When I lost my beautiful wife to sepsis, utterly devastated is an understatement. Numb. Shock. Terror. Fear. Panic. My future dreams with her - obliterated in minutes. Depersonalisation, out-of-body feelings. Suicidal. I didn’t want to live a minute more. An atomic bomb of pain exploded in my heart and I’ve been affected by the fallout of grief ever since. I joined a club I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Seeing her in the Chapel of Rest. Pain and defeat and loss and despair all rolled into one. My whole reason for being stripped painfully away with razor-sharp edges. Why me? Why us? Our biggest crime being we loved each other? I can only hope now she is in a happy place, a place where she’ll wait for me to come to her.
The anxiety and panic has been really bad today. I’m at work, but it’s a trial to even sit still. My grief for the loss of my wife is fuelling them of course. Things feel unreal. I want to cry. I want to run. I’m scared of being in social situations for fear of embarrassing myself. The feelings are awful.
Yes, I want to eradicate these intense feelings which are very distressing when they occur although I fully understand they cannot harm me. I sweat and feel the need to escape the room. I’ve liken the feeling in comparison to waking up in a buried coffin in the pitch dark, with about a quarter inch of wriggle room from your nose tip and no oxygen. That’s the panic. That’s as close as I can convey the suffocating feeling.
I am seeing a therapist and working through this but I feel desperate at times. I so miss my wife, my main support. I feel like I want to cry all the time. My therapist thinks I’m doing so well, I have been involved in an ongoing case of gross negligence against the healthcare trust who didn’t follow protocols and contributed to my wife dying. This has been going on for nearly 4 years. I fear a lot of things about the future - loneliness , never having love or happiness again and of course the deterioration of my mental health.
I will grieve forever I know, but hopefully with less intensity - I lost my soulmate and the love of my life. Nothing is the same. I wonder why I’m still here and what my purpose is now.