In a matter of weeks, it will be seven years since Sean died. I, too, wanted to die. Not right away. I could intellectually accept the reality that he didn’t survive the cancer he battled so hard, but I couldn’t process it.
Grief trauma doesn’t always hit you like a ton of bricks. It did when we lost Jude, but with Sean, it matriculated in, like an IV drip of aching and longing and overwhelm and of separation with the self that I was when Sean was still alive.
The first month was in so many ways a whirlwind. He died on the fifth and was buried on the ninth of August. Family was at the house the day he died, but that night, it was just me and the girls—and Sean wasn’t coming back. Sleep was impossible. I woke up every hour during that first week, much the way I had after rest told us on August 1 that he wouldn’t survive his cancer. I kept waking up to see if he was still with us.
Once it was just us, taking care of my children was the priority. My own feelings were put on the back burner. My youngest was 19 months old and even though she was so little, she knew that something wasn’t right. She became clingy in a way that she hadn’t been since she was a baby-baby. She held onto my leg while I did mundane chores like unload the dishwasher. My three-and-a-half-year-old still held the expectation that he’d be coming back. My six-year-old also couldn’t fully process the totality of death. The day after he died, she asked if we could send daddy a text message in heaven. That broke me. I tearfully told her that he wouldn’t be able to respond to us, and then we cried. It was agonizing.
I didn’t want to take up the space they needed to grieve. People showed up with food. I numbly accepted it. I had no appetite. I couldn’t bear the guilt that I was alive and able to eat and he wasn’t. It wasn’t fair. I grieved for him, for the creative, kind, loving father who had so many ideas and ambitions, who was so encouraging for me and my dreams and aspirations, all things that died one-by-one until I also didn’t want to live.
I forgot to grieve for the person I’d lost in myself. I didn’t know how to care about myself in a meaningful way at all. I understand why, and while I will say in some ways it’s made me a more selfless person and it’s made it easier to not make life’s many hardships or the cruel things some people have done to me “about me”, I also deserved to feel self-compassion, something I wouldn’t learn to feel until this past year, truly.
The version of me who died was someone who could focus, who could get things done, who had the courage to do things that scared her (usually). She was the version who sometimes self-sabotaged and who harbored imposter syndrome. She wasn’t the most attuned version, but she had things under control. She finished her second master's a month before Sean died, chasing the ambition to start a publishing company, which had been directly inspired by Sean suggesting it when she was teaching talented writing student at who had aspirations of becoming writers but whose access to the increasingly corporate traditional publishing industry was restrictive. She cared about helping other people perhaps more than she cared about helping herself. She was still very much a product of her conditioning, which also meant that though she could intellectualize emotions, she struggled to feel them. Motherhood can make it difficult to know how to take the time to process your own feelings and emotions. Everything has to wait, and by the end of the day, you’re too tired to investigate your interior landscape. I realize this, too, is by product of conditioning that puts the burden of motherhood almost solely on the mother’s shoulders, though, Sean was at least a helpful and involved dad and partner.
Instead of focusing on feelings, this version of me cared about goals and achievements, but as I said—one-by-one, those fell away. The publishing company would have to wait. Then one day, I remember feeling that it didn’t matter if I ever wrote a book. I had notebooks of ideas and outlines for works I wanted to create—I still do, but I remember the gut-emptying feeling of “what does it matter”? What did it matter if I wrote a book that sold around the world if Sean wasn’t there to read it? I just wanted to die.
For my parents, their concern was my children—not me. When I almost cried talking to my dad one day, he suggested I read the book of Exodus from the Bible. I still don’t know what the point of learning how to build a fucking tabernacle was, but sure. I read it. It did not help with my grief at all. As for my mom, she only cared about the well-being of my children. The fact that I was at one point legitimately suicidal has never been fully understood. She’s only said, “I’ve never felt that way.” And she said that “I changed”. Of course I did. You’re supposed to. I didn’t just change I died. Not in the literal sense like Sean, but the version of me who existed before went underground with him.
