Rhonda

I sincerely want to thank every single one of you here for all of your replies. I was afraid to open myself up emotionally to strangers but have been so grateful that I did now instead of waiting weeks or even months. I have told my daughter about this site because I think I left it up on the computer, she saw it and asked what it was. I told her about it and that there is a place here that she can talk to other teens if and when she is ready. This might be a good place for her when the time is right because she is not one to open up to strangers face-to-face. We are going on a trip tomorrow and will be gone for a week so I am hoping that it does us some good to get away again and see more family right now. We have no family here in Arizona and it's times like this that I miss them even more than usual.

I want to thank all of you who have responded. I appreciate all of your kind words so much. I still have my parents so I can't tell my daughter that I know what she is feeling but I have told her that if her dad could find a way to sit on her shoulder the rest of her life now, then that is what he is doing. We are going out of town again in a couple of days for a week to visit more family and then school starts on August 11th. I've already contacted the school to let them know what happened so they can keep an eye on her at school. I've gone through many losses in my life (when I was 11 a cousin of mine who was 16 commited suicide; a few months later one of my uncles died at the age of 39 from lung cancer....these 2 events drove me into a depression that I carried into my early 20's and alomost did not recover from. Then a very close childhood friend's brother died in a boating accident at the age of 20...I was 18. My grandfather died when I was 20 and a close friend passed away 10 years ago at the age of 33 while scuba diving. Just 5 years ago, my grandmother died from Alzheimer's....my mom & I were with her when she took her last breath). So I know what it is like to feel the pain of losing loved ones in death. I am just feeling so many things about Kevin's (my ex) death..... guilt being the most difficult to overcome right now and still feeling like this can not be real. I wish for my daughter's sake that it was not real. I feel a constant aching in my chest, like it is hard to breah most of the time. Then I get distracted for awhile and I think, oh maybe it's going away and as soon as I stop doing something it hits me very hard. I also feel like no one in my family or any of my friends can understand what I am feeling so I don't want to tell them.

I am new here. A friend from church told me about this site. This is difficult, it feels hard to breath. Here goes.... We have been apart for 7 years now and I am remarried for 5 years now. My exhusband and I were together for a total of 10 years and have a 13 year old daughter. To make a very long story as short as possible to bring you up to present day, my ex had mental health issues that he had never really been able to get the right meds for. He had an anxiety/depression disorder and was manic depressive. When I filed for divorce after being together for 10 years, it was not because I wanted to but because I needed to think about our daughter and the life we were in at the time. He was never home and I did every thing. felt like a single mother and when we was home, I never knew what kind of mood he was going to be in. Divorce was difficult for me but I knew I had to do it to make a safe home for my daughter and myself. We had been in marriage counseling for a year and a half. He did not want the divorce and never seemed to get his life on track. He started doing drugs and lying to me and everyone else he knew. There is so much but too much to type. We lived in chicago and 5 years ago when I remarried, I moved to Arizona along with my daughter and my new husband. Since then, he had moved to AZ approx. 3 1/2 years ago but feel into drugs even deeper and never even had a job while living here. He called me one night and asked if he could come to our house because he was going to Texas the next day to live with his sister. So my husband and I let him spend the night in our home and say goodbye to our daughter and took him to the airport the next day. He ended up in rehab in Texas and seemed to be doing better. He went from there to a half-way house and then moved back to chicago 2 years ago. He wasn't holding down a job and finally became homeless this past April. I was devesated for him. We both cried on the phone together because it was such a big hole he was in and I was so worried about him. I felt in my heart that he wouldn't be able to get himself out of this. His family had been helping him out financially and finally said 'no more'. He was in a homeless shelter until the end of June and then he had been saying on a friend of his ex-girlfriends apartment the past few weeks. If I didn't get a call from him for a week, I called his friends to check on him and make sure he was ok and that he was in contact with them. We had a trip to Chicago planned July 11. We just returned on the 27th (3 days ago)We were visiting family and friends. He called me on my cellphone on Wed. the 16th from a payphone to see when we could get together so he could see our daughter. I asked him if he'd be able to call me the following Monday to go to lunch because my husband was going back to AZ that Sunday and I was trying to make it more comfortable for the 2 of them and my daughter. He died that Saturday, 3 days after our conversation. It seems to be a heart attack but are waiting autopsy results right now. He died in this girls apartment. I went to the morgue to ID him with his brother-in-law because I felt in my heart I needed to see him with my own eyes before I could break the news to my daughter. I just didn't want it to be true. He was too young, only 38.t I have been filled with so much guilt. I have so much in my life and he had nothing, and he didn't even get to see our daughter before he died (he had seen her last summer when we visited). I know he was leading an unhealthy life but does hat mean he was not a worthy human being? He was the father to my daughter. I always told her that just because he makes bad decisions does not make him a bad person. He had a big heart and he loved our daughter and me. I had an extremely hard time at the funeral on Friday. It was held at the church where he and I were married and the priest who did the funeral mass also married us(he is a friend of my ex's family for 20 years now). I left the church in full blown sobs. All I could see was the 2 of us standing there in 1994 taking our wedding vows, so young and happy. Then our entire life flashed before my eyes. My daughter has cried maybe twice but has been acting 'normal'. I believe she is still in denial. She refuses to see a grief counselor. I can't just ignore it. I know it will hit her at some point and she will explode. I haven't slept hardly at all in the past week and feel so much pain every single minute of every day. At first I felt that everyone would question my grief but to my surprise, friends and even his family have been worried about me and asking me about how I'm doing and not just about my daughter. I am just so filled with guilt for the divorce and how his life turned upside down. He always made me feel like he needed me to hold his hand through life. His mother told me he was always going to need someone to hold his hand through life and that it wasn't my fault. I feel guilt for having a nice home and a good life with my new husband and my 13 year old and her almost 3 year old sister. I just had always hoped that my ex would find his way in this life. I'm not sure how to deal with all the guilt I am feeling. No one else seems to understand my guilt and I don't know how to reach out to my daughter without her pushing me away. He had such a good heart, he deserved better in life. I don't think I will ever find peace in his death. He was only 38 years old. Even though he wasn't father of the year, at least he was in the world for my daughter. Now he isn't even in the world anymore. This was so hard to write. Sorry for typos and misuse of grammar(if any). I am just trying to get the words out. Part of me is also angry with him for putting me in positions over the past 17 years to make hard decisions that I wish I never had to make. I feel like I'm babbling.