They say that you make the best decisions you can with the information you have, and you can’t blame yourself for that. But it is difficult to look back and see the way I handled living with someone with depression. Before I dealt with this, before going through the experience, my understanding of depression was very minor. I got that people could be depressed and could be so sad they’d want to die. But I didn’t really understand it.

I don’t know that there is any way that anyone can understand when they aren’t in it. Worrying, watching, trying to do what you can to find help and hope. I felt so young, so incredibly young to be dealing with all of this. Your husband isn’t supposed to have a life threatening illness when you are young and just married. That’s supposed to come long down the road, when you’re old and gray. But depression is a life threatening ailment that can effect people at any age.

Early on, it was easy for Kody to keep me out of his own darkness. He was able to disguise it so much more completely. But as his depression got worse, I started to be a part of it. At first I approached it as I approach all problems, endless research to find a solution. So it was going to see therapists, and finding medications to try, and doing genetic testing to find which medications might be the right ones when those weren’t working. Then on to acupuncture, alternative medicines, more therapists, more doctors. The more we tried, the more scared I got.

There are moments that I remember clearly, like when I took him to his first therapy session, sat with him in the waiting room, then walked along the pier outside the office until he was done. I asked him after what he thought and he just shrugged.

“Not for me.”

It soon felt like nothing would be for him. I hoped with each new treatment that there would be an answer and at first for each one he seemed to hope as well. But after a few weeks of anything, he’d be back to blank and hopeless. Truthfully, I’m not sure he really committed himself to anything long enough for it to work. But he was convinced I should see him trying.

There are moments that are blurs. Like the fight we had where I locked him in the bedroom, sure that if he left the house, I’d never see him alive again. I’m sure our argument was something to do with work and him not going again. It usually was, but it escalated until he told me that he didn’t want to get away from life at the moment, he only wanted to get away from me. And only then did I let him leave for the night.

I threw all his clothes on the floor in the garage, because it was easier to feel anger than to feel the terror that I was living with. It was easier to say to myself that I hated him and didn’t care if he lived or died, as if saying it could make it true. Living life with a husband who was so depressed, felt so impossible. I felt like I myself was drowning in the darkness that he brought home with him. I think it was that moment I gave up. I know that was a mistake, but I couldn’t bare to be so invested, when nothing we tried worked.

I didn’t always do the wrong thing. There is a time I remember when I came home early around 11am to find him laying in the dark in the bedroom, all three cats curled up with him. And I didn’t bother to ask why he wasn’t at work. I didn’t try to make him explain himself. I just crawled into bed with him and held him in silence. I held him and cried silently, because I felt so incredibly helpless.

At some point, could have been minutes or hours later, he held me tight and kissed my tears. He spoke to me in barely whispers and I’m not sure I even heard words, but at that moment we understood one another completely. It was the beginning of the end of our marriage, and it seemed like in that moment we both understood. He couldn’t stop hurting and he didn’t want his hurting to continue to harm me.