. Eventually I went through bankruptcy followed by foreclosure. I was fired from my job for not being able to keep up with the ever-changing metrics. When I discovered my oldest daughter was using heroin, I thought life could not get any worse.

I was wrong. 

My father developed Alzheimer’s disease, and I moved in with my parents to help care for him. Two years after he died, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I took care of her until the end. 

By then my daughter was no longer using heroin, which was an unexpected miracle.

But at that point my younger daughter was in trouble for school truancy and drug use. Eventually she was removed from my home by Franklin County Children Services after her high school filed a criminal complaint with the local juvenile court and a judge ruled that she be placed in foster care at a local psychiatric residential treatment facility. It was a good thing I was unemployed, as my days became a merry-go-round of mandatory meetings with social workers, psychiatrists, counselors and a court-appointed guardian. They picked apart my life and told me everything I was doing wrong as a parent but offered nothing in terms of concrete solutions or support. 

My daughter was gone for over two years. Upon her return, she told me she’d been sexually assaulted while she was at the treatment facility. Guilt for what she’d been through vied with an impotent sense of rage deep inside me. The feelings were so inflammatory that sometimes I was sure I’d self-combust. 

In the midst of my ongoing crises, I met a man in a writers’ group I’d joined in an attempt to get away from my life. Jim became a bright beacon in my otherwise dreary existence, so much so that I dared to envision a future with him. But three months after my mother passed, he died by suicide in my car. My younger son, who’d adored Jim, was so traumatized he had to be hospitalized after he became suicidal. My older son ghosted me for several years, deeming me a toxic mother.

I could no longer deny that my life had become a not-so-funny running joke, with me as the punchline. Sometimes I imagined my husband disgustedly shaking his head as he watched his family fall apart. 

Just thinking about it exhausted me. One day I lay down on my living room sofa and couldn’t find the strength to rise again. I prayed for death as I thought about how I’d failed everyone, including myself.

Elizabeth helped me to reframe my viewpoint.

“Your husband died, then you had a baby. You had to hit the ground running with no time to grieve him or help your children. Your life became a runaway train that took 17 years to crash,” she said.

She put me in touch with a psychiatric nurse who prescribed a combination of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. She also utilized cognitive therapy, including EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). Slowly I began to feel better.