280: What if you lived on the line between life and death?
56:03 Share

Today's episode is brought to you by Audible. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, or expert advice, you can be inspired to new ways of thinking. And there's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. Currently, I'm listening to Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, a wonderful audio title that challenges us to imagine a new way to lead

love, work, parent, and educate through the power of vulnerability. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500. That's audible.com slash happening or text happening to 500-500.

This Is Actually Happening is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. What if comparing car insurance rates was as easy as putting on your favorite podcast? With Progressive, it is. Just visit the Progressive website to quote with all the coverages you want. You'll see Progressive's direct rate. Then their tool will provide options from other companies so you can compare. All you need to do is choose the rate and coverage you like.

Quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. Hello, Prime members. Have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts like this is actually happening ad-free? It's good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts included with your Prime membership.

To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts. That's amazon.com slash ad-free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads. Check out our recently completed six-part series, The 82% Modern Stories of Love and Family, ad-free with your Prime membership.

This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It felt like I was in some other place. Felt like I was kind of in between life and death. And I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay there. I just wanted to stay there forever and not walk away. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 280. What if you lived on the line between life and death?

This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today.

This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

Let's face it, we were all that kid. So first call your parents to say I'm sorry, and then download the Instacart app to get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes all school year long. Get a $0 delivery fee for your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order. Additional terms apply. I come from a maternal line of separation and divorce from generations back before separation or divorce were common at all.

My mom's parents were divorced. My great-grandmother was divorced. And then my great-grandmother never knew her father. And her husband was cheating on her. And there's a story in my family where she was sitting in a hair salon in Chicago, and she overheard two women talking in the hair salon. And these two women realized that they were both engaged to the same man.

They were dating the same man and they were both engaged to him. And she was just sitting there listening, not a part of the conversation. But at some point she turned to them and she said, "You both may be engaged to him, but I'm married to him." And that was her husband. That was my great-grandfather. My grandmother, who died before I was born, the big family secret that we found out when I was a teenager was that she was actually sleeping with my mom's first boyfriend while my mom was with him.

And my mom never knew until years and years after her mother was gone. It goes back and back and back. I was born in Los Angeles in 1982, and my parents at the time were both Scientologists. My mom grew up in California. My dad was a Jew from the Bronx.

My mom had two kids already who were 11 and 12 years older than me with two other fathers, not my dad. And then on my dad's side, he also had a daughter from a previous marriage. My childhood is kind of broken up into before my parents separated and after they separated. The happy moments of my childhood were when all of my sisters and both of my parents were there.

My sisters loved me so much. They like showered me with attention and affection and they played with me all the time. There's a thing that people like to say in my family that my feet never touched the ground until I was two because someone was always holding me. I was always getting kind of passed around from person to person. And my parents were both very, very loving and they're both very sweet people.

I remember those early times being very happy. My parents both joined Scientology when they were young. They were deep, deep in it. My parents both worked in it. Every friend of theirs was in it. I was born into a family that had been in a cult for over a decade. My sisters grew up in the Church of Scientology.

They moved around a lot as children and were living with a lot of different friends and boyfriends of my mom. And one of my sisters told me that by the time she was like 12, she had lived in 17 places.

In Scientology, they see children as small adults. So my sisters have a lot of trauma from growing up in that environment of being in a cult, of kind of being treated as people who could make their own decisions, even when they were very small. But my whole family left Scientology when I was a baby. It was one of those things that they all experienced and I didn't.

I think that I was protected from the very intense traumas that some of them were going through. And it wasn't just Scientology that affected my sisters and brought different forms of trauma into their lives. It was also leaving Scientology and entering a mainstream gigantic high school in Los Angeles

When people talk about cults, one of the problems with cults is that they're so insular and so the trauma that's happening makes it so that people can't even connect to others outside of that experience. The first time my dad left, I think I was five, and my sisters left to go to college. Suddenly, everyone in my home left the house except my mom and me.

My dad left because he felt like he needed to do some spiritual searching. He had had a real full life and career in Scientology as an auditor, someone who does spiritual work almost like a therapist. And it was something that he really loved doing. So he was very lost after we left Scientology, even though it was what he wanted. But he really had trouble finding his footing kind of ever again after that.

