Ashland, Oregon
Deeper Image
Title: Bending
In her own words: “I feel like we bend like a twig or we stand really stiff and we break in these times. We have that choice hopefully. Another type of person may have broken under the intense shock and change of having your husband commit suicide and having to tell your children. At first it feels like you’re going to break, but then you have a choice point, I think. I asked internally what is this asking me for? Of coarse when you have kids, you’re a mom, you have so much inspiration to get it together. I have to find the teaching in this in order to transmit it to my children.
How can I bring meaning to this, how can I find meaning in this? That’s the bending point. There is nothing that is all bad, and nothing that is all good. Everything is everything.
For me everything has a deeper meaning and that’s what I had to find in my husbands death. The worst, darkest part was when the police, fire cheif and a friend came that afternoon and told me that he had shot himself. And then I had to tell the kids when they got home from school that he shot himself. Nothing else looks that hard. That was the darkest part….
I felt stripped to the bone and I didn’t feel like I had anything in me to be false anymore. So at that day at the funeral/memorial service what was most true for me was the shock at how full the room was in counterpoint to how bad my husband was feeling about himself with his depression. How he felt unloved and bad at his work and all these things that I knew of coarse were not true. But here was a room stuffed to the gills of people who obviously cared about him. That juxtaposition to his mental illness state that caused him to take that action…I was just full of that and I honestly couldn’t let that pass by without really taking it in. It was as if he couldn’t take it in, so I was going to . When I stood up there I said with my hand on my heart, “I am here to take in what Glenn could not.” It’s indelibly printed in me that none of us know how much we are loved! And let’s not wait for someone else to stand at our funeral and look out there for us.” Excerpts taken from Ahri Golden’s radio interview aired on NPR