I broke down crying today bc I was running late to an appt and left the house in sweatpants so… That’s how I’m doing. But hey, at least I still went to the appointment.
“I know love is love, that’s it.”
Cold War (2018) dir. Paweł Pawlikowski
Trigger Warning: Death
This time one year ago was my last day with Richard, @areyouawizard , before he died. We hung out at home with my six year old daughter Eden, whom he’d been helping me raise since she was two, then he went to work. I stayed home and watched Ghibli films with Eden, then put her to bed.
Richard’s mom messaged me and asked if he was okay bc she had a feeling something was wrong. I messaged him and told him to call her to let her know he was okay, and I told her he’d just been home with me, that he was at work now, and that everything was okay and he would call her, and she thanked me.
He came home late from work and I had texted him asking if he was okay, bc I was worried that he was so late and I hadn’t heard from him. He came home around 11:30pm from a shift that was supposed to end at 9pm, and told me he’d lost the phone I had just given him. We argued for about a minute, and then I told him that, even though it was extremely frustrating that he’d lost a phone I had just given him, I loved him too much to continue arguing. I told him I just wanted to cuddle and watch anime. He said he was going to the bathroom and said he’d be right back to do just that.
I sat in our room waiting for him and played Pokemon on an old Gameboy color. After about ten minutes, I heard a clattering noise. Eden was sleeping, so I went into her room to check on her, thinking she’d fallen out of her bed or something. She was fine and I was confused, but I went back into my room and continued playing Pokemon. I was on Suboxone maintenance, and I thought Richard was too. I didn’t even think to check on him when I heard that noise, because he’s and adult, and I thought that he was clean and sober, and probably just doing a number two.
Another ten minutes passed, and I broke out of my Pokemon trance and wondered what was taking him so long. I got up and knocked on the bathroom door and called his name. He didn’t say anything. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep on the toilet or something, he was always exhausted after coming home from work. I opened the door and saw him laying face down on the floor in front of the toilet, as he had fallen off. I called his name again and went up to him. I was still thinking that he had just fallen asleep and fell off the toilet. My mind couldn’t think what was really happening, because I couldn’t accept that. I was completely clueless.
I rolled him over, I noticed that rolling him was complete dead weight. I’d moved a body to the morgue once before while working in the hospital, and rolling Richard reminded me of rolling that patient off their bed. His lips were blue and his eyes were half open and rolled back.
I snapped into an intense shock, starting when I rolled him, and a million thoughts began running through my mind all at once. I shook him and said his name again. I got up and ran to Eden’s room. I closed her door and turned her light on, so she wouldn’t wake up afraid of the dark and come out because she was scared. I went back to the bathroom and began CPR and noticed a needle on the floor next to where he’d been laying. I ran to my room and rifled through my backpack and grabbed my narcan kit and my phone. I came back to him and narcanned him. Nothing changed.
I kept saying his name and telling him to come back. I called 911 and the dispatcher walked me through more CPR until the medics arrived. I told them my daughter was home, and one of them went into her room with her to make sure she didn’t wake up. They pulled him out into the hallway and I ended up trapped in my room, unable to sit with Eden, and stuck watching them try to revive him. I sat on my bed and looked him in his (completely vacant) eyes as his body bounced up and down in synch with the medic’s compressions.They asked me what his drug of choice was, I told them opiates, and I told them that I’d already narcanned him once.
I called his parents and told them I’d found him unconscious. They asked if he was alive and I told them I don’t know. I told them to go to the hospital. I called my brother and told him what was happening. I texted my manager at Barnes and Noble, and told him why I wouldn’t be at work the next day.
After an hour of the medics giving him compressions and oxygen, they got his heart starting again and brought him out into the ambulance and to the hospital, where his parents were waiting for him. After they all left, I brought Eden into my room and cuddled with her in my bed. She asked me what was wrong and I told her that Richard got sick and had to go to the hospital. I had hope that he would come back because they’d gotten his heart starting again. After she fell back asleep in my bed, I called her dad and told him what happened and suggested that she stay with him for a while. About an hour later he came and picked us both up. He brought her home with him and dropped me off at the hospital.