He became kind of a follower of different trends on the edge of the psycho-spiritual movement, as he would say, picking things up and then discarding them. He left and came back a whole bunch of times over about two years. My parents kept reuniting and then separating again over and over.

Later, when I was still a teenager, I found a little journal that I'd had as a child. And there was a page that said, "I wish my dad would come back." And then on a different day, lower down on that same page, it said, "He came back." And then lower down on the same page, it said, "He left again." That was going on for years.

I think neither of them were able to think about what would be good for me in that situation. That was definitely one of my early traumas because I didn't understand what was happening. For me, the hardest part was the instability

So my mom and I moved in with her new partner, Eddie, when I was seven or eight. And I lived in that apartment through high school. And Eddie ended up having a serious knee injury in the first one or two years that we lived with him. And he ended up being disabled. And he had been very athletic. And he couldn't walk anymore because of these knee replacement surgeries that didn't work on him.

He was drinking a lot and he was kind of trying to manage pain with painkillers and trying not to get addicted to them. The places I found solace back then were art and writing. My dad would take me to new age bookstores and buy me crystals. And that was another space where I found a lot of comfort. And that was kind of a big part of my spirituality as a teenager.

I lied a lot as a kid and I knew that I was lying, but the disconnect was pretty strong so that I didn't feel like I was.

When I was 15 or 16, I started making out with people. Sometimes I would be drawn to making out with the wrong person. I might make out with a friend's partner or make out with someone who had a partner. I had this kind of weird sexual relationship when I was 16 with an older guy who lived in my apartment building who had a partner that he lived with and I was friends with the partner.

I felt compelled, I guess, and aroused. And I often found myself in situations where maybe I was drawn to secrecy or drawn to that kind of feeling of taboo around desire. And then I would feel guilty and I would feel confused, but maybe would continue to do the thing I was doing that I felt was kind of wrong.

Some of that dishonesty and some of that need to have a secret. Maybe it was a space for me to feel like I had something that was mine, just belonged to me and that nobody else could touch and that wasn't anybody else's business. And it was a space where my body and my desire and my drive and my own sensuality became primary for me.

When I look back at my life, I feel like a lot of the different moments in my life are determined by what relationship I was in at the time. And that feels like something that I've kind of inherited from my mom. I'm non-binary, so I now don't identify as a woman, but I at the time was living and identifying as a cis woman. And I was dating cis men. And it was always pretty hard.

More than one partner told me they felt like I just wanted to be with a woman because I wanted to talk about my feelings and wanted to know what the other person was feeling.

My first partner, I felt responsible for him. I felt scared and I felt like I was stuck with him. And I realized that he was very emotionally dependent on me. And I had a pretty severe panic attack for the first time in my life. I didn't know what a panic attack was at the time. So I thought I was losing my mind completely.

I didn't sleep for several days or eat for several days. That was a little bit of a turning point in me kind of understanding that I was prone to anxiety and understanding that I needed to watch out. I think I was often in a role of doing a lot of emotional labor for someone else and not feeling that that was reciprocated.

In terms of my sexuality, I would say that I always had sexual encounters with people of different genders. But I ended up having these relationships with men. You know, if it's possible for you to be in a relationship that looks somewhat normative and you haven't figured it out yet, then you might kind of fall into those because that's what your culture is prescribing.

I never felt like I was in the wrong body or that I wanted to dress differently at that time, but I had some other difficult to pin down experiences of like presentation. I don't identify as trans, but I resented something about presenting as a cis woman and I resented a lot about gender binaries.

I felt that weight of being seen in the world as the female half of a couple and I hated that feeling.

And I think there was a lot of confusion because I didn't really know what was wrong. I would be trying to figure it out. And I spent a lot of time in my 20s and 30s talking with people about gender and sex and felt a kind of sadness and felt like something just was out of my reach. I had some friends who definitely saw me as empowered and confident, but I felt like something was missing.

I went to college at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was studying comparative religions and anthropology and creative writing. I moved to St. Louis in 2014 to do an MFA in poetry at Washington University. I was just feeling really excited at that time because I was finally dedicating myself full-time to my artistic practice.

