Hello everyone, posting here for the frtst time, my husband died in early June and up to now I’ve been coping fairly well. I have no family and although I have lots of lovely friends I just feel the need sometimes to offload to someone impartial. He had some health conditions including heart failure, it was under control with medication, but with hindsight I can see that he’d been in a slow downward spiral over the previous 12 months. The end was only 72 hours after he was taken into hospital with pneumonia and although it was a shock, in a way I was sort of prepared for it, he’d lost interest in so many things and seemed depressed and I couldn’t see a way out of it.
I’ve coped fairly well up to now, doing paperwork and practical things, and I’m making sure to look after myself but the one thing that gets to me is guilt - and I don’t mean the “could I have done something to save him” sort. It’s something that has plagued me for a lot of my life, although in recent years I’ve got better at dealing with it since I heard someone say that if you ask people if they have any regrets, no-one ever says “I wish I’d felt more guilty”. At first I felt guilty because I am coping and not crying my eyes out (though I’ve had some weepy moments), but I think I’ve come to terms with that and realised theat everyone’s grief experience is different and this is OK for me.
What’s brought me here though is that I was smacked in the face yesterday by a big wave of guilt caused by something from 50 years ago. Been having a sort-out of stuff from the loft and found a letter I’d written to my husband in the early days of our relationship. I remember that things hadn’t been going smoothly (the reasons were largely down to me) and he wanted to break up, so I’d written 3 full pages pleading for him not to. No memory whatsoever of writing it so I read it through but couldn’t make head nor tail of it, so goodness knows what he thought at the time, but it must have had the desired effect because we stayed together and were married for over 46 years. The letter was so embarrassing it went straight in the shredder, but that’s when the guilt kicked in and I started remembering things and wondering if he stuck with me against his will just out of sympathy. It sounds really daft when I write it down but it’s been going round and round in my head. Today hasn’t been a good day, I couldn’t seem to think of any of the great times in our life together, all I could see were those negative experiences at the beginning and end, like a pair of grim bookends. But then just now I was looking through photos on my phone and found a daft video we did in 2010. We’d obviously just come back from the pub and my husband was doing a two-way conversation with a teddy-bear, doing a falsetto voice for the bear’s answers, and it really cheered me up.
Anyway, thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this, just getting it out of my head and down in writing has really helped. Thanks. 