What I learned from my husband's suicide | Lori Prichard | TEDxOgden

[Applause] [Applause] the day was august 16th 2019. it was a friday i got up at 3am like i did every morning to get ready for a show that starts at 4 30. i went downstairs and my husband travis did like he did every morning he laid out coffee and my breakfast but this day was different it was my birthday so in addition to that he'd left me gifts and a card later on that morning he got our kids ready for school got him up got him dressed fed him kissed them goodbye that was the last time any of us ever saw him he was 44 years old my husband killed himself on my birthday which if i think about it is outrageous we were happy we were happy he was educated he was a successful physical therapist he had two master's degrees and a doctorate his had wonderful parents and made no sense but i've come to realize now that my husband didn't kill himself because it was my birthday he killed himself because he simply couldn't live another day and i know that now because he left a paper trail my husband and i had been married for 15 years two months shy in fact and as embarrassing as it is to say it i never knew he suffered from depression my guess is he was clinically depressed but he was active he was engaged he got more done in a day than i ever did but i look at him now pictures of him on her son's birthday or at christmas we're sitting in a restaurant in tokyo he looks miserable and our children singing him happy birthday happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday i don't know how i could have been so blind it's as plain as day and it haunts me i told you travis left a paper trail and a couple weeks after he died i found these their notebooks he'd been riding in since 2016. they're a window into his mind and a side of my husband that i never knew one entry that's particularly stunning reads i have to choose to let my pain consume me or find strength in the pain and find a purpose in my life my husband was a master at hiding his depression he never talked about being in pain he never talked about seeing himself as a complete and utter failure but it's there it's in his journals he called it the bully in his brain and that bully was relentless it refused to surrender its power over him and i think about the man i knew and the qualities that made him such a great husband and father and i realized so much of who he was was fueled by his depression nothing was ever about travis ever all he ever wanted to do was to make us happy but the problem is i don't think he knew how to make himself happy i used to tell him all the time how much i loved him and how thankful i was to be married to him and in those last few years he would say to me are you sure there's 7 billion people in the world i thought that was such a funny thing to say i didn't understand why you said that but i get it now he didn't feel like he deserved to be loved this is where i could rattle through a list of statistics that show the link between depression and suicide but i'm not going to do that because travis is the statistic this is his story of how he tried to pull himself out of that hole of depression after he died i checked the browser history on our computer i was astounded at the breadth of research that he had done on suicide and depression there were hundreds of journal articles and i found out later that the day before he died he spent 12 minutes on the phone with the national suicide hotline but when he came home from work that night he didn't say a word to me there were times in our marriage i knew travis was struggling but he was always centered around his job he thought he should be further along in his career and to me that is an easy problem to solve you just change your circumstance right and so i encourage him to do other things anything deeper than that he would say he didn't want to talk about it made him feel weak i let him get away with that but there was one conversation that we had about a month before he died that was a little raw it was the first time he gave me any indication that his depression wasn't situational it was more systemic it was coming from within who he was and how he felt about himself and to be honest it scared me and the next morning he left me this note lori i love you your goofball husband and that's what travis did he downplayed it he didn't seem to worry so i didn't worry it wasn't until after he died i realized just how serious his depression was but it took him dying to get me there please don't be like me don't let the person you love talk you out of your concern for them i don't blame myself for my husband's death i blame myself i was so blind to that illusion that he created i didn't act fast enough to get him help my therapist is a professor at the university of utah she's an expert in mental health she often says if only people would view depression like they do cancer depression is a medical diagnosis that deserves medical treatment depression is not a character flaw depression is not a weakness you are not a goofball and trust me you are not going to snap out of it three years of journal entries prove he could not dig himself out of that hole so how do you silence that bully in your brain i am not an expert but i know this you can do everything right to get yourself through a day of depression but what happens on that one day that one day you just don't want to work so hard anymore who's going to carry you through for travis that person should have been me but i didn't know if you hear anything from me please hear this tell someone you love your struggling yes tell a professional but tell someone you love i knew something was wrong that morning i didn't know something was that wrong had i known more i could have done more i'm not here to romanticize suicide or make a martyr out of my husband what he did and what he failed to do to get help is not okay no family should go through the pain the heartache and the disbelief that we have gone through people talk a lot about suicide they don't often talk about the people who are left behind and the worst moment of my life was not the police telling me that my husband was dead the worst moment of my life was telling our children what happened to their father thankfully i had help the head of ksl got me in contact with the woman who's now my therapist the university of utah professor i was telling you about she told me flat out no matter what i said to them i had to tell them the truth no matter how awful it was that's the thing i wanted to lie to them i wanted to tell them that their father had fallen and hit his head or had a heart attack anything but the truth but anne told me what to say and i said it verbatim your father died from depression he took his own life my son was 10. my daughter was 13. how did he think that this was the solution because above all else travis loved his children had he understood the pain that he was inflicting upon them he never would have done it now i will spend the rest of my life trying to keep my children alive because now they're more likely to die the same way so not only am i mourning a past i cannot change i am terrified of my future and what suicide brings with it despite that people say to me suicide is selfish and i will say to you travis honestly thought he was being selfless that bully in his brain made him believe that we would be better off without him it would be comical if it weren't so tragic i would say to you suicide is not selfish it is just really stupid suicide will not get you the relief that you're looking for it only causes a whole other cascade of problems that the people you love most in the world have to pick up and carry for you don't leave that legacy to your family or to your children i'm telling you this but in reality i'm talking to him i'm giving you the plea that i wasn't able to give him to convince you whoever you are please don't take your life think about the people you love they will not be better off without you i know a year has gone by and a birthday is fast these are the gifts he left me that morning i can't open them they're a painful reminder of what was meant to be a life lived together you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 420,205

Rating: 4.8656311 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Brain, Children, Depression, Family, Mental health, Self

Id: Jb_1IklnhaU

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020