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“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” ~ Mary Oliver
Clarity on how to live can strike in our final hours. It’s a terrible irony. The clarity that eludes us all our lives comes unbidden at the very moment life is about to be extinguished. I witnessed this in the final hours of my husband’s life. Insight and wisdom came rushing in. He decided it was too late for him to act upon. Instead, it was to be his parting gift to me and, in time, to his sons.
It’s a winter’s night in November. All is still in our neighborhood. I’m jolted awake around 3 a.m. by the sound of our security alarm beeping. On two occasions in the past, our house had been broken into but I know by the beeping sound that this is somebody trying to leave the house, not break in. Next thing, I’m running down the stairs, taking two steps at a time. When I reach the hallway, I see my husband going out the front door into the cold night. Unsure of what’s happening and still half-asleep, I call out crossly to him “Where do you think you’re going at this hour?” He says in a quiet voice “I’m going out for a drive.” I respond “No, you’re not!” Then, I take him by the hand, shut the front door and, like a child sleepwalking, I lead him upstairs and back to bed.
I get into bed beside him, snuggle up to him and we talk. He tells me he has a sick stomach. His mind won’t stop ‘whirring’ he says. He asks me if I know how to make it stop. I don’t.
Now, years later, I understand the brain-gut connection. How it’s like a two-way highway connecting our emotional state to our gut. I’ve done a lot of reading on the mind-body connection since then but that night, I didn’t know anything about this highway, I didn’t know anything about how to relieve his anxiety, so I just lay there next to him.
In the quietness, my mind flits back over the past few years of our marriage. We’ve had very few arguments. It’s been a mostly silent battle between us, each living in our own trench. The closeness we once shared is gone. He works excessively long hours at the bank where he’s Finance Director. Our boys are usually asleep before he comes home from work. In the morning when they wake, he has already left. They desperately want to spend more time with him. The older one often tries to stay awake until he gets home but tiredness usually gets the better of him.
The night he was heading out for a late drive, after some time talking quietly so as not to wake our boys, I drifted off to sleep. I don’t think he slept at all. The next morning, he asked me to call his workplace to let them know he is sick and won’t be coming. I make the call, get the kids ready for school, drop them off and come back to check on him before I leave for work. My thoughts are on the mountain of laundry that needs to be done. I’m thinking if I get a load in before work and then another load on when I come home, I’ll get on top of it.
With such mundane thoughts on my mind, I go upstairs to check on him. He’s dead. His body is still warm, but I can’t find a pulse. His whirring mind has finally stopped. My world, for a while, stops too.
My mind rushes back to our final hours together and to our hushed conversation during the night. It was perhaps the most honest and vulnerable conversation we’d had during our 12 years together. He was heartbroken as he told me he’d “got it all wrong”. He’d put his work above everything: above his marriage, his young boys, his health and happiness. He said to me that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees, until that moment when he could see it all clearly. He lamented over what “a fool” he’d been. He felt unimaginable despair.
My husband paid way too high a price for external success. He’d fallen for the false promise of contentment and security offered by our achievement-obsessed culture, that if he worked harder, gave more of himself that one day he would ‘arrive’. He strove and pushed and achieved promotion after promotion. In the process, he lost everything that mattered to him.
He loved busyness. To him, it was the hallmark of a successful person. He didn’t realize that his compulsive over-working was his way of running from himself. It was how he numbed his fears. His fear of failure, his fear of not being enough, all of these could be pushed down with striving to achieve more success and recognition.
Work addiction is seen as honorable and noble. For a deeper delve into how work addiction has become deeply embedded into our Western culture, check out the article “Why Men Are Overworked, Stressed, and Burnt Out (and How to Break the Cycle)” published on The Good Men Project.
Work addiction is set apart from other addictions such as opioid addiction and alcoholism. However, it still has the power to destroy the addict and their family. This destruction happens inside homes with expensive security systems in affluent neighborhoods and not on the streets or under railway bridges. But the fallout is the same – families left broken-hearted and a young life wasted.
My husband’s realization of the high price he’d paid for external validation came too late to save his life, but it’s profoundly affected the course of his sons’ lives as they’ve gone from small kids to high schoolers. It has taught them some powerful lessons, such as:
- Self-worth is not dependent on other people’s approval of you, your own self-approval is all you need.
- No matter how far you progress in your career and how much money you earn, if you don’t have a loving relationship with yourself and those close to you, you won’t be happy.
- Follow your gut; if something is making you unwell, take action to change it and if you can’t change it, leave the situation.
- Asking for help is courageous, not a sign of weakness.
- Everything is impermanent and imperfect. Accept this and appreciate the small things.
- Failure is not fatal. It doesn’t make us worthless. Learn from it and keep going.
His final conversation with me before he took his life was perhaps the most important conversation we’d ever had. He trusted me to pass on these lessons to our boys when they were old enough to understand. He wouldn’t be there to help them navigate their lives, but he left them an important legacy: the insights he’d got the night before he died that would guide them to make better choices in their lives.
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National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
BE THE ONE TO SAVE A LIFE.
YOU CAN DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT SUICIDE.
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Photo credit: Getty Images