When he signed himself into the hospital, they called it acute depression, and blamed it all on the business and family. Nobody connected it to the war. I should have, but when you're so close to a situation, you don't always see. And this was 1976. Posttraumatic stress wasn't even recognized until 1982. I looked at his medical records later. They don't even say he was in the military.

When he was discharged, it was one of those-see you in six weeks. A mental health disaster. He was still on heavy sedation. He'd get up, take pills, go back to bed. He slept twenty-four hours a day. I knew it was serious, but he refused to sign himself back in. He should have been taken involuntarily because he had made threats, but the laws are very difficult to deal with. People used to put people away just to get rid of them. I was an RN who dealt with commitments through the emergency room all the time, and they still wouldn't listen to me. But, he followed through with his threats. When they found him, the mental health person who had refused to sign him into the hospital showed up with the state police. One of my coworkers just looked at her and said, "She told you, and you didn't listen."

Those were hard years, after Jim died. Mike was the oldest and he was only seven. I was working long hours, tired all the time. My parents helped, but money was always an issue. I pulled away from my friendships. Nobody wants to hear about a suicide. I don't go to high-school reunions. I don't go to nursing reunions. I don't want to have to rehash my life. You pull in and you become very private. You don't share at all. So that's the worst part.

The second worst part is you get to this age, and it's like-god, where'd my life go? I don't regret anything I did or didn't do, but it's like, well, this is the part of my life where things should be different. And they're not. I'm still working sixty hours a week and I'm still tired. I turn fifty-five this year. My feet hurt, my knees are gone, my back's gone, I'd like to ease off. It's not the life I would've chosen, but I don't think in life we're given a whole lot of choices. Jim had a choice. I think he would have been in a psychiatric ward for the rest of his life, and that would have been devastating to him. He didn't feel he was worthy of living, and I think that that's why he chose the path he chose. I think his choice probably was the best. Whatever life brings you, you deal with it.

And I was one of the fortunate ones. I had a profession that paid better than a lot of people's. If I had had to raise three kids at minimum wage, where would I have been? It's an election year, and I'm waiting for it to come out again that the problem with the world is single-parent families. That's a slap in the face to every single parent who has sacrificed to raise children to be productive members of society. I'm a single parent and I'm proud of my kids. Two of them have gone through college and come out owing nothing because I have sacrificed to get them through. I haven't asked the government to give them loans, grants, or anything, and yet they tell me I'm the reason society's in such bad shape. It really irritates me. If this had been dealt with right, if I had the benefits of a widow of a battle-related death, my life and my children's lives would have been very different. I would not have had to work full-time. I would have had more time to spend with my kids. And now, I would have enough to retire. To me, if people serve their country and something like this happens, the country owes them. The democracy and the government that you so support and believe in, you shouldn't have to fight. I'm not an activist or anything like that, but I shouldn't have to do this. But they want paperwork going back twenty-five years, and I'm on the third appeal.

Am I angry at him? Yes, some days. Do I feel sorry for him? Some days. Do I wish my life had been different? Well, yeah I do, but if it was, what kind of different person would I be? Someone told me God only gives you what you can handle. I've decided God maybe has a little bit of Alzheimer's and forgets, and he keeps giving me a little more.