My next biggest mistake was dating. I realized three years later when I listened to a mom podcast that what I already knew was a trauma bond (ugh) was actually a form of bargaining. Replace what you lost with a cheap and massively inferior knockoff. The only good thing that emerged from that relationship was that I was able to bear witness to all of the unresolved little-t childhood traumas that needed to be resolved. There were a lot, and that relationship triggered all of them while was dealing with complex grief. That diagnosis would eventually include C-PTSD because when you’re in a controlling, manipulative relationship with a narcissistic sociopath as I was, you develop symptoms of C-PTSD. It was nearly catastrophic.
But I kept showing up and doing the work. When I did write a suicide note in December of 2019, I ultimately made the choice to live for the sake of my daughters. At that time, I felt like the worst person in the world. I felt like I ruined everything and that I would ruin everything and that my kids would be better off without me. But then I remembered what my three-and-a-half-year-old’s therapist said when I took her to see a counselor after she started to scream that she hated me—it was so unlike her. I didn’t take it personally—she was a child, but when the therapist explained that in her mind, I’m God, and she was mad because I “let” her daddy die, my heart broke. I remember typing out the note in my phone’s app but then stepping away from the bleakness of that broken abyss realizing that while I believed I was the absolute worst person in the world, my children thought I hung the moon, and they were innocent and they’d suffered enough. I wanted to leave the party early, but they needed a chaperone.
Because of that relationship, I still couldn’t process my grief or extend the compassion to myself that I needed. You truly can only heal so much when you’re in a situation where you’re walking on eggshells and micromanaging the emotions of someone who doesn’t care about you or understand you. It took longer than I care to admit to recognize that actions speak louder than words, and if that person hadn’t done something unforgivable, I might have stayed stuck, so I’m grateful for that.
Healing the trauma that was keeping me from properly taking care of myself accelerated after the breakup, however, I hit another wall when I became aware that I was being gang and cyberstalked, which sent me into a state of hyper vigilance again. I am fully aware of the smear campaign that was responsible for it, and I absolutely pray that the universe delivers justice and that karmic retribution is as harsh and decisive as were the additional challenges I endured as a direct result of that abusive, manipulative, and psychopathic behavior. Let’s just say I’ve learned more about dark triad personas than I have ever cared to, but I plan to be constructive with it.
But right now—I’m still processing. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of everything that’s happened in the storm that loomed on the near horizon seven years ago. I feel that in so many ways I’ve done so much, but at the same time, I also feel I’ve done so little…at least in terms of my own goals and aspirations.
I’m not the same person I was seven years ago, but I’m also not the same person I was one or even two years ago. The person I am now has a keen sense for abusive and manipulative behaviors—my “early recognition” software has improved immensely. I can set boundaries. I can choose what and to whom I give my time and attention. I care about other people’s feelings, but I no longer feel responsible for them.
That said—I’ll admit. Recently, I’ve felt creative ennui, ADD in not knowing where to start or to turn. I have ideas, but I still feel like there are areas where I’m stuck. I know objectively I’m not behind—I’m where I’m supposed to be—we always are. I understand that. I know the things that I’ve tried to do—like actually start the publishing company in both 2024 and 2025 were stymied by other events—like making sure my kids and I were safe from Satan and Co. For now, I just want to write. I just want to focus on my writing and actually do what feels life-giving to me.
And I want to give myself the compassion that I had to continually put on the back burner. I’ve had to stop caring if other people understand—some do, but a lot don’t—many people, sometimes the people who should be your biggest support system just want you to get over it, which is not the same thing as getting through it. I don’t care if other people judge…widowhood is not like other losses, and just as I would never ask someone seven years later why they’re still mourning the loss of a parent, then why would anyone ask a widow of the same thing? But still—I have moved on, learned to live, and give myself a life and a personality that I genuinely feel happy with and at home in. Where we are is just that—it’s where we are, and the reality is that we all always just have to start where we are. I am optimistic that this is the turning point I have been moving toward for so very, very long.