Saddest/Toughest Day of your life?

Reading this today makes me appreciate my wife and three year old even more.

My wife's first miscarriage would be my saddest but I feel I am very lucky and blesssed.

The day my dad was taken to the hospital for the last time. He had Alzheimer's and in a matter of 2 years he went from being a vivacious, intellectual, compassionate man to an angry, bitter child.

When he finally was taken away, it was because while his mind had withered, his athletic body was still strong and he was becoming impossible and dangerous for my mom to deal with.

I was 19, but I was scared to death of this weird, unexplainable process.

The night the ambulance took him, I remember hearing a lot of banging and yelling going on upstairs and when I walked into my old bedroom, I saw my father, naked and covered in his own feces and some blood, standing in a corner, with my mother trying to either hold him up or hold him off and I couldn't tell which because he was shaking so much.

My mother told me to call 911, which I did and I couldn't think about whether I should or not, I just had to.

Within 10 minutes, the paramedics were there and they cleaned him up as best they could and took him to the hospital. He never recognized me after that. I wish I could have said goodbye to him, as I didn't realize it was already too late. That night was hard.

I've been through a lot of friend's and relatives deaths in my life. I've seen my own troubles loom large at times, but that night was hard for the actual time in which it happened and for the time that followed.

bean there wrote:

Divorced Guy wrote:

Um...dude, I think you failed to read the entire thread. I'm not stuck on my wife, I don't want her back, but I do love and miss her. :)

No I read the entire thread, You may not think you are but you are..

if you were in love with someone else or have moved on you wouldn't be describing her as "the most beautiful person I've ever met". Sorry man, that is a chump talking.

I watched my father waste 20 years of his life pining for my mother after divorce and it was gut wrenching.

^ Totally without foundation. The fact that your father wasted 20 years of his life (at least in your opinion) has no bearing on what Divorced Guy is going through. It may, however, color how you see the world and what you are or are not able to understand about others.

My wife has been gone for 11 years. I continue to love and miss her. And yes, she is the most beautiful person that I have ever met. That said, I am enjoying life greatly, running a startup company, coaching my kids' soccer teams, in a great relationship with a beautiful woman, learning to sail...

Loving someone who you are no longer with and living a full life are not mutually exclusive.

And calling someone a "chump" is ignorant and childish.

Folks-your stories are all very heart wrenching. You all have my sincerest sympathy and I have just finished praying for you all to heal and to use your experiences to help someone else going through something similar. You will know exactly what to say or do or even not to say. Don't let it be for naught. God loves you all and so do I.

Whalers moving to Carolina.

Surprise! wrote:

Whalers moving to Carolina.

The day I found out Santa Claus wasn't real. No, really, this was devastating news when it happened. I remember crying for hours.

After we'd been married for three good years, my wife began to act more and more irrational, hysterical, and violent. She wouldn't admit that she needed help. I started making appointments with doctors. Over the next year we got about six false diagnoses, including chronic fatigue, thyroid imbalance, and "There's nothing really wrong with you." After she'd hit me hard with her fists for about the tenth time while screaming curses, I gave up trying to help and moved out. A week later she apologized and took the blame for what had been happening. I couldn't handle going back into the situation and said I wanted to split up. We got a divorce--not ugly--and she moved back to her home town 1,000 miles away.

About a year later she was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea. It causes a loss of ability to control movement, and also dementia. I heard this from a mutual friend, who also said that she was "improving." I called my ex-wife, and she was friendly and optimistic. She said she was on a program of drugs that were having good results.

Saddest/toughest day:

Three months later, I got a call from her mother at 8 p.m. She said, "If you want to talk to her again, you'd better do that now." Then I heard my ex-wife's voice, almost unintelligible, say, "Please come here." Her mother got back on and said, "You probably won't make it." I got a cab to the airport and took the first flight. I was at the hospital in her town by 1:00 a.m. after driving 90 mph from the airport. Her parents and brother and best friend were there. She looked 40 years older and could hardly move. I leaned down to embrace her, and she said something that I couldn't understand. Her mother told me that she'd said "I love you." I told her I loved her, too, and sat there, and one by one people went home to sleep. Her brother and I stayed there all night. At 6 a.m. she woke up and tried very hard to talk to us but couldn't make words. We called her parents, and they got there in a few minutes. She kept straining to talk. She died about a half-hour later.

People keep saying that I'll "get over" this--that it will lessen gradually in my thoughts. It's two years later now and I haven't gotten over it at all. I think about her every day, and what happened gets into everything that I try to do. I feel horribly guilty about leaving her. Then I try to forgive myself by remembering how bad it was and how much I tried to help her. And that doesn't work. And I wish again that she could have talked to us before she died.

He father has since died of Huntington's and her brother has found out that he has it. It's hereditary, and if we'd had kids, which we were probably a year or so from trying to do when she was first affected, they'd have a 50-percent chance of having Huntington's. But I don't feel very lucky about that.

I have been following this thread for the last few days and have found it quite interesting and it has caused me to reflect on my own situation.

Like the OP, my situation came out of a divorece. I had been married to my best friend for 19 years when I found out she had started an affair with a guy over the internet. I was crushed but was able to survive only because I knew I had to devote my time to raise my daughters (6 and 13). It was a difficult 6 years, but not only have I survived, but I have thrived. In addition to coaching successes, I have met, fallen in love with, and married a wonderful woman.

