Wanting to die but not by suicide

My self preservation instinct went completely out the window when my wife died of breast cancer. I tried to commit suicide when I was 18, but I survived and that cured any suicidal ideation...BUT after my wife died, I daydreamed about dying in my sleep. How nice it would be to go to sleep and not wake up.

My wife and I were intimately connected in that we were an ocean crossing sailing team and a mountaineering team. We encountered many situations where we relied on each other to literally save each other's lives. She was my best friend and truly 'my person/my other' in this world. The pain of losing her was/is the biggest and most unimaginable pain of my life (I know this without a doubt). 2.5 years later...I'm digging myself out of the emotional, physical and spiritual devastation that her death and my own doing have left me in.

What you're going through is grief and your reaction to it is this...grieving. It's absolutely fucking painful in every sense. It's inescapable. There are no shortcuts through it, there's no way around it and it's demands can't be ignored...but it does become something that you can bear. There will come a time where the bearing of it will become 'normalized'.

When that time came for me, that's when I noticed 'in the tiniest of moments' that I could still see and experience beauty in this world. I've held onto that and it's what I currently live for.

You and everyone else in 'here' have my inexhaustible reserves of empathy...cause we have/are travelling through the darkest of spaces that life has brought us.

/r/widowers Thread Parent