And I met Kelly, a PhD student in the English department. We met up at a cafe to talk about starting a literary magazine. We hit it off and we did start a magazine together. We were co-editors of this online literary and arts magazine.

Kelly was assigned male at birth, and when I met her, she had been living as a man and was living in this very conservative, very religious, Christian, evangelical environment, having been brought up by missionaries. She had a different name at that time. She was married to a woman who was very Christian and had a two-year-old son.

Kelly and I loved working together, but I knew that I didn't know her. She was hiding a lot, and I was talking a lot. I was talking a lot about my own struggles, and she was, I think, a little caught off guard by our friendship because she wasn't used to having people pay attention to her and notice that something was going on or notice that there were questions that maybe someone should be asking.

At some point, she kind of revealed to me that she had had a queer experience or two before. And then she kind of freaked out because she had never told anyone about that.

And then all this stuff started coming out. She started telling me that she was having these gay hookups with men on the regular, kind of through Craigslist. And she was starting to explore the possibility that she might be not a man. She started opening up about that stuff to me, and I was terrified. But I was just kind of crazily drawn to her once I started seeing who she really was.

I just felt so deeply connected to her. I would say that she and I were both feeling like we wanted to live more honestly and explore our gender and sexuality more honestly. So there was a really big feeling of relief and kind of liberation and freedom and empowerment that was very exciting for both of us.

One night we both were at a reading and we ended up hanging out late after the reading with some people and she gave me a ride home and when I went to get out of the car we hugged and then she kind of held me tight and I felt like she was about to kiss me and she was kind of shaking.

And I pulled away and she looked at me and there was just this look in her eye. And I said to her, "I'm really sorry. I know I've been very sassy tonight. I know you love your wife." And I got out of the car. I thought it was sweet. I thought we were having like a sweet flirty moment. I wasn't taking it seriously and I didn't understand how big of a deal it was for her.

She texted me a few times over the next couple weeks and I kept saying like, "Oh sorry, I'm really busy. Yeah, we'll catch up soon." And I would kind of see her around. But then there was one day when we were in the office together and that day she told me that she had feelings for me and I said, "That's okay." Like sometimes friends have feelings for each other. I'm not bothered by it. But then something did happen which is that she started telling me the truth.

And it's like these layers started to kind of peel away. And when I saw what was underneath, it's like I fell in love with the person that she was and the person that she was becoming. We had this moment that was very intense where we talked about having an affair. It was this moment where we were like, oh, my God, I think this attraction between us is building. But obviously, we can't be together because you're married, you're a kid.

Okay, but what if we just have an affair? So we kind of decided, yeah, let's try it. Let's have an affair. And I think from the moment we said that, within a few days, we were both going through breakups. We didn't want to have an affair. We wanted to get out of the lives we were in.

Today's episode is brought to you by Quince. It's been a busy season of events and travel, and my wardrobe has taken a beating. A total overhaul isn't in my budget, but I'm replacing some of those worn-out pieces with affordable, high-quality essentials from Quince. By partnering with Top Factories, Quince cuts out the cost to the middleman and passes the savings on to us.

I love the Italian board shorts. They're made from quick-drying material and offer UPF 50 protection for all-day wear, so I can go from hiking to lounging on the beach without a wardrobe change. And compared to other luxury brands, the prices are well within my reach.

Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with Quince. Go to quince.com slash happening for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash happening to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash happening

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie, and one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. ♪

She actually asked her pastor and her wife to talk with her. And in front of their pastor, which she did because she wanted her wife to have support, she told her wife, I'm not Christian anymore and I'm bisexual. I've been hooking up with men for years behind your back.

The first time we had sex, we had this night together and she asked me to put makeup on her. She had never had makeup on before. I sat on her lap and I put eyeliner and eyeshadow and lipstick on her. I said, "Go look in the mirror." And she went into the bathroom and she looked in the mirror and I said, "How do you feel?" She said, "I feel seen and I feel beautiful."

I looked at her and I feel like in that moment I was in love with her right then and like devastated for her for how much she had been like hiding herself. When she looked in the mirror, she wept. And then we had sex for the first time and it was crazy. Like we just had passionate sex that was like a lightning bolt.

