May 11, 2019

First solo trip with my Mom to London

I sometimes think about the version of myself who, in April 2019, believed the worst was already behind her.

She had just been accepted into a law degree at the University of London. It was the first big thing she'd chosen for herself in nearly a decade. She wanted to advocate for vulnerable children one day, and the acceptance felt like proof that the door was still open, that she was still capable of building something. She was proud of it in a way she hadn't let herself feel about something in a long time.

She was also, that month, packing for Colombia. A close friend from hotel management school was getting married, and the wedding would take her to Bogotá and then to Cartagena. It was the second trip back to Latin America since leaving him, the first had been El Salvador, where she had started to feel her own person come back. This one was a continuation of that, more sun, more music, more friends, more of herself. She was finally standing on solid ground.

That's the woman this essay is about. Or rather, it's about what happened to her three weeks later.

When I got back from Colombia, real life was waiting. My first law exam was coming up, Introduction to Legal Systems, and I hadn't written an exam in years. I had forgotten how to study. The simple act of trying to prepare felt strange and foreign.

And then he texted me.

Out of nowhere:

“I have been doing some email blast outs for the suitcases and am going through old e-mails. Re-living all the messages and efforts you did to help us, I realized I clearly didn't appreciate your efforts enough. It is way too late and I know you said you didn't want to hear from me but I just want to say thank you for doing all of that and I am sorry I couldn't appreciate it enough when we were together. I wish you lots of luck with your exams!”

I read it more than once. Mixed feelings, as always with him. Slight relief that he'd acknowledged something. And underneath it: too little, too late: too little, too late. Our problem had never been about appreciation. It had been the abuse. It had been the years. It had been everything he'd done that this message politely didn't mention.

I decided not to answer. I had an exam to focus on, and I wasn't going to be pulled back in.

But May 2019 had other plans.

A letter arrived from the tax office, sent to me because he hadn't updated his contact details. I forwarded it to him with a short hand-written note asking him to handle it. No reply. I assumed he was angry I hadn't answered his message and was now punishing me by going silent.

Then a friend mentioned that he'd launched a new version of his last business, and that I was listed on the website as part of the founding team. Old photos, old language, as if I were still part of it. I was furious. I messaged him asking him to take the photos down. No response. That part was unusual. This kind of long silence wasn't his style; lashing out was. A few days later I checked his e-mail inbox, I still had access from the years I'd run his businesses, and saw my message unread. Along with many others.

Something wasn't right.

So I started reaching out. All week, between study sessions, I messaged his friends, anyone I could think of who might have heard from him recently. The answers came back one by one and they all said the same thing: nothing, not for a while, when did you last hear from him? Every reply, in addition to my gut feeling, started painting a picture of a thing I didn't want confirmed. Then I checked his e-mail again and saw something new, an unread message from the girl he'd been dating, asking where he was, saying she was worried. He had disappeared on her too.

By that point, every part of me knew. But knowing and admitting are not the same thing, and there was one more thing I refused to let him take.

I had the exam on Friday. I had worked hard to get back to this point, and I wasn't going to let him take it from me. Not even like this. So I took the medication my doctor had prescribed for the anxiety, sat down at the desk and wrote that exam as if my future depended on it. Because it did. It was a small, quiet act of rebellion. But by then I already knew.

I went to his apartment that same afternoon, after the exam. Rang the bell. No one answered. I'd handed back the keys when I transferred the lease to his name, so I couldn't get in. I tried calling from a suppressed number. Nothing. Something in my body was already screaming, but I had spent so many years being told my instincts were wrong that trusting them still felt foreign.

My thoughts were all over the place. He's probably just on holiday. He's doing a digital detox. He's punishing me. He knew how to play psychological mind games. He knew exactly which buttons to press to make me spiral, and part of me, the part still wired by him, kept asking whether this was that. Just some twisted maneuver to get my attention.

But underneath that familiar suspicion was something else. A quieter, heavier feeling I didn't want to name. What if this wasn't manipulation. What if this time it really was the thing I had always been afraid of. I went to bed unsure what was real and what was leftover fear.

The next morning, May 11, 2019, I walked into a police station.

I'd like to file a missing person's report.

The words came out and once they were out I couldn't take them back anymore. I sat in a small room and explained everything. The silence. The unread e-mails. His bipolar diagnosis. His previous suicide attempt. I said it all out loud, and once I had, I couldn't pretend anymore that I didn't know what I was saying.

The officer took me seriously.

What followed felt like being part of a film I half-remember. Some of it is cristal clear, some of it is foggy. I remember a private room, another officer, the same explanation again. I remember the police van. I remember arriving at his apartment and being told how this would go.

Ring the bell. Check the windows. Call a locksmith if needed.

"If we have to call a locksmith," one of the officers said, "it likely means we're not helping anymore. We're identifying."

I still clung to hope. I told myself I was being dramatic.

We rang the bell. No answer. We walked around to the garden side. All the blinds were down, which was strange. One of the officers lifted the corner of a blind and looked in.

"There's a light on in the bathroom," he said. "The rest is dark."

And what did I think, in that exact moment? Honestly? You idiot. The kind of trouble I would've gotten into for leaving a light on while travelling. I wasn't judging him. I was bracing for the punishment I would have faced for doing the same thing. That's how deep the control had gone. A man might be dead inside that apartment, and the first thing my brain did was prepare for blame.

I told the officer this wasn't normal for him. They explained they couldn't see anyone inside, so we'd have to wait for the locksmith. Which, as they had told me only minutes before, almost certainly meant identifying a body.

My mind refused to go there. I don't know if that was self-protection or denial.

He paused. He chose his words with the care of someone who had done this before. "These things depend on a lot of factors. Temperature. Timing. There's no way to be sure. Let's just wait for the locksmith."

So we waited.

When the locksmith arrived, the officers asked me to wait one floor up, at the building entrance. I didn't want to. But I stood at the entrance to the building, as close as I could get.

And then.

That smell.

I knew.

But I still refused to acknowledge the undeniable truth.

A few minutes later, the policewoman came up the stairs. Her face was already telling me, before her gentle voice did.

"We have found a male body in the apartment. I'm truly sorry for your loss."

My legs went. My friend caught me. I cried in disbelief and shock and a kind of pain I hadn't known was an actual physical thing, the kind that goes through your chest and takes your breath with it. When people say their heart was breaking, they aren't being figurative. I felt it.

Eventually I could breathe again, and the officers helped me back to the van. I sat there staring out of the window at nothing. The day wasn't done yet though.

Forensics arrived. Then the fire brigade. More police. The building had become a scene, in the official sense of the word. They had found a tank of an unidentified substance in the apartment and needed to secure the area. The forensics team was there to handle the body.

I watched all of this from the van as if it were happening to someone else. If I hadn't been sitting in it, I wouldn't have believed it.

Grief doesn't ask if you're ready. It just crashes in all over you.

What happened in the weeks that followed, the calls I had to make, the funeral I planned with a sister I barely knew, the will, his family, the silence, the grief no one had a script for, deserves its own space. So I'll stop here.

Even now, years later, returning to this day feels like opening something that had finally scabbed over. Some experiences don't fade. They just wait, quietly, until you're ready to look at them again.

The next piece is about what came after.

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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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