Addiction, the beginning.

30th of July 2013, a date I will never forget. I will note a trigger warning here relating to suicide, so please be mindful if you choose to continue reading.

Hubby had been behaving slightly off, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but things just felt amiss. I had asked him a few times if he was ok and always received the same response, “I’m fine, nothing for you to worry about”. Turns out there was plenty for me to worry about…

That morning, I had sent him a text checking in, and he responded by telling me to check my car, he had left something in there. I found a plastic bag with four envelopes in it and immediately started to feel extremely anxious, my heart was racing, and I felt sick. I ran with it to my room and realized the envelopes had been addressed to myself and our 3 children. I opened mine and I must have been screaming because before I knew it our 3 children were in my room - daughter 16, daughter 13, son 9. A lot of what followed that morning is a blur of trying to find him, comforting my children, police visiting, ambulance coming, my sister and a dear friend coming to support us…

Around 3 hours after finding the envelopes, I managed to get him on the phone and somehow convinced him to come home. He kept saying all our money is gone, he felt like he was possessed by something and as we talked, I learned that he had been hiding a heavy secret - he was experiencing an addiction to gambling and he felt totally under its control, to leave this earth felt like his only alternative.

He arrived home and after briefly hugging the children was taken away via ambulance to hospital, the beginning of life dealing with addiction had begun for us as a family… I was soon to discover just how long and how deeply he had been dealing with it on his own.