This is Neil, my husband, holding our beautiful daughter. May 1st marked the 18th year since his death. I have been working on this post all month, stumbling along with lots of pauses and endless re-writes, beginning with these first sentences. Died, passed away, left us, ended his life, committed suicide – so many word choices. I always hesitate – realizing the impact when someone doesn’t already know the story. The word suicide is particularly harsh, sad, terrible. The reality will always be stark but with time, the way his life ended is no longer the thing. The wound of his leaving will always exist but the memory of him has become lighter. The idea of who he was and the ways that I miss him have become stronger. The dark stuff – of which there was a lot – has faded. The years have given me a gift of healing and renewed love for the man he was, the joy and fun we had.
Please indulge me as I leap into a complete fantasy of what life might be if he were still here and healthy.
The truth is, I think if Neil were alive today he wouldn’t be here with me now. He’d be volunteering in Ukraine using his ace logistics skills to move aid in or people out and in the course of a day, he’d be dashing into harms way to rescue anyone who needed rescuing. The riskier and more dramatic mission the better and him mentally crafting the story he’d tell us afterwards. Along the way, he’d find a way to make people laugh momentarily helping them to forget their own fear or pain. This was the man he was when we met in Sarajevo in 1992.
Maybe if he’d stayed living a life of peril instead of trying to tame his energy and demons into the routine of supporting and raising a family in Connecticut, maybe then, he’d still be with us. As dangerous as life in war is, for him the addicting mix of adrenaline and danger and purpose was less destructive than the self-medicating that eventually destroyed him.
There’s no sense to magical thinking but anyone who’s lost someone to suicide lives with ‘what-if’. We all have a carousel of thoughts about what might have been done, what we might have done differently to prevent that ending.
With the passage of time and because I have much more of it to myself, my memories and sense of his spirit have become more lucid. I share these thoughts with Molly. Last week she sent me video of an owl that was lingering on the roof of her apartment building and I told her how Neil had saved an owl that was caught in a fence during the early days when she in an incubator in Brindisi hospital. Of course this LA owl was her Dad watching over her! I believe it.
Molly has many moments of Neil showing up in her life. I suspect the girls in England, Gemma and Zoe must too. On Molly’s plane ride when she moved to LA, ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ was one of the film choices and of course, she watched it. There he was on the airplane screen, accompanying his youngest girl out on the launch of her California adventure! (see the last photo below of him getting kicked in the face by Jessica Rabbit ) On another flight she took a few months later, she watched him appear in ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ another oldie that happened to be a selection on the flight. Coincidence?
Before I knew him, Neil was a film and television extra in England. Handsome and tall and charming, he worked on lots of now-classics at Pinewood studios in England. He was a storm trooper in Star Wars and there’s debate whether he was the guy who knocked his head on the door frame because he was so tall. So of course he harbored fantasies of moving to LA himself – now his spirit is cheering his girl. Maybe a little ‘woo-woo’ but I believe this.
He is with me randomly – as a song comes on the radio when I’m thinking of him, when I’m watching an English mystery, as I work in the garden. Driving today I saw a vintage Land Rover Defender and he was craning his head out the window to get a better look, calling out his appreciation to the driver, probably making a new friend. When I feel like I need a protector – like a scary moment driving on I-95 0 it’s him I sense with me. I wrote before of the time I asked for him for help in finding Rob’s car key that had fallen into the Long Island Sound when we were kayaking. Finding it seemed impossible. I found it. (Here’s that post)
What would Neil have made of social media? He loved television so much that I’m sure his screen time would have been off-the charts. He’d have the fanciest phone and would be a TikTok famous old guy with tons of followers. He’d certainly have figured out how to use it to make a few quid. Handsome, exuberant, funny in his outrageous English humor on-steroids way, he would likely have gotten into a trouble too! But maybe if he stuck to dancing. He was an excellent dancer in an 80’s kind of way. Remember those dance shows in the 70s and 80s? He’d have one of those solos with his own little stage – he was that good. Social media would have given all the attention and fame he delighted in.
I have never laughed so often and hard – nor cried as much – as during my life with this man. There was no in-between – no boring. When things were bad, I longed for boring and I still appreciate the predicable cadence of my life. But I miss him. I miss the him that I married in Sarajevo, that I lived and traveled through Europe with. I miss the dream of sharing life adventures, wandering the world, the promise of a partnership. I miss the laughing. I miss the heavy weight of his arm over me at night, his 6 foot 4 presence beside me. But I am grateful for the light and love of his spirit that I feel.
Do you still feel the presence of someone you lost?