My ex boyfriend killed himself a few months after we'd broken up.
It's a weird story. We weren't good together from the start. He was abusive and an alcoholic. Well he was realky an anything-holic. If there was anything in the house or atbhis disposal that he could use to alter his perception of the world, he would just consume it until there was nothing left. Alcohol was just the easiest thing he could find.
After the last time he abused me, I left him. I'd been making plans to take a job overseas during the school year and I just tried to focus on that. Of course, like all the other times, he begged me to come back, begged me not to go. I told him that my trip would be the decider, that if he got into rehab and got help that I'd consider giving it another shot.
I left in September. He got drunk and got thrown out of where he was staying because he'd threatened his roommates. He was arrested in November and went to jail for 20 days. When he got out, he got kicked out of another place for the same reason. I told him that it was really over because his getting sober and not hurting me again wasn't enough of a priority for him.
He began stalking my Facebook page. He harassed me on all social media accounts. I had to block him from several accounts. He somehow managed to get my cell number and wasted god knows how much money texting and calling me non-stop. He called several of my friends and invited them to our wedding in May. He harassed male friends of mine. He'd really gone off the deep end.
Four years ago, he was homeless. He got kicked out of the shelter for, what else, coming back drunk. He was in his favorite bar that night, begging all these people he knew to take him in for the night. No one would put him up, but it's not their fault, he'd burned everyone in his life from family to friends to coworkers.
No one really knows what happened. He was found in the road the next morning. He'd been hit by a truck. I was one of the last people he texted, and my last words to him haunt me to this day.
I was/am really confused about how I feel about all of it. At first it was devastation, then anger. My feelings change so often. It's almost 4 years to the day and I can't wrap my head around my own feelings.
I got counseling afterwards for domestic violence and it saved my life. I had blamed myself for so long for his death, thinking that if I'd just tried again. If I'd only held out a little longer, he'd still be alive.
But pouring countless hours into speculation and details and dark corners of my past that just keep coming back, I realize that if it hadn't been me, it would have been another girl. If it hadn't been then, it would have been soon after. I thought I could help him, but in the end his demons were just so much bigger than me. I thought for so long that if I could have loved him enough and show him that one, just one person was out to help him instead of hurt him, that I could save him.
This was the most catastrophic failure of my life. Not a day goes by that I don't think about him.