MY EX DIDN’T WANT ME TO SEE HIM DIE
DEAR BEL,
MY HUSBAND and I split up nearly 30 years ago and neither of us remarried or even found another partner. We lived close by each other and (unknown to everyone) saw each other every week or so.
We were intimate but that wasn’t the whole point of the visits. We cooked each other meals and enjoyed each others’ company.
For complicated reasons, he hardly saw our children, although he paid for them and they grew up loving their dad.
About three years, ago he began to grow distant and put off our meetings. I was bewildered.
Two months later, I found out he was in a hospice, dying of cancer.
I discovered my daughter had been caring for him at his home when he became ill. He made her promise not to tell me. He died shortly afterwards, with our daughter holding his hand. He wanted to protect me, but I can’t forgive him for allowing our daughter to be with him. She suffers from slight mental health problems and gets depressed. She’s said repeatedly that the memory of his terror at the moment he died gives her nightmares. But I don’t blame him.
I grieved when he died, although people said: ‘Oh, you’d been apart a long time anyway.’
Things were starting to get slightly easier, but a few months ago I began thinking about him a lot. It’s got worse and I cry constantly. I’m bedbound and live alone, so I’ve plenty time on my hands. He’s become an obsession and I have to get some sort of life back again. ISLA
THIRTY years ago something rather mysterious happened: you ceased to be married, yet remained closer than many couples.
Even more mysterious, your husband hardly knew his children yet ‘they grew up loving their dad’.
Was their estrangement something to do with your divorce? Who instigated the split? Why did you need to keep your ongoing relationship with him a secret and why are you still afraid they will find out?
It’s very strange. Yet your daughter was ready to embrace secrecy, too, and not tell you her father was ill.
Your current home situation is clearly very hard; no wonder you are in a state of permanent upset. But I wonder whether it’s entirely due to grief for your ex?
You lived ‘close by’ yet never went round to see him. Are you now consumed with guilt (as well as grief) because of that unbridgeable gulf?
I suspect it’s getting ‘worse’ because you haven’t begun to make sense of what happened. Many people grieve at the death of an expartner, because you are mourning the life you didn’t have together, the potential wasted.
Such feelings must be made worse for you by the strange, secret life you led with him and the knowledge that, in the end, he didn’t want you to be with him, for whatever reason.
I do not say these things to make you sadder (and I’m sorry if they do) but to encourage you to look back with honesty and acceptance and to look forward with your confusion laid to rest.
I think you should be honest with your children and not continue with this inexplicable charade. I think it’s time to celebrate with your children everything that was good about the man you all loved.