She Left Him, and Then Asked Me to Do This…

Love your enemies? (a true story)

Photo by Iulia Mihailov on Unsplash

I had set her ringtone on the most strident setting possible, to ensure it would wake me up at night. Wherever I was, I made sure I knew the fastest route to my car, in case I needed to get to her.

“I’ve decided I’m going to leave him,” she had said at last. She had told me how her husband (let’s call him Mike) had been treating her (let’s call her Mary). The physical violence had stopped but it was never far away, and the psychological violence was never-ending, one put down after another. She had sworn me to silence. And I told her that if she needed help, night or day, she just had to call.

And then one Sunday afternoon he exploded in a fit of drunken rage and started to threaten his parents, in whose home she had taken refuge, trying to smash their door down. When he realized he’d terrified his own children, when his depression caught back up with him, he agreed to check himself into the psychiatric ward. Giving his wife — my best friend — the opportunity to leave safely with her children. She packed her bags, I came to fetch her and brought her back to her parents' home. Once she was settled in, once she had stopped crying, I asked her if there was anything else she needed help for.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m scared of what he might do to himself. I need you to give him moral support.”

Nausea

I hated him, I found him despicable. Although he did have serious psychiatric issues, none of those were excuses for his drinking and violence nor for how he had turned her life into the mess it had become. And she was asking me to help him, to give him moral support?

He had posted a message on social media saying that life was hard and that he was heading to the psychiatric ward, so I send him a text :

— Hey, Mike, I hope you’re doing ok?

— Mary’s depressed and wants to leave me :/

— Ouch. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help…

— Thanks my friend, your support is precious to me.

As time went on, he asked me to call him, so I did. He had been diagnosed bipolar. He had manic phases, where he claimed he was going to claw his way out of this mess by sheer willpower and hard word, and depressive phases, when he would whine about how he had nothing left to live for. The medication was slowly eroding the highs and stabilizing the lows. And he mainly called when he was in his depressive phase, so that was most of what I saw.

It was fascinating to what extend he was unaware — or unable to face the reality — of the emotional damage he had done to his wife and children. She would start trembling any time he sent her a text message. Meanwhile, he was painting himself as the victim: “She’s being mean to me. She’s lying, she’s always had trouble with the truth. Just ask her parents.” (Her parents were saying nothing of the sort). “I’m the only one who can put bread on the table,” he said, locked away in the psychiatric ward. We talked about his projects, the books he wanted to write that were going to require “mountains of work” from him. And from time to time he would talk about how his life was not worth being lived.

Empathy?

Little by little, as I tried to pretend to be his friend, I found myself understanding a little of what he was going through. All the verbal abuse directed towards my best friend made me feel sick, but his despair was real.

“I’ve had enough of life” he would say, “I’m going to find a way to put an end to it.”

“No, don’t. Please! Think of your children, of the damage it would do to them,” I would reply. And he would step away from the figurative ledge he was teetering on.

His loneliness was tangible. It was mixed in with his delusions of grandeur, but the underlying suffering couldn’t be ignored. It was hard not to be drawn into his version of reality. At times after having talked with him I’d find myself wondering if she were the one making everything up. And then I’d remember the state she was in, the trembling, the crying, and snap out of it.

Little by little, he started getting better, as the medication took hold.

Coming apart

Because of the greater stability, but mainly because of the cost, he left the psychiatric ward he had checked himself into. That was not to say that he was doing well, per se; he was still in a sorry state. But the danger of him inflicting physical harm on himself was mostly gone. He was progressively becoming more and more aggressive against her, heaping all the blame on her, saying she had become vicious.

— She’s being nasty to me, she’s really violent.

— It sounds to me like she’s behaving like a wounded animal because she has been hurt.

— I’m not responsible for any of that, it was my illness. I’m the one who is suffering. And she abandoned me

— But you accused her of being mean and cowardly?

— She abandoned me when I needed her the most!

— But when she talks to you about the insults and violence she suffered, you just reply that you’re not responsible for your illness?

— Well I’m not!

— But you were violent against her?

— Yes, I was.

The conversation petered out. I took a screenshot.

Any time I would not accept that he was completely blameless due to his illness, he would accuse me of being partial, of taking sides. He grew aggressive against me. Although I always insisted I cared for him and understood his pain, my not buying into his “not guilty” plea meant my presence was unbearable.

I decided enough was enough. I had tried to help him. I had tried to love my enemy, and to a certain point, I had succeeded. But he couldn’t face what he had done. Nor anyone who did not accept his twisted reality.

His whining turned to insults.

I ignored him.