For the next two days, his family and I stood at his bedside, sobbing, holding his hand, and kissing his cold and clammy forehead, while we watched his body die. On day two, he was taken off life support and brought into surgery, as he was an organ donor. A woman who worked with the organ donor association came in with molding kits, and gave his family and I each a mold of his handprint. Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I keep it next to me in bed and hold my hand to it.
My brother came up to NY from Texas the day after I found him and made sure I wasn’t alone. My best friend since highschool came up from DC the next week after he left so that I wouldn’t be alone during his funeral. After she left, I spent all my time with Richard’s old cell mate, telling everybody else that he was there to make sure I was okay, like my brother and best friend had. Really, we were actively shooting heroin and coke together, which I had never done before, platonically sharing a temporary life consumed with getting high and finding ways to get drugs to get high. He had recently found one of his friends dead, and we were both completely absent and in shock, trying desperately to feel any kind of peace.
For me, I just wanted to feel anything other than the soul crushing grief that made me want to kill myself, and hoping that I would accidentally die of an overdose while doing so. I wanted to join Richard, I wanted to be with him again. At one point, I actually hung a noose, put it around my neck, and dropped. But the rope fell off the hook I hung it from and I gave up and got high again instead, which is exactly what happened in highschool when I tried to kill myself, except for the getting high part. During this time, I was still living in the house that Richard and I had shared together with Eden for the past two years. Now it was empty and surreal, and I often lied on the bathroom floor where I had found him, and cried while begging him to come back.
This lifestyle lasted one month. I went back to work in this time, and my manager encouraged me to take more time off, as I guess I was clearly completely absent from myself. My mom and best friend came up from Virginia and helped me move out of my house in Rochester, and into my aunt’s house two hours away, where I detoxed myself by smoking weed.
Now, one year, two relapses, two overdoses, and two rehabs later, I’m in a sober living house two hours away from Rochester, and have seven months clean. Eden is still with her dad, we still have joint custody, and I spend as much time with her as I can. She was with me for the whole week of Christmas. I spend every day in outpatient therapy for substance abuse and PTSD, self help meetings, and community outreach. I’m working on getting a job at a radio station, and my goal is to be okay with my trauma enough to work as an emergency dispatcher myself, so that I can pay back my student loans by doing something I’ll actually enjoy doing, and go back to school to finish my nursing degree.
I still struggle, and there’s still a lot of work that I have to do, and a lot of things that I have to get right. But, I actually feel at peace most of the time, without having to get high anymore, and without having to use any kind of unhealthy coping mechanisms. I’ve found spirituality in Buddhism, I meditate every day, I have a sponsor and do stepwork, I do yoga, I draw, I knit, and I embroider. I’ve learned how to handle my emotions without self destructing. I’ve found love again, which I thought I would never want again, and thought would never happen again anyway. I’m in a very happy, healthy, and loving relationship. I see positive parts of Richard in him in many ways, despite him overall being very different from him, in all the best ways. It almost feels like Richard sent him to me, so that I wouldn’t be alone in his absence. Most importantly, I am happy.
That one night, and Richard’s absence, changed my entire life forever. Everything got completely flipped upside down. The life that we had built together disappeared, along with the future life together that we had counted on. I miss him every day, and I will continue to love him for the rest of my life. The leader of one of my Buddhist groups once told me that grief is love with nowhere to go. So I send him messages frequently as a way to send that love for him somewhere. And I share my memories with him to others as often as I can.
This is the first time that I’ve shared all of this in it’s entirety, and tbh I’m not completely sure why I’ve taken the time to type it all out and share it, but it is extremely therapeutic to do so. The next few days will be extremely difficult for me, but I know that Richard would want me to stay strong and sober throughout it all, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
