I am 74 years old, and I find it difficult to believe that I am at last and unbelievably happy.
I have arrived here from a dark, distressing please. By rights I should be dead. I realized, of course, that I was committing slow suicide, but the desire to dull the pain of existence was much stronger.
My mother always used to say that I was lucky, but my luck ran out when my father died of lung cancer when I was 12 years old. When I was 19 I came home to find my mother dead on the living room floor. Effectively rendering me an orphan. I made the major error of moving in with my then fiancés family, and I was trapped in a long abusive relationship.
My husband thought nothing of throwing a paper knife at me, stabbing me in the leg, or kicking me in the stomach when I was pregnant. I had to get up and go to bed when he died, and often he would talk at me all night and, if I dared to go to sleep he would nudge me to wake me up. My friends told me that his was not normal behaviour, but it was normal to me. Meanwhile my drinking escalated to the point where I was having frightening hallucinations and often breaking limbs.
His health was never good. He was misdiagnosed with celiac disease soon after we married and was on a gluten-free diet for fifteen years before it was discovered that he actually had Chrone’s disease. In the end he developed Parkinson’s disease via gallstone surgery. I did my best to take care of him through his various illnesses, but he still made-up songs calling me an ‘evil woman’. Though he frequently declared that we should be kind to each other, his behaviour to me could hardly be described as kind.
My daughter who made an unsuitable marriage to get away from her father, was afraid one of us would kill the other.
I left home for a while, did go to 90 AA meetings in 90 days, and had a spell in rehab, but I always had to go back out of a feeling of guilt, and, when I went home, it was to the same old situation. There seemed no way out… until he died.
Everyone who knew the truth of our relationship couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just feel glad that I could no longer be hurt, but I kept replaying past traumas over and over again. So it was when I eventually put myself in rehab again. By this time I was seriously ill, probably close to death. In rehab I found people that truly understood and it set me on the path to acceptance and happiness. Once home, I started to go to Motiv8 meetings as I wasn’t really comfortable with AA. Now I guard my sobriety jealously, and haven’t yet tempted to drive for almost 12 months now. My daughter cleaned my floor with one of her father’s suits after he died, is working on her built up anger. She is doing a Motiv8 CBT course to this end. I’m sure that people, seeing things from the outside, felt sorry for my husband having to deal with an alcoholic wife for over fifty years it seemed there was no escape for me, but at long last I am truly happy.