I truly beleive that I could not have been as good a person (father, coach, husband, etc.) had I not experienced the pain from my loss. In Catholicism, we refer to this as the paschal mystery. Like Christ, we grow and gain new life through the loss and death of our previous pain filled experiences.

Like a previous poster, I read these posts and have prayed for all of you. Each and every one of these pain filled experieinces are opportunities for growth and new life.

Divorced Guy wrote:

Precious Roy,

My ex-wife and I are so serious about putting our kids first that many of the people in our town don't realize we are even divorced. We make parenting decisions together, we are there at almost every event our kids take part in, and there is NEVER an ill word spoken about each other in front of our children. Our kids are amazingly well adjusted and feel like we to a large degree are still very much a family. It certainly is not always easy, but we are the only divorced couple I know that truly backs up the statement "our kids come first."

I too am divorced, and this is the situation I am aiming for. Things are still somewhat bitter, but my divorce itself wasn't contentious and we remain civil toward each other. I'm glad to see that I'm not being crazy to think such an arrangement is possible.

Wow, this really scares me because I am in a serious relationship with a person I believe to be my best friend. Do you know why she went this route? Did she ever offer an explanation? Its so hard to understand matters like this.

Mos Def wrote:

Wow, this really scares me because I am in a serious relationship with a person I believe to be my best friend. Do you know why she went this route? Did she ever offer an explanation? Its so hard to understand matters like this.

A lot of stuff happened around the same time. She had a great deal of anxiety (perhaps hormone related) during the pregnancy of our second child. She gained a lot of weight during/after the pregnancy. She decided to try the low carb approach to losing the weight and got really thin (back in college racing weight thin). This, coupled with turnimg 40, and being demoted from a job that she held for 12 years led to a great deal of serious introspection on her part. She looked at her life and felt that "she just wasn't happy".

Nothing I could do or say would change her mind to want to reconcile our marriage. She felt a great deal of guilt at being caught in her affair, and I guess she was looking at leaving as an escape from a bad situation.

I am a firm believer in the power of love, and I wish you you the best with your relationship.

Bowerman 5k, 2010.

I'm also a firm believer in the power of love, but hearing stories like yours just really scare me. I'm sorry you had to go through this.

I wasn't going to reply to this thread - too morbid somehow. But your post about alzheimer's and the person that used to be your father did it for me.

Look up Huntington's Chorea; my 1st wife slowly died of it. Funny thing it, her death was a big big relief. the hard thing was watching her descent into it. She violently refused treatment (there is no cure; drs. just medicate symptoms), so i let her slowly deteriorate w/o hurting herself. Finally, i ordered an in-home psychiatric evaluation when she got really bad. They took one look at her, asked a few questions, she got violent, in came the police and EMTs,Strapped her to a board, hauled her out as she was screaming, Neighbors watching the freakshow. At the hospital, they had to give her Haldol to quiet her down. She never spoke again. She lasted about 2 weeks in a hospital and 1 day in a nursing home.

The hard part was watching the adult i used to love being treated like an animal.

And now for a different observation: the young people on here who post about the pain of breakups: i completely believe you that the pain hurts like hell. Just cuz you don't have 50 yrs of living doesn't mean yOur sad day doesn't also hurt. No reason to diminish those experiences vs. divorces, deaths, etc.

Athens marathoner: unfortunately, i posted my account before reading yours. HD is very rare; so its surprising to see a similar experience here at LR. Your account brings unpleasant memories. The personality change that HD people go thru is frightening. My wife was never on any drugs, so there were no brief periods of improvement - just decline. Like you, i have much guilt about not doing enough.

My 1st wife,her sister and mother died of HD; 1 of her 2 bros. has it (he has been institutionalized for about 20 yrs now). It is truly a nasty disease.

Here is the unfortunate truth wrote:

in a great relationship with a beautiful woman, learning to sail...

Don't want to sound like a jerk because of your loss (and BTW- your situation is very different than Divorced Guy which is coloring YOUR perception)

BUT I don't think your girlfriend would take too kindly to you guys calling ex-wives "the most beautiful person I've ever met" nor should they. The sooner one can really see a person for what they were good and bad, and take them off a pedestal, you can get better.

I was deeply in love once to a girl I thought was the "most beautiful". And yes, I said it, believed it even after she dumped me. I thought I was being a stand up guy but I was just kidding myself. Then I met my wife and it honestly seemed like a silly thing to say all those years.

Love the one your with.

When I was thirteen my dad was sentenced to 7 years in prison, 800 miles away from my home, for a crime he didn't commit.

Bauhaus--I'm very sorry that you had to go through that. Thanks for the comments, but you did much more than I did: you stayed with her through the whole thing. At least you found out that it was Huntington's--I didn't find out until later. I don't know how my ex-wife became calm just before she died--maybe drugs, maybe just the inability to use her muscles any more. But she was kind to her family and me in her last few days. This has made me realize that instead of only agonizing about her being unable to say what she wanted to before she died, I should be grateful that she was apparently in some way still herself, unlike your wife and joeink's father when he had Alzheimer's.

How did you get past this and remarry? Did you find a way to accept what happened--not just your first wife's death, but the incredible unfairness and randomness of what happened to the most important person in your life at the time?

You're right that it's rare to find another person who has experience with Huntington's. I always have to explain it, unlike Parkinson's, for instance, which is similar but not nearly as bad. It's pretty surprising that we posted these stories 44 minutes apart.

I got outkicked. placed 2nd in 4:00.04. I never broke 4. I now blaze and drink and im obese.