Today

After being in shock for two days we both finally felt better. I visited you and we talked, talked, talked. It was good to see you! We remembered happy days. Very happy days, like a vacation trip two years ago. When you say you want to be that happy again, I know you can do it. You want to keep fighting!

You also had a chance to see a doctor today. Apparently, your suicidal thoughts didn’t go from 0 to 100 within minutes. Your worries about adjusting to life outside the clinic may have piled up over the last weeks and resulted in a suicide attempt as soon as something must have triggered it. This is good news. In a way. This means you can work on identifying the warning signs and react to them. Just another step towards recovery. It’s not a small step. But it can be done.

On suicide, part I

You learn quite some crazy stuff when you have a depressive husband. Stuff that you never even wanted to learn. For example, the three phases of suicidal tendencies: (1) consideration, (2) assessing, and (3) the decision to actually do it.

This week I learned that the husband can go straight to phase 3, the decision. With no time to assess or use any of the other strategies he learned during therapy to prevent his suicide. In the last minute he snapped out and called for help. This is why he is back at that clinic. After just being released. After months of hard work to learn how to deal with his depression and the constant voice in his head telling him he and his life are worthless.

I was traveling when it happened. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I was there. The morning he told me about the attempt, he also told me that he almost did it again while I was still sleeping in the other room. We cried, we talked a lot about it, and we called the clinic and told them he needs to come back. Then we had breakfast. We took extra long time for it, talked about the past week, laughed together. Some normality, before life in the clinic and frequent hospital visits started again.