I was kind of out of control, in love with her, like couldn't really think about anything except wanting to be with her, but also kept having this feeling like I shouldn't be involved in this situation because it was too complicated and too messy. I was faced with my history and my patterns, my attraction to situations of intensity, of secrecy.

It wasn't fun. And when I say I was attracted to it, it wasn't that I loved every aspect of it. It's just that it felt so compelling and it felt impossible for me to choose otherwise. Kelly was struggling with a lot of guilt about the feeling that she was abandoning her son, who was two years old.

There was the additional guilt that she had to really face about the hookups she'd been having. And so she started to get very depressed and she started to have some suicidal thoughts and she started to see a therapist for the first time ever. She also started seeing a psychiatrist.

Around this time also, we were talking about non-monogamy and I wanted to talk through things with her and I wanted to be understanding. And it was summertime, so I decided that I was going to go out of town for a few weeks and visit some different friends. We decided to take a little bit of a break from talking and I told her that if she needed help because of mental health stuff, that I wanted to talk about that. But I wanted to take a little break and not talk too much about our relationship.

And while I was out of town, I got some weird calls and texts from her. I found out that she had been awake for several days in a row, had been out all night with someone. And then she went in to have a therapy appointment and she was very obviously to her therapist in an episode of Full Blown Mania.

Things would happen like she would be unable to stop talking. Her speech might be incomprehensible, like she would be repeating a word or a phrase over and over and over again really fast, twitching a lot, pacing, kind of tapping on something. Her thoughts would start going so fast that she couldn't distinguish between what she was thinking and what she was saying out loud. So her speech would become jumbled because she would be like only saying parts of the thoughts that were racing around.

She started to get very agitated and the therapist felt a little bit scared. And her therapist and psychiatrist were basically saying, you need to go to the hospital right now. That was the first hospitalization she ever had. It was four or five days and they diagnosed her with bipolar one.

The level of experiences that she had, it was so outside of her control and it was so physiological. I mean, you could see her speeding up or slowing down. She was almost catatonic sometimes when she was depressed, like couldn't move her body, found it hard to move her mouth to say words, like her face would change. That fall, she had a hospitalization for suicidal depression.

She was very scared and couldn't be alone and was having obsessive thoughts about ways to take her life. I was terrified of losing her. I was so anxious all the time. People in my life were very worried about me. They wanted me to walk away. They wanted me to try to just be her friend. And I wanted that for myself too in a lot of moments, but I couldn't walk away.

After the first few hospitalizations and after the first year or so of our involvement, she went for two entire months to an out-of-state residential facility for mental health. She had full-time professional medical care and therapy. During your stay, you can't wear your own clothes. They take away your shoes. You're just wearing socks.

It's really hard because there's not a lot of dignity and especially for a queer, a non-binary, a trans person to be in that space where you don't have control over what you're wearing or for her, like she needed to be able to shave or put on makeup or do different things to make her feel more comfortable. And those things were hard in that kind of a hospital environment.

When she came back from that stay, that's when she publicly first changed her name to Kelly. And at that time, she also changed her pronouns to they, them. Things just got magically better once she changed her name.

In that first year, there was so much confusion and anxiety and so much drama. But I think one of the worst parts was that she was still living as a man publicly, and she had a masculine name. To live with bipolar disorder, we just kind of realized that she and we together needed to change our life structure.

She didn't drink. She exercised a lot. We went to bed early. She took her medications every single day. And she tried to live authentically and to open up about who she was and to live according to her values. I think Kelly really saw her gender identity and her experience with her gender as a becoming person.

It wasn't a static thing. She continued to learn more about herself so that she could find out who she was in an authentic way. She slowly just realized that the more feminine she felt and the more feminine she expressed and presented, she felt more and more positive about herself and more and more connected to herself. You know, she was afraid of what she was finding out.

But the more she embraced it, the better she felt about herself. And, you know, over a period of years, she was slowly becoming okay with the idea that she was a trans woman. Her birth family, her mom, her dad, her five siblings, none of them were ever affirming of her gender identity. Her parents never used her name.

