Limbo

I feel as though I am torn between two worlds right now. The life I have to live for my children, and my desire to be with my husband. I cannot explain this feeling. I feel as though I am pulled both ways stuck in a limbo, in this thing called life...

I can't help but wonder what it was like for him. How he felt?

One of the things people do not understand about addiction is the fact that an addict really has no desire to live. So many people think that you can scare an addict clean by telling them they could die, when in reality they fall on deaf ears.

To live with an addiction is painful. You constantly battle the desire, constantly battle peoples perceptions on who you are. Too many people see only the addiction and not the person any more.

My husband would always talk about how he just wanted to die, that he lived for me, he lived for his daughter, he lived for our family. That was all he had left to hold onto. The only positive and hope he carried on with his life.

So what did he feel the last moments of his life? His daughter fighting so hard to just be away from him, constantly told that his other children hated him, wanted nothing to do with him. Me, his wife throwing him out because of a relapse... losing the family, and children he lived for. The only reason he held onto life.

He had to have felt very alone, with all of his demons. Where was his desire to hold on any longer? Right now I am forced to live on for my children. So was this what it was like for him? To hold on until finally he was free from what was holding him back in this life? Allowing the addiction to finally take him at last?

I loved him, I still love him, so very much! I feel so empty, so soulless without him.

I will live every day of my life with regrets. The regret of throwing him out. For not standing beside him in his moment of weakness. I wish I had just taken the needle from him, held him and told him how much I loved him and that together we would get through this relapse, that we would get through this fight with the world, and those trying to rip our family apart.

Instead I had hoped "tough love" would win out. That he would leave, and come back like he always did and we would fight through it and get him clean again. I gambled, and I lost. So many times I listened to others advise. To give ultimatums. I don't think ultimatums work. I am honestly not sure what does work.

All I know is that I love him. The person that he was, not the addict that so many people defined him as.

Without a doubt I believe he knew I loved him, as much as I knew he loved me. I just wish I had not given him a way out. I wish I had been strong enough to fight for him and give him a reason to keep fighting for himself, and for us.