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My (late) husband was bipolar and an alcoholic. He was, for the most part, a distant, selfish man who would let nothing in his way to get that next drink. Yet he did have some nice qualities, ok, rare, but sometimes....and he was a jolly drunk. Not mean when he drank.
Then he stopped drinking. He attended AA and achieved sobriety. for about 4 years. He was struck by a truck on his motorcycle by an old man that wasn’t watching and turned in front of him. Bill, my husband, hit the truck with his left side and flew over the hood and landed on his head. Full face helmet, no obvious trauma to his head, just a broken hip. fine, right? Then he got worse and just ...crazier, by the year. Diagnosed bipolar the next year (oh THAT’S what that was all those years) but his bipolar got worse each year for a couple of years. By 2006 he was worse every month. We separated in late 2006, he had gone really off the deep end. That’s when he started drinking again. Stalked me, me and the two kids left at home lived in fear that he was going to kill me. I know he wanted to, maybe there was something decent left inside him though, he didn’t kill me or the kids. He’d started drinking and porn and stalking me while we were separated. He got so scary that the police, when he’d show up and I had to call them, and our lawyers, were afraid for me to go near him. He was obsessed with me, so I would run and stay inside when the deputies came. In and out of the mental ward at the hospital, they made him give up his guns. THEY MADE HIM GIVE UP HIS GUNS. Why didn’t they prohibit him from having them at all?????? In any case, in 2008 he told a coworker that it had just gotten too hard. And he took the day off and shot himself in the head with a gun he’d just gotten from a pawn shop that day. Thursday. March 6. They didn’t find his body until the 10th. The cop that answered the call mercifully took care of the mattress and bedding after they’d taken his body out of his apt. His children were friends with our children so he knew this was Nathan’s father lying there. They pretend that background check does any good. It doesn’t do any good. I’m VERY thankful that I’m safe. And that my children are safe, but this was terrible. Horrible. I actually don’t know that I would have made it through this without a very few people. One of whom was FReeper Null and Void. Saved me when I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it. Hard, hard, hard on us. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was for Bill to do this. I didn’t want him back, I feared and loathed him by that time. But I didn’t want him to die and my kids....they were just wrecked.