Her ex-wife did start using the name Kelly, did start using they/them pronouns, but when Kelly switched to she/her pronouns, her ex-wife said, "I just can't." As time went on and as she grew more fully into herself, she grew more distant from her birth family,

We have this stereotype that a conservative Christian family might disown someone, say, "You're not my family member anymore." But it wasn't like that. They were always saying to her, "You're rejecting us." They felt abandoned by her. They wanted to say to her, "We're always going to be here for if you come back to the right path."

But then at the same time, some of them wouldn't use her name or affirm anything about her life. They would send her a text to say hi or say happy birthday, and then they would claim that that was them making an effort. And she was in and out of the hospital for a life-threatening mental illness. Even though she tried to create some boundaries and talk to them less often, their voices were in her head all the time that told her basically, this isn't real. You're a fraud.

It was a feeling of her own reality of herself being dismissed completely. We made some amazing friends. We had a strong queer community. She had a lot of people around her that really loved and adored her. But things got worse and hospitalizations started again. In late 2019, the fall was just kind of uncontrollable because she was in the hospital, then out, then in, then out.

I think she was terrified of what was happening to her mentally. When she was manic, she would sometimes move very fast and her body language would feel scary to me. It would be this feeling that something very unpredictable could be about to happen at any moment.

She had done ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, in 2016. She had some really troubling memory loss from it and it was just a really hard experience for us and she seemed kind of not all there during the few weeks of doing it and we never wanted to do it again. But in 2019, we kind of decided to try it again because we were feeling so hopeless. And she was just having these weird holes in her memory

Like one day we were driving down the street and it was right by our house and she said she didn't recognize where we were. And that was scary for me. And I think it was terrifying to her. I think she was terrified and it was really hard to know if the things she was experiencing were her disorder or medications that she was on or the electroconvulsive therapy or what. It was just so confusing.

My anxiety was through the roof. Sometimes if she did have to go to the hospital, I would kind of collapse that night and I was just kind of a mess, but I would try to hold myself together when I was with her.

Once an episode passed and she was feeling better, we would kind of debrief. We would talk through what happened. We would kind of both narrate the experience to each other. And we kind of talked about her illness as if it was this third person living with us that we had to kind of deal with. But at the end of 2019 and early 2020, I think we were both starting to feel kind of hopeless and

She was really scared. She felt like her life was being taken away from her. It was kind of taking over my life. I didn't have a lot of room for myself and I knew that it was a problem, but it was like we were in constant crisis. I think she also started feeling like a burden to me and she started feeling unsure if she was going to be able to work. She was getting a lot of medical bills and was worried about money.

At the same time, we got engaged and we were planning to get married and she was really excited about that and it was fun to talk about and we were planning it. But it did bring up a lot of issues for her about family because she didn't want to deal with how they would see her

During this whole experience, I think I really had to start to face some things about my own history and family and patterns of codependency because I saw the way that I was giving myself over to this other person and their experiences and how hard it was for me to set boundaries.

I was constantly afraid and I didn't know what to do because I didn't really think about leaving her. I didn't want to. I mean, I was still very, very in love with her the entire time, but I definitely felt like it was unsustainable, the life we were living. And I felt like I had to be hopeful for both of us, even at times when I was feeling hopeless.

In March of 2020, Kelly was having suicidal ideation almost every day and it became almost a normal part of our life. One of the things we would talk about is, okay, let's just focus on making it to this wedding. After that, we can focus on making it until Christmas.

It's like you just become accustomed to the threat that someone could try to take their life, but you think that it won't happen yet. And, you know, she didn't say, I want to do it. She said, I'm afraid that I will. And so she was living with that too, that feeling of fear that she would, and oftentimes really fighting that feeling and struggling against it and wanting to live. She was a person who was so alive. And then the pandemic hit.

She was acting very twitchy and agitated and didn't really seem to understand or believe things that we were hearing on the news. I was trying to talk to her about the pandemic, and she said that I was lying to her to try to keep her from gambling or something like that. It was kind of one of those weird moments where something is happening that's off.

So shortly after that, a friend and I took her to the hospital. And when she came back out just a few days later, the situation with the pandemic had escalated. And I told her we might not be able to have a wedding this summer.

All of Kelly's healthy coping mechanisms involved being with others in healthy ways. She was coaching an ultimate Frisbee team. She loved to have people over and cook dinner for people. She went to the gym several times a week.

