He left a suicide note addressed to his mom and family saying he was sorry to hurt them, but that he didn't want to go on living. His family decided that I must have been the one who made him feel that way, that I wasn't being a good wife, so they all blamed me. I couldn't put "your loving wife" on the tombstone. I felt like he walked out on me-and Kim too. I buried him in Mattoon, Illinois, where he was born, where his family lives, and I have never gone back.



When Kim was nine years old, she developed ulcerative colitis. She was very ill, hospitalized at least once a year. The last year of high school, she was in the hospital almost the whole year. The doctors told her she had to have her intestines removed when she was eighteen. She said she would rather die, but I pleaded with her and she finally agreed to have the surgery, and then another after that. She almost died more than once.

I didn't understand anything about benefits, so I was paying all her bills for years when they could have been paid for by the government. When I got really desperate, I started writing letters to anyone I could think of. The Brandy Shive's Children's Fund got me a counselor and paid every bill I couldn't pay. They also taught me about Agent Orange. Mack had been exposed in Vietnam and Kim's symptoms were typical. She was an Agent Orange poster child when she was fifteen.

Kim is now twenty-nine. We're very close. She's in California, teaching third grade. She's fragile, and she gets sick easily. I wanted to be strong for her, and I think, in her eyes, I have been. But I was fifty-three in December, and I still feel like something's blocking me. I got my PhD in 1978, and I've never done anything with it. I had aspirations of doing something wonderful, but when I got job offers I was afraid to go try. I was afraid that I'd be expected to do something that I couldn't do.

Kim says I used to wake up talking in my sleep, and I had flashbacks about my marriage. I never had a dream about Matt that wasn't about fighting. Not physical fighting. Me fighting for myself, fighting for survival. I'm always saying, "Don't do this to me. Don't pull me down." I don't want to say Mack's suicide ruined my life, but maybe if I'd had someone telling me I was good, that I could do it, it would have been different. Instead, everyone was saying, "What did you do to that poor man?" and "Why didn't you save him?" It's like I still hear my mother's voice in the back of my mind: "You've done something to get him to this point of killing himself. Maybe you don't deserve to live." I try not to let that rule me, but it's always in the back of my mind.