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When I walked into my husband's home on September 5, 2006, I thought I was meeting him for a lunch date and then to go to my apartment to prepare a formal resume for him. I called out Jeff's name twice but there was no answer and the house was eerily silent. Jeff's television was rarely off or he was outside working in the yard, his pride. I walked into the living room and saw two sheets of printer paper hanging from a built in curio case, the front of which faced the dining room, and weighed down by a lamp.

My stomach started to quiver and there was a surreal feel to the moment with the papers, one of which kept lifting gently in the breeze from the dining room ceiling fan, and the dust motes floating in sunlight from the dining room bay windows. To this day those are the things that still stick in my mind. In that moment I knew. Without reading those papers. I knew.
I knew that the three months of crying jags to the kids when I was out of state working a week or two at a time about how much he loved them, how he couldn't live with the bi-polar anymore or with the constant feeling he was being watched that the Zoloft and Nurontin could not stop were related to a downward spiral that resulted in suicide. And the phone calls to my hotel rooms at two or three in the morning needing my reassurance, and someone to help dispel the dark thoughts.
One paper asked me to call the police, asked that I not come into the basement because he was dead, a statement that he had written individual letters to our two teenagers and Jeff's thirty year old stepdaughter and my daughter, and the other asked that I pay his only friend, Jim, the money he owed him.
I didn't want to believe. . I've read that denial is common. I walked back to the bedroom, calmly. His bible lay open to the seventh Psalm on an unmade bed and a shotgun was perched against the wall. Pictures of the kids from childhood on were scattered on the dining room table and on the bed. Odd, but I couldn't call the police, some part of me thinking how embarrassed Jeff would be if he were only unconscious.
One of the neighbors that had been close to all of us since moving in about five years earlier, and with whom Jeff had spent evenings on their front porch since we separated in 2005, went for me. He only walked part way down the basement steps, enough to see Jeff's knees on the concrete floor as if he'd been praying, and his limp gray hands. His wife called 911 for me, I was

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