She wanted to go to the gym and I said, you're not going to be able to go to the gym. And she was trying to find out if the ultimate Frisbee practice was happening. And she found out that that had been canceled. It was really, really scary when I realized that she wasn't going to be able to do those things.

On March 23rd, it was kind of a cold day. It was just barely past winter and I went for a walk with a friend and Kelly went for a jog with one of her good friends who she played Ultimate with. And I remember on this walk saying to my friend Michaela that I was afraid she was going to die and that I felt like she already had one foot in another world. When I got home, Kelly was already home. She was crying in her bedroom.

I remember her saying to me, could you hug me? And I went over to the bed and I sat with her and she kind of like leaned into my arms and she put her legs up so that I was almost holding her like a baby. And I just held her and I asked her if she was feeling suicidal and she said yes. And I asked her if she thought that she could be safe and she said yes.

And I asked her if she had any plan in mind and she said no. And I asked her if she had any methods that she had access to and she said no. She told me that she had to go pick up some medication at a Walgreens and I was about to go have this Zoom call with three friends.

I told her that she could come in and join the call if she wanted. I was in a different room of our house with the door ajar. And at some point, she came into the room. She looked a lot better. She had put on a cute outfit and she had put on some makeup and put up her hair. She leaned down and she gave me a kiss. And all the friends on that call said hi to her and she kind of waved. And then she left the house.

So I'm still sitting on that call for a long time, just chatting with these friends. And at some point I hear Kelly come home. And so in the back of my mind, I'm thinking she's home. I'm not worried about her. She's just in the other room. When I got off the call, I go into the other room and I call her name and I look in all the rooms of the house and I realized that she's not there. And I'm confused.

And I look outside and my car that she had taken is gone. My heart started pounding so, so hard and calling her and calling her and calling her. And I text her. I called the police and I could barely breathe. I told the police on the call, I said that they should go look at this one park that was a few miles away.

After I got off that call, I was kind of pacing around the house and I got a text from her friend, Hannah, that she had gone on a run with earlier that day.

So Hannah came over to the house and I was just a wreck and I didn't know what to do. And I was pacing around and Hannah said, can you look at her computer and see if you can see anything on Google Maps? You know, if it's connected to her phone, we could maybe see where she went.

We saw that she had gone to the Walgreens and then we saw that she had gone to a park very close to my house. We looked at the map and we looked at each other and we just said, she's at Agin Park and we left. I just felt like my whole body was sinking and floating at the same time and my heart was still pounding so hard and I couldn't breathe and the police were already there and the lights were flashing.

There was this area that was roped off and they wouldn't let us pass. A policeman came up to talk to us and I had this kind of crazy desperation of feeling like, oh my God, like I need to know right now if she's alive or dead. Like somebody needs to tell me right now. I felt like I was going to scream. This policeman said, I'm sorry to tell you. And I

I just started to, everything just started to kind of break apart for me. And then he said, the person is deceased. It was the worst sentence that I have ever heard in my entire life. After that, I remember lying down in the middle of the street, just sobbing.

Then I was sitting on the ground with a medical examiner, a woman who was taking some information from me. That medical examiner said to me, "Was the gun hers?" And that's when I found out how she did it. I called her best friend Jonathan, and when I called him, I was crying. And he answered the phone and I said, "I'm so sorry." And he started crying. I didn't even have to say it. He just knew.

Then everything just started. I mean, she died at 10 o'clock p.m. That night, some friends were over at the house talking to me. It was just such a flurry of people finding out and her birth family getting involved and phone calls. And the only thing I could think about was needing to see her body again.

The medical examiner had told me that I would be able to go see her the next day. But Kelly died on a Monday night. And on Wednesday morning of that week, the city shut down because of COVID. And nobody would answer my calls. And then because we weren't married yet, Kelly's birth family had the rights to her body.

I was scared that they weren't going to let me see her, and I was scared that they were going to dress her up as a boy. Her family ended up moving her body to a chapel a few hours away. And a few days after Kelly died, my friend Gray drove me to the chapel. I saw some of her family members, and I was able to see her body again.

