I will have a hard time staying on topic and not posting a novel, I have so much in me to say and have had no one to say it to forever.
My husband of app 36 years has had lung cancer/COPD/assorted side issues for app 6 years now (at least, that’s how long ago he was diagnosed). He is 17 years ago older than me, I am 56, he is over 70. For the previous 20-odd years, we lived lives apart-not in separate domiciles, just separate lives-except that I had no life- we had a tacit bargain that he went out and won the bread, I stayed home and “kept the light on”. It was a devil’s bargain, it took me a long while to realize just how bad. Those last 20 years also included no sex-he just lost interest after I had to have hysterectomy, and there were other issues. (We have no kids, he has two grown sons from previous marriage).
I have stayed at home in those years in almost complete isolation, our friends were his friends, my family all lives elsewhere, his is here (but except for his kids and grandkids, all his family is now deceased, he’s the last one standing). This got me out of the loop with my family, and I feel like it would look selfish to turn to them now, but they couldn’t help, anyway, there’s too much I can’t say, and though I love them, it would be like spilling my private life to strangers. Our tacit bargain-DH took good material care of me, I stayed home and didn’t bother him -yes, I love him and he loves me. But we have a very dysfunctional relationship, he’s very controlling and demanding, I allowed it in exchange for security-I don’t just mean material, I have become over the years a very insecure person, completely dependent upon him.
Well, the dynamics have slowly changed over the six years since his diagnosis-but in ways such that I am totally confused, not to mention bitter, angry, resentful. So is he, I know, but his is more at the cancer, mine is at him. I am an evil person for feeling this way, but I do. He is angry that he must let me go, I am angry that even now when I need some autonomy to care for him, he is still a control freak, but in passive aggressive ways so that he can claim that he has no control and no interest in having control anymore.
I will be 60 in 4 short years-while he was out living the life he wanted (and only he and God know exactly what that entailed), I was isolated and celibate-when he married me, he was very pleased to have a younger woman who loved sex, so it was a bigger deal than even I knew at the time for that to just be almost suddenly gone from my life. I told myself over the years that I didn’t care, and I even believed it. Now I know that I was just waiting for things to change-but 20 years went by and they never did.
I don’t even know how to deal with many things that I know people just do-he always wanted to do everything, control everything, know everything and tell only what “I needed to know”, and that wasn’t much. I heartily admit that this is as much my fault as his for allowing it-what have I done? I’m a grown woman who doesn’t know the first thing about dealing with the necessary details of life, and now we’re in a weird place where he wants me to know how to do these things, though he’s still not ready to let go of things, no matter what he says.
When he does die, my life will be over, in many ways- I won’t have him anymore, I can’t even sleep at night without his presence in the house (night terrors, etc), and also the way it’s going, I won’t have much life left to live. I honestly wish that I’d been the one to get the cancer, it would have been much better for both of us. It would have suited both of our respective strengths and weaknesses better for it to be me.
Even now, he is the one who leaves the house every day because if his best friend doesn’t drive him around he gets depressed if he has stay home all day (never mind that he doomed me to exactly that for app 20 years), and I can’t even point that out to him, how dare I compare the situations, because he’s dying.
I’m sure it’s easy to tell that there’s a lot I haven’t said, that’s not all by design, I’m confused about a lot of things and don’t know what to say about them.
I am his only caretaker in the home, besides his good friend who takes him out every day.
OK, here’s one thing I may as well admit-I have had an opiate addiction in all those years, enabled by myself and by him (he got the pills for me, I wouldn’t know how), because that way I could endure my isolation, even believe that I liked it, and I left him alone that way.
He never had an addiction to anything (except food, and that’s been gone).
You can imagine the problems from that now. I am very evil, I even resent that he now is not only willing but eager to take all the pills (including for anxiety) which I took all those years, but that he now needs for himself. I can’t even take anything for stress, he even wants all those now. I feel like after stealing my life, now that he must leave this mortal coil, he’d like me to die with him, one way or another. I don’t have much to look forward to, my youth is wasted and gone, I have no friends or “support group”, and I’d be ashamed to say any of this to anyone “in real life” anyway. I know that whatever he did, in the end I allowed it. I made a devil’s bargain, and the joke’s on me now.
Go ahead, say the worst, it won’t be anything I haven’t said to myself. If I didn’t have two little dogs whom Iove, who depend on me, I’d just follow him after he goes, though I have a great fear of hell.
I don't believe that I’m looking for answers, just perhaps some clarification in my confusion.
ETA-And no, my opiate addiction didn’t drive him away, because I didn’t have one until well after his withdrawal from me, and his “living my life, no one tells what to do” thing, while I, with no one even asking, lived the life he expected of me. I had back surgery after his withdrawal from me, one thing led to another, and became a way of me staying compliant and complaisant while he went his way.