Ep. 15 – The Other Side of Grief: A Spouse's Perspective on Loving Someone Through the Unthinkable

Well, thank you all for that.

You know, because we're on with our spouses and, and also our community member, April, who, who's dear to us, it's, it's very interesting to see and hear from your perspective.

And I think that's a lot of the reason why we wanted to do this episode is because there are a lot of you out there, spouses and partners of people that are You guys are gonna make me cry.

Getting, understanding them when that phone rings that something is very wrong, knowing that, like, I gotta go tell him at his job, and having him come outside, knowing that I gotta clear my schedule.

This is not good.

You are the support, you know? You're, you're the one.

You guys are the ones.

So thank you for, for traveling down that road.

I know that wasn't easy.

I have a, a question, and also for each of you.

But I'm just curious to know what you knew about murder-suicide before it became a part of your family story.

I like to talk about how for me personally, [chuckles] I ask you a question and then I'm gonna talk about, about myself.

But for me-

It's typical.

[laughs] For me though, I think about, like, I was a kid, Phil Hartman, the actor, comedian, passed away in a murder-suicide, and that's when I knew about it.

And it was right there in the '90s when, like, Phil Hartman and then OJ, it was a lot of stuff like that happening.

And I never heard that term before, and I hadn't really heard it bef- after that time until it happened for me.

So I'm just curious if any of you can speak to what you knew about murder-suicide before it happened in your families.

We had had suicide in our family.

There was an uncle who had been terribly, terribly depressed after the loss of his father, who just withdrawed- withdrew from activities, from the, from the family, from the extended family, from his practice, et cetera, sullen and then just disappeared, and eventually was found.

Depression-based sui- suicide though, not a murder-suicide.

I think of the Phil Hartman episode, and I think of the OJ episodes, I think of rage-induced crimes that are, you know, maybe a crime of passion or just an act, an act of rash thinking and chemical imbalance, however you wanna relay wherever the mind was coming from when the act was perpetrated.

Never really defining it and giving it a brass frame as a murder-suicide, but just these large garish activities of rage.

That's usually how I-

So-