TW: Suicide, depression, abusive parents

The pandemic has sucked for most people; I think we can all agree on that, right? I don’t know a single person who has said, “Yeah, Covid was actually so cool and I’m so glad that it happened!” Sure, the first few months were pretty neat: jobs furloughing, staying home, less crowded public spaces, etc., but a vast majority of people I know have either lost loved ones to Covid, put on unwanted weight, developed serious depression and/or anxiety, or had long-standing relationships fail as a result of the strain the pandemic has put on everyone. It feels like looking back on life pre-Covid is akin to peering into an alternate dimension; things were so similar, but they were also, so, so different. I spent most of the pandemic unemployed and moving from place to place, and I did my fair share of burning bridges over the past three years. But I wanted to share a story with you; not a story about how traumatic life has been, or how hard I was tested, but a story about the one thing that the pandemic didn’t break: hope.

I recently moved to Saskatchewan to live with my wife. I’m currently a stay at home husband while we wait for my permanent residence application to finish processing so that I can get a job. I live in a beautiful home with a beautiful partner and four beautiful cats, which is in very stark contrast to living with my parents and having a toxic/abusive mother constantly test the thickness of the thread I was holding on by. I can play video games as much or as little as I want to; I can cook and eat whatever foods I want to; my wife and I can communicate in a healthy way and stay dedicated to growing our life and our love together; I have a healthy sex life for the first time in 29 years; I quite literally do not have a care in the world right now. By all accounts of my own expectations, I have “made it.” This is everything I could have ever dreamed my life would be. I can go to bed at 3AM, wake up at noon, make myself a coffee, and do whatever I want to do with my. Albeit, my wife and I do most things together when she’s not working, but as an acute care nurse who works 12 hour alternating day and night shifts, I end up having a lot of time to myself. I get to be the crazy cat father and chase our four malevolent gargoyles around the house all day and snuggle with them all night. I am by all accounts, the happiest I have ever been in my life, and I know that my wife and I are committed to keeping these feelings alive together for both of us. But that’s not to say this doesn’t come with a cost.

My wife was previously married, a relationship that ended abruptly in October of 2022 when her late husband lost his battle with depression and took his own life. She and I have been very close friends for over a decade and a half, and I was supposed to be at her first wedding but wasn’t able to make it. Her late husband and I were also good friends because of how close she and I have been the last sixteen years, and losing him has left a hole in the hearts of so many people. I’ve become rather accustomed to losing loved ones though; a large number of people that I knew in high school and college have passed away, so grief is something I’ve unfortunately become very used to. I spent countless hours talking with my wife in the immediate aftermath of her late husband’s passing. Fast forward 8 months and we decided that we were going to get married. Skip another month and we applied for spousal sponsorship for me to live here. Now we’re almost five months into my stay here, and everything has been so egregiously lovely and beautiful, save for one role that I feel like I need to fill. We all have roles that we play in life; we’re all a daughter, son, sister, brother, father, mother, friend, etc., and I’m obviously no exception. I’ve been a son to my parents for 29 years, and a brother to my siblings for just as long. I know it’s my own brain creating this illusion, but I feel like I’m not having to step into the role of “replacement husband.” I’m coming into the life of my wife’s late husband’s friends and family in a position where I feel like I’m expected to be a replacement for him. Nobody has ever expressed this to me, and I know these are weights that I need to put down, but I can’t seem to let go the notion that I have to be a son to his parents, or be the same friend that was to his friends. Survivor’s guilt seems like a tacky way to put it, but it’s hard not to feel that way when most of the friends and family that my wife has introduced me to were at least acquainted with her late husband. I just want to be me, and I just want my brain to be content with where we are, because it’s the happiest place I’ve ever been. Even as I’m writing this now, I’m having text conversations with some of my wife’s friends; they have been nothing but welcoming to me as a new part of her life, and as such, a new part of their lives as well. I just need to convince my brain that everything is okay, and that any pressure I feel is entirely self-inflicted.

In not so many words, I still have a lot of work to do. I need to find a way to reconcile the person that I am, with the person that my brain expects me to be given the position I’m in. I still need to go to the gym to stay healthy. I still need to practice mediation to keep myself calm. I still need to find a job when the time comes. I don’t say all this seeking pity from an internet full of strangers, and I don’t say any of this to pit myself for the position I’m in. I’m sharing this little bit of my story with anyone who might need to hear this: nobody truly has it all figured out. I’m someone who has “has it made” as people say. I have no “adult responsibilities” that concern money or jobs or anything like that; but I still need to hold myself accountable for the things that I owe other people. I owe my wife a life full of love, peace, calm, and safety, because that was robbed from her last time; I owe her late husband’s friends and family an honest attempt to be a part of their life, because they want to see her happy as much as I do, and we’re much more likely to achieve that goal together; I owe myself a mental break after surviving the worst three years of my life back to back to back; I owe the friends I’ve lost a life worth living. I carry them with me as a reminder to work hard on the important things, and to spread love wherever I go. If all I have left of them is memories, then I’ll spend my life creating memories for myself and everyone around me.

I’ve more or less turned this into a stream of consciousness of some sort, but I will attempt to wrap the things I’ve learned over the last three years up. Never stop growing; there are always improvements to be made on who we are as people. There will always be “something more” that we can do in some regard, an it’s increasingly important that we continue to recognize that sometimes “something more” can mean “resting.”