Dead to Me
TW: Abuse, trauma, rape, death, alcoholism
I’m sitting here writing this with a conflicted heart on the anniversary of a death. Part of me wants to keep this story hidden and private — a Pandora’s box deep in the shadows of my heart. The other part wants me to open that box, dump the burden, set it on fire, extinguish the fire, set it on fire again, and then throw it out. The only issue is that takes a lot of vulnerability and strength. The catch 22? After everything, I’m scared to be vulnerable, and I wasn’t sure I had this strength.
But I do.
It all started with a boy-meets-girl. They were young and in love. So in love that red flags were disguised as carnival flags. They were together throughout high school and college. Then, they got married. There was abuse, and a lot of it. Then it all ended when the wife died.
My late wife that is.
There were plenty of red flags that I should have seen, but being colorblind really bit me in the ass. She was insanely jealous, controlling of my time, would loom past mistakes over my head years after they happened, and plenty of others. The issue was I was in love, and I thought I was loved. Well, I’m sure she loved me in her own way, but that love hurt.
Things got so much worse. We both started to drink — a lot. We both became alcoholics. I eventually got sober. She drank herself to death. However, before the relationship ended, I was beaten, strangled, raped, verbally abused, emotionally abuse, and degraded. I was told that no one would love me but her. I was unlovable. I was a burden. Broken. If I ever tried to leave, she said she would kill herself.
I eventually gave her the empty threat that I would leave. It was me or alcohol, and we know which she chose.
I was never going to leave.
Then one day, she beat and strangled me. I eventually shoved her off of me with my foot to keep her away from my face and neck. Because she had been drinking, she stumbled back and hit her hip on a dresser handle.
Then, she called the cops on me.
She called, after beating me, to tell the police that I was the one that was beating her. Due to her serious medical conditions at the time, her hip immediately was bruised. However, writing this now, I just realized that bruises take 1–2 days to form. So that bruise was never from me. Time to add a new item to my processing list.
The cops came, listened to both of us, saw her hip, then arrested me. I then spent a night in jail for being abused.
The next morning, she picked me up with a vodka bottle in a brown paper bag under her car seat.
Due to her having me arrested, that enacted a protective order that said that I could have no contact with her. The protective order ended up protecting me, not her. She would send me countless texts trying to manipulate me, control me, and interfere with my separation from her.
I didn’t see her again until she was connected to life support, brain dead, and they needed me, her legal spouse, to make the decision to disconnect her from life support and donate her organs — the decision to let her die.
I authorized everything. My only request was that to honor her memory, they played Landslide by Fleetwood Mac when she passed before they harvested her organs. It was her favorite song by her favorite band, which was painfully applicable.
She saved two lives and gave another person the chance to see.
Her parents largely blame me for her death despite the weeks I spent in the hospital with her, the seizures I made sure she survived from the DTs, and both my parents and me begging her parents to do something. My dad even went so far as to offer to completely pay for her to go to rehab after paying off $10,000 of students loans for her using money he received from his father’s death.
By the time that they were ready to do something, it was too late. The damage had been done.
At her funeral, I was left out of nearly everything other than one 8 year old picture of us in a video slideshow and the mention that I’m still alive. She was also cremated, which she had explicitly told me she did not want. Her remains were then kept by her parents, where I could never see them again, and I was excluded from getting the opportunity to meet the people who received my wife’s organs.
I started therapy because I knew I was messed up. During which I was diagnosed with PTSD and complex PTSD. In the words of Anna Kendrick in The Last Five Years, I was “covered in scars I’ve done nothing to earn, and I’m still hurting.”
For so long I would only tell those who were closest to me and/or didn’t know my wife. I was so scared of others finding out what she did to me. I was scared that they would think differently of her. I wanted to protect everyone’s memory of her. I was scared that people wouldn’t believe me. I had people very close to me tell me she couldn’t have raped and beaten me because she was the woman/wife, and I’m much stronger than her. The issue was, I was never willing to raise my hand, even in self-defense.
That’s over now.
She did what she did, and there’s no changing that. I’m done bearing the burden of this secret. This is my story, and I’m fucking taking control. I’m healing. I’m working. I have to put effort and thought into each and every day because of what happened. There are no medications to treat these injuries.
I’ve only just recently begun to understand the depths of my trauma and how much it affects those around me and the person I love the most. I realized I needed to heal and make changes. I’ve started doing meditation again, reading recovery books and journal articles, self-administered EMDR (this is not recommended), survivor workbooks, and, in an effort to emulate certain aspects of narrative therapy, I wrote this.
I’m done just surviving. I want to thrive. I want to be able to say that I’m worthy of love, that I’m not a burden, and I didn’t deserve what happened to me. The people that I’m closest with in my life tell me I’m a good person, and I want to believe it. I want to be a healthy contributing partner in a relationship. I want the closure that was taken away from me, and the closure that I can never get because she’s gone.
I want to love myself,
and this is a start. This is my story. This is what happened to me. I’m free from these shadows and dancing around the truth.
It’s time to heal.
Yours in pride,
Jae
If you or someone you love is being affected by domestic violence, you are not alone. You can visit https://www.thehotline.org/ for resources.