They didn't do anything in terms of any kind of gender presentation or anything. They just tried to be respectful to the body. I touched her face and her arms and her hair, and I talked to her, and I sang to her a little bit. It was very surreal,

It felt like I was in some other place. It felt like I was kind of in between life and death. And I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay there. I just wanted to stay there forever and not walk away. I knew that the plan was that they were going to cremate her body, and I didn't know if they were going to give me any of her ashes. And so when I saw her, I cut a lock of her hair.

I felt like her death was a little more real. But I also have to say that there were so many different moments where that boundary between life and death felt more and more blurred and kind of challenged.

Okay, most Americans think they spend about $62 per month on subscriptions. But get this, the real number is closer to $300. That is literally thousands of dollars a year, half of which you've probably forgotten about. Thankfully, Rocket Money can find a bunch of subscriptions you've forgotten all about and then help you cancel the ones you don't want anymore. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions,

monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features.

Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. Getting the smile and confidence you've been dreaming about all from the comfort of your home isn't a total mystery with Bite Clear Aligners. Just don't be surprised if all your friends start asking, what's your secret?

Begin by ordering your at-home impression kit today for only $14.95. Bite Clear Aligners are doctor-directed and delivered to your door. Treatment costs thousands less than braces, plus they offer flexible financing, accept eligible insurance, and you can pay with your HSA FSA. Get 80% off your impression kit when you use code WONDERY at bite.com. That's B-Y-T-E dot com. Start your confidence journey today with Bite.

My mom and my sisters, they couldn't come be with me because of the pandemic. They wanted to, but I was too scared of them getting sick. And at that point, I was in this mental state of feeling like, oh my God, if I lost someone else right now, I wouldn't be able to survive. Finally, about six weeks later, I really needed my family. They all made their way to Columbia, and we were able to have a Zoom memorial that was attended by about 150 people.

Even though it was over Zoom, it was a very needed community experience to have. A few days later, my mom was leaving and a piece of mail showed up that had something about Kelly on it. And it had the word deceased, which I think became the triggering word for me. And my mom was about to leave and I was crying. And my mom said, I'm so sorry that she's gone.

And I kind of yelled and I said, she's not gone. And I wish people would stop saying that. And my mom said, you know, I don't mean that she's really gone, but I mean physically gone. And I said, that's not true. After that feeling passed, I was kind of like, oh, that was really weird. It kind of freaked me out.

I started having this very powerful need to do rituals and have objects around me that would represent what was happening and would represent Kelly. And it was like these daily kind of rhythms of organizing flowers and crystals and candles and objects.

It started to become something that I really, really, really depended on for survival. It was like one of the only things that kept me grounded in my body and grounded in reality and grounded in kind of physical space. I think in the aftermath, there was a very strong feeling that it shouldn't have happened. Just this feeling that it was preventable and that things were supposed to go differently that day.

I was trying to figure out whose fault it was, and I was one of those people, but I felt like it was kind of everything's fault. It was her family's fault. I felt like it was the pandemic's fault, and I felt like it was the fault of her psychiatrist and her therapist, the fault of the mental health institutions and the financial institutions who were sending her bills, and the disability people who said that she was too young to get on disability.

I definitely felt a lot of anger towards her family. I felt like if she had to live with bipolar disorder, that one thing that could have made a difference in her well-being would have been her family's affirmation of her gender. And so I was furious with them.

I really hadn't dealt with them while she was alive. And seeing them was very frightening to me because I realized more about what she had had to deal with. She has a brother who wrote really horrible, horrible things about her on Facebook after she died. He started deadnaming her and misgendering her. It was just really, really, really awful.

She did leave a will and she left everything to me and her son. And so that was one thing that was a relief because I was really afraid that if that will hadn't existed, her family would have come into my home and started taking her art and her computer and her things. I gave them a couple things. I gave them a couple pieces of her art and they gave me some of her ashes. There was a little bit of generosity and trying to help each other have our needs met between us.

The first year was really, really hard to get through. And I had some moments of suicidal ideation myself. When someone really close to you dies by suicide, suddenly suicide itself seems real in a way it didn't before. And that was something really hard to talk to people about because they didn't understand that that's very common for people who go through suicide loss.

what i really wanted someone to say was of course you're having those thoughts and those feelings look at what you've been through look at what you're going through every day

I see grief as something that's profoundly different from sadness because it's a huge shift in reality. And I think it's something much more fundamental and physical. You just go through these kind of metabolic shifts almost. And it's like your body is different.

