Greetings Everyone, I stumbled upon this site while searching for answers to my current situation. I perused various topics and it feels like a safe place to share my grief. I apologize in advance if it takes me a while to respond as I'm only online 2 or 3 times a week but I feel it's time to share my story...I suppose its an exorcism of sorts...so here goes...
My significant other (sigot) have been together for almost 6 years and we're both in our early 50's now. He is the love of my life and until recently it kept getting better and better over the years. When we met, he had been living alone for almost 2 years after being divorced. I’ve been divorced since the late 1980's and had been single for over 6 years when we met. He has a teenage daughter and I have 2 grown sons plus a beautiful grandson.
About 1½ years after we fell in love, my sigot made the decision to move in with his mother because she was beginning to get very frail and was concerned about her living alone; she was in her early 80's at that point. She lived in the same town as him and lived near his daughter, too. Before he moved in with his mother, we had talked about living together eventually once his daughter was old enough to drive ands graduated from high school. Through the years that followed, his mother had various health problems and also started to have trouble walking.
My sigot lives about an hour away from me and up until recently we would see each other almost every weekend and would talk several times a day, but all that changed this past May when his mother passed away from failure to thrive due to complications with a broken hip. I loved and adored his Mother and she loved me, too. We had a wonderful relationship and I miss her so much. She made me promise her that I would take care of him after she passed and I promised her I would. I would go and visit them through this period as often as I could and offered emotional support to them both. She passed and he was by her side when she passed.
After she broke her hip, she had to go to a rehab facility and a week later she refused to stay so he brought her home and then took short term disability from his job to care for her 24/7. This went on for almost 3 months and she slowly stopped eating, became very hostile towards him (dementia set in) but not towards me or her granddaughter.
The grieving was hard for both of us and his daughter. About a month after she passed, he said he wanted to “slow things down with us and take a break” all of a sudden. He says he still loves me and cares for me but needs time to “figure things out”. We now talk only 2 or 3 times a week versus 2 or 3 times a day and I haven’t seen him in person for almost 2 months! I am so confused and feel like I’m being punished. He tells me that “I deserve a better boyfriend” and that he “just has to be alone for awhile”.
I have expressed to him repeatedly that I am unable to give up on our love and that I am a fighter, not a quitter and that I will give him all the space he needs. I’ve even suggested that we both go to counseling together to work through this difficult period in our life. He just insists that he needs to be alone right now. I want to offer comfort to him and unconditional love but he doesn't want it.
My family and friends are just as devastated as I am and they all say to just give it time. I just don’t know how long I can go on like this, it feels like I stuck in a time warp spinning out of control in grief and loss. I promised his mother that I would take care of him after she passed, so how I am to go on like this and not break her promise?
Sorry for the long post! It does feel better to just write this all down and share with a group that is going through the same or has gone through the same. Thanks for taking the time to read this xox