Grieving the Man Who Broke Me

Grieving someone who hurt you is its own kind of madness. You're never sure which version of them you're mourning, or whether you should be mourning at all.

The hours after the apartment are mostly a blur. I remember my friend taking me back to her place, getting me into her bed, wrapping me in a heavy blanket and asking me to please rest. I was so spent that I passed out under the weight of it and slept.

Some moments, though, are engraved. The weight of my phone in my hand as I started saying the thing I had never imagined saying. He was gone. By suicide.

The exchange with his best friend still loops in my head.

"I'm here with the police and they found him. He's gone."

"Gone where?"

"He killed himself."

I had found out, not as his partner, not even as his friend, but as the last person who still cared enough to look for him.

I started writing the messages. Friends. Old colleagues. People who knew him as the charming, confident, ambitious version. Not the volatile one. Not the cruel one. Not the man who had shattered me.

The condolences poured in. So did the confusion. What no one knew, and what I couldn't explain, was that I wasn't grieving the same person they were. I was grieving someone who had deeply, repeatedly hurt me. Who had left me emotionally bruised, physically harmed, and psychologically exhausted. There is no correct vocabulary for that. People say you must be devastated, and you are, but not in the way they imagine. I was devastated to have lost the man I had loved for almost ten years. I was devastated by the years themselves, by the trauma I was still unpacking, and most of all by the deep, cavernous guilt whispering maybe I could have saved him.

I was also angry. Furiously, incredibly angry. Angry that after everything he had done, I was the one left picking up the pieces, again. That he had gotten the final word. That I never got a real apology. That he could still take up this much space in my life, even in death. And angry at myself for feeling anything at all.

I thought the hardest part would be finding out he was gone. I was wrong. The hardest part was what came after: the chaos, the calls, the guilt, the grief that didn't behave like grief. I didn't know how to mourn him. I also didn't know how not to.

There were moments of real love between us. Or what I had once believed was love. Memories that made me laugh, and memories that made me sick. I kept trying to sort them into something logical. But there is no neat box for this. You loved him. He hurt you. He is dead. None of those facts cancel each other out. They just live in the same space.

The days that followed were survival. Crying one minute, completely numb the next. Family and friends moved around me carefully because I was barely functioning. I saw my therapist. I started medication to take the edge off. I spent hours on the phone with his best friend, the only person who could fully hold the confusing weight of grief, anger and relief all at the same time.

Then the practical things came, and of course, because nothing involving him was ever simple, they came complicated.

The detective told me they had found a handwritten letter and a set of videos in the apartment. It would take a few days for the police to release them; standard procedure, they said, to confirm there was nothing harmful or criminal on them. I sat in that waiting period in a haze, half-relieved that I didn't yet have to face whatever he had left behind, and half-bracing for it.

When the police asked about family, I felt that familiar knot. He had been estranged from his parents. But I knew his sister had recently moved back to Zurich. Meeting her for the first time, at the police station, after his death, was surreal in a way I still don't have words for. How do you offer condolences to someone you've never met, about a man you both knew completely differently? I held back the version of him I knew. She was grieving her big brother, and I wasn't going to put my version of him on top of that. We all carry different images of the people we know. I didn't want to impose mine.

At the station, the detective laid it out: one handwritten letter, thirteen videos.

My first reaction was laughter. Dark, involuntary laughter. Of course thirteen. Of course he saw himself as the rewritten main character of 13 Reasons Why. It was so completely him that I almost forgot, for a second, what we were actually there for.

When I finally went home and opened the envelope, what was inside wasn't the goodbye I had expected. It was a will. He had laid everything out in cold, practical terms. He'd left me enough money, he said, to pay off my debts. He listed passwords, his bank accounts, his laptop, his e-mail, his social media, as if I were meant to step into the role of executor of his life.

He asked me to give some money to the girl he had dated right after me. He called her "a good girl" who had had a tough life and "deserved this." That single line said everything about who he still was: the mix of control, generosity, and playing the good guy, all in one breath, all directed by him from beyond.

There were also requests about the videos. Some were to be sent to specific people. Others he left at my discretion. Maybe there's something positive that can come from this story, he wrote. He wanted me to thank people who had been kind to him. He wanted me to apologize to others he felt he had let down. He had built me a list of his unfinished emotional business and asked me to finish it for him.

At the very end of the letter came what he probably believed would soften everything: that I had been "an extraordinary partner," and that he would "always love" me.

Reading it was like being pulled underwater. It wasn't a love letter. It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even really a goodbye. It was a set of instructions. A manual for how I was supposed to carry him, one last time, in the aftermath of his destruction.

Then there was the funeral to plan. With his sister. A woman I had only just met, who was grieving the loss of her big brother, while I was being asked to publicly honor a man who had nearly destroyed me. It was its own kind of performance. I texted his best friend at one point: The last year we were together was the worst time of my life. I'm still trying to forgive him for everything he did, but I still feel responsible. It's so weird. That was the truest sentence I wrote during the whole period.

I felt as if his death had forced a forgiveness onto me that I wasn't ready to give. As if grief had rewritten the rules of who he was, erasing the harm without asking me first. I was still trying to digest years of damage, and the world wanted me to grieve him properly.

So I medicated, antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, and went through the motions. Numbness became my default setting. The planning, the logistics, the choosing of music and words, became a way to survive the rest. A distraction from a chaos I had no name for.

Even now, years later, I don't fully know what to do with the contradictions he left behind. The man I loved and the man who broke me are both gone, and somehow both are still here. I still find pieces of him in unexpected places, a song, a place we went, a phrase he used to say. The grief surfaces unannounced and behaves like he did: without warning, on its own timeline, asking too much.

What I have come to understand is that grieving him was never just about losing him. It was about losing the version of myself who had stayed. Who had tolerated too much. Who had forgiven too quickly. Who had loved without boundaries because she didn't know what boundaries were yet. That woman doesn't exist anymore either, and some days I grieve her too.

That, I think, is the cruelest piece of losing someone who hurt you. You aren't only mourning their death. You are mourning the version of yourself that loved them, the one who didn't yet know how much it would cost.

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If you're struggling with thoughts of suicide or just need to talk to someone, you're not alone. You can find a helpline for your country at findahelpline.com or befrienders.org. In Switzerland, Die Dargebotene Hand is available 24/7 at 143 (143.ch). In the US, call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, call Samaritans at 116 123.

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