In the time since Kelly died, I started feeling like I was a little baby who was having to relearn how to be alive and relearn who I was and relearn the world because I felt like I died. The person I was died and I had to go through a time of choosing to live again and choosing to re-engage with life.

During that whole first year, I really had to learn to take care of myself. And the way that I did that was by asking for help. So many people working together saved my life. I talked on the phone with people a lot. I talked to my friends and my family and my therapist and my support group and my pets. I always think, like,

"You saved my life. You saved my life. And you saved my life. And you saved my life. And you saved my life." To all these different people and animals. I found a support group of suicide widows, and we would talk every week for several hours over Zoom. And we said all the things that were really hard for other people in our lives to hear.

I went on walks almost every single day. I would sit on the roots of the tree where she died sometimes, and I would just sit there and kind of feel her presence, and I would feel the tree. And I had this weird feeling of being grateful to the tree for holding her in her last moments because I felt really upset that she was alone at the end.

basically for one entire year. I feel like my whole life was about me surviving. And in a way, it was the first time in my life that I've probably ever completely focused on myself.

Kelly and I talked a lot during the last few years of our relationship after that first year. We talked about how in many ways, maybe if I had been a quote unquote healthier person emotionally, maybe I wouldn't have stayed with her for the first year. Her life was so messy and she asked so, so, so much of me.

I feel that we live in this culture that draws really hard lines about what's healthy and what's unhealthy and what a good relationship looks like and what a bad relationship looks like. And for me, I do think that some of the ways that I was compelled by the situation came from dysfunction in my past, being drawn to something that seemed unmanageable

Being drawn to something where someone needed me so much that it seemed like they were in danger of not surviving without me. That's a very codependent thing to experience is feeling like that situation is comfortable. I used to think that if we love each other, it's our responsibility to save each other and keep each other alive. I've had a lot of people in my life that had a lot of trauma.

And there was always a feeling of needing to help them feel okay and keep them safe and keep them going and keep them alive. And I have had this shift where I think we do save each other by loving each other. I don't think that I failed and I don't think that Kelly failed. I think we both saved each other.

I would say that there was something between us that neither of us could really ever explain that was something more mysterious that was like a feeling that we were being held together by something larger than us. I do think that that thing is love and there was a lot of love between us and I still feel that there is and I still feel her love in my life now. I wouldn't give up my time with her for anything.

That's one of the most valuable things I have ever had and taught me so much and continues to teach me new things all the time. A little over a year after Kelly died, I met my current partner. He's amazing and he has really joined me on this grief journey where he's really embraced Kelly into his life.

We talk about her a lot and he feels like he's gotten to know her and I feel like she's here with us. I reject the idea that she lost her fight. You know, a lot of people talk about suicide in that way, like the person was struggling and had this fight with mental illness and they lost. It is tragic and it is awful, but it's not fair to that person to call their life a failure. I think that she won.

She lived and she was able to be herself against great odds. Nobody talks about all the days that a person will struggle against suicidal ideation and live and go to bed that night and wake up another day. I saw her doing that. I lived by her side. I know how much she wanted to live and valued life and wanted to fight.

Her life was something that was a gift and something that was its own full story. I just feel grateful that she got to be herself. I thought a lot about how grief-illiterate our culture is. People just want to think that you're doing great or that you're suffering immeasurably and not making it. And it felt like this weird binary that people couldn't think outside of unless they had experienced a really big loss themselves.

All the binaries that we live with, those lines are all more blurry than we think. The line between life and death, the line between surviving something and not surviving it, the line between humans and the natural world and the objects around us, the gender binary. We don't have a culture that lives very well with a paradox.

It's something you live with every day. You live with the loss and the pain and the trauma of the memories. But you also, for me, I live with the love and I live with the gift. You know, she died, but she loved. And that has to be everything. To me, that's everything.

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein.

Today's episode was co-produced by me, Aviva Lipkowitz, and Andrew Waits. With special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at ActuallyHappening.

On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, you can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com.

And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com slash happening. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Wondering more.

If you like This Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.