What a lot of people don’t talk about when they talk about suicide, is the way depression steals a person away from you. Kody was lost from my life long before he died by suicide (see I’m trying it).

When I fell in love with Kody, I fell in love with the goofy guy who loved puns and loved to tease me. He was so much fun. We always were on adventures heading out into nature. When we were outside together, we were so happy.

One of the joys that Kody and I shared was the rain. In high school, whenever the rain poured down, we would run outside in the rain. Just run joyfully, feet slipping and sliding on grass and mud.

As the years passed, I saw less and less of that side of Kody. I couldn’t get him to come on hikes with me, since he wanted to sleep in late. The rain poured down and he’d be having a bad day, one where he barely spoke. There was no energy for running in the rain.

It’s incredibly difficult to be with someone who is depressed. Every day there was tension, since I never knew what Kody I was coming home to. There were still bright moments, but fewer than ever.

He talked to me about the depression and about suicide attempts. We tried to get him help. He tried therapy, many types of meds, and even acupuncture. Each treatment started with hope and then ended worse than the last because he was becoming more and more hopeless. I wasn’t able to get him to open up as much anymore. I found him in brooding dark moods more frequently.

I have many regrets about this period of time, but I know there’s not anything I really could have done differently. He was drowning and taking me down with him. It got to a point where he stopped being willing to try anything to help with depression. I’ll admit that is the point where I gave up. I resigned myself to the fact that one day, he would be successful.

It was at this point that our marriage unraveled. Kody blamed me for his depression and said that outside the relationship he’d be happier. I knew I couldn’t survive living every day thinking I’d come home to find his body. In the end, he set me free. We resolved to stay friends.

What followed was for me a brighter space of my life and for him a decent into darkness. The divorce worked like all the other things we’d tried to cure him of depression, at first things seemed hopeful, but it was soon evident he was still trapped in depressive episodes for significant amounts of time.

He was happy for me in all my successes, happy to see me in a new relationship and then a new marriage, since he knew he couldn’t be the person he thought I deserved. He was so excited for me to be buying a house.

In the last six months of his life, he worked so hard to get better and to find a way to live with depression. He actually started asking for help and getting a lot of it. He tried new therapies, new drugs, and went to the VA for help.

After his final hospitalization, he seemed happier, much more himself. I know now that this is because he’d finally settled on ending his life and at last felt some relief. When he died, the shock was still incredible. It was unbearable to me to live in a world without him there.

I’d known this was coming, but I still felt blindsided. He’d tried so hard. It wasn’t fair. And in truth, though I’d lost the Kody I loved years ago, the finality of death still was crushing to my soul.