My name is Ross. I have lost my husband to suicide, am permanently disabled, and am struggling under the weight of his loss, piling medical bills, rent, car payments, and general living expenses. Without help, I will lose everything I have ever worked for after March as my remaining finances run entirely empty, my apartment lease ends, I have no funds to store my furniture and belongings, and my access to food and medical care could be lost entirely. I am asking for $64k to cover a year of household bills, medical costs, the costs of my husbands funeral expenses, debts he accrued that I am still liable for, and to start a path forward for myself.

After suffering multiple Covid infections I suffered impaired cognition, impaired organ function, impaired mobility and began to suffer consistent ammonia poisoning from high levels in my blood which causes my brain to swell at times. In February of 2023, I was declared to be totally permanently disabled—physically and mentally. My husband took me to several hospitals both in and out of state to look for treatments that would help, but after struggling for two years, nothing seemed to work. I wasn’t responding to any of them, and my conditions were worsening. At the time, I couldn’t even make my own medical decisions.

We tried reaching out to family to ask for assistance, but no one responded to, cared about, or respected our problems other than my husband’s father. While he helped with the strain of the medical bills in the summer of 2023, the rest of my husband’s family treated us with contempt and acted as though me and my conditions were burdens and moral failings. We were shamed, guilt-tripped, and they did not see my medical problems nor my and my husband’s distress worth dipping into their vast wealth. Despite our obvious struggles, they continued to ignore us to instead take vacations, something that only seemed to accentuate their lack of care for problems out of our control as his mother made repeated claims of being in poverty.

I kept visiting doctors, and they told me that the treatments I’d done weren’t helping. The only thing we could do was to improve my quality of life at home.

After that, unknown to me at the time, my husband had begun racking up debt by taking out loans to pay for my medical care, which was done entirely against my wishes. I had told him explicitly that if we could not afford the care, I wouldn’t consent to it because I felt the writing was on the wall already. But the debt plagued him and he himself began deteriorating. He stopped eating unless I put food in front of him, he stopped sleeping, he began pulling his hair out. He started to abuse stimulants, which he also hid from me. He neglected his own medical and mental health needs saying we couldn’t afford it. Some days, and frequently towards the end, he would begin screaming at us in strange poems and become detached from reality.

The end of my husband’s life was frightening in our home. My husband struggled with schizophrenia and idiopathic hypersomnia for most of the time I’d been with him, and there were repeated suicide attempts he’d made that I had to intervene where he would scream that his family hated him and they would never help him. For most of our marriage, I was able to care for him as he needed. But as I got sicker, I could no longer provide the attention to detail or the caregiving that he had grown accustomed to from me. That coupled with the stress we were experiencing led to those disorders worsening until it tore him apart. I could not convince him to seek help for his health concerns and he suffered from his aforementioned disorders as well as a pituitary cyst and a heart condition. Frequently towards the end he would begin to scream angry poetry and sometimes split into a different and horrifying person. Watching him come apart was agony, but I couldn’t make him get the help he needed.

Then, in September of 2023, the unthinkable happened. Under the crushing weight of his mental health conditions, the neglect of his family, the stress of finances falling apart, and the fear of loss, my husband purchased a gun and shot himself at a nearby park. On that day, I noticed he was running late—which he never did—and had a horrible feeling about it, so I got ready to leave our apartment to go looking for him. Almost as soon as I left my front door, two agents were at my door to tell me the news. A nearby witness to the scene had seen my husband fire the shot and fall over where it happened, and he was found fairly quickly.

It was immediately a waking nightmare. I notified his family and mine. His mother—after not answering her phone for hours despite promises to always answer for emergencies and only to discover she’d been out day drinking—pretended she didn’t know about his conditions or mental health, claiming she had no idea he was depressed despite her participating in his therapy and group therapy sessions with us before. She shamed me for being concerned about the future and told me to focus on her, while I bore the full cost of his funeral, bringing on further debt. I made sure the funeral he received was one he would have wanted, to ensure my husband’s wishes were respected. My mother-in-law found this to be offensive, claiming I was not allowing her to have any say in the funeral when I had asked for her help both verbally and in writing multiple times. She began making a false narrative about my husband, making up a person whole-cloth that was nothing like him—claiming he had a closeness with people he didn’t even want to be in the same building as; that he was Christian when he followed tenets of Buddhism and Taoism; that he wasn’t depressed or mentally ill.

I tried to chalk all this up to the trauma of losing a son she abandoned and the guilt that came with it, so I did my best to remain kind to her despite her frequent cruelty, even giving her the blanket he used to wrap himself in every morning and one of his necklaces. But the lies and slander continued, to the point where his mother and sister publicly blamed me for his death, going as far to say that if I had divorced him when I was declared disabled, he’d still be here. His sister made monstrous accusations that I had abused him and kept him from contacting them, but the irony was my husband hated his sister and didn’t want contact with his family and I was the only one urging him to continue being in contact with them. His mother and sister began to tell his extended family distorted versions of our relationship. They even went after posts and images on his Facebook around our wedding anniversary, posting deranged and unhinged statements on any picture they could find of him or me. When I stopped them from commenting on his Facebook claiming I was "evil" and responsible for his death, and saying he would be alive if I had divorced him when I became disable, they claimed he was being impersonated and had it taken down. I tried for months to recover it, but Facebook support would never connect me to a person. It retroactively removed every message he ever sent any person, replacing it with a default "This message violated Facebook policy". In one fell swoop, they destroyed his entire online Facebook record.

I ended up having to request an order of protection against them after the funeral. Instead of mourning my husband and trying to set his affairs in order, I was spending my time in courtrooms discussing their insanity. I didn’t truly expect to survive this long, so I just kept telling myself to get through it and eventually I would be with my husband again when it was all done.

Despite how they had always treated me prior and how they acted just before it, I tried to be as compassionate as possible following my husband’s death. I planned the funeral entirely to be around when his sister was able to return to the States from overseas work. I gave his mother the blanket he used to wrap himself in every morning while he had his coffee. I tried to include them in the planning of the funeral but his mother refused to be involved unless she could control it and give him a Christian funeral. I was not going to disrespect my husband’s life by doing his final services in a way that he’d never agree to.

I was unable to see his body right away due to the pending investigations. We didn’t know how he obtained a gun, he shouldn’t have been legally able to with his mental health conditions but it turned out he had a valid FOID card and bought it from a store. I wanted to have his body moved back home where his family was, to be easier on them and because we were happy there before we moved. We had moved for his job, but became very miserable in our new residence as we didn’t like the area. The earliest the funeral home had told me they could retrieve his body was the Monday after he died, and he’d passed on that Thursday.

We started to process and grieve a bit. On that Saturday, a friend and I had the eulogizer come down to the place where he died to perform a ritual of release and to talk about how he died. We were expecting a peaceful day after all the rush of detectives and the horrors of the immediate aftermath. We just wanted a day to grieve. Due to the actions of his mother harassing the funeral home and claiming authority over the service, his body was moved early without my consent, leading us to have to rush to the morgue to meet with a driver who was already dispatched. This would be the first of many insane actions by the funeral home, but I didn’t know how much it would cost to place him somewhere else. Another expense I was going to have to take the brunt of.

The day came finally to go to the funeral home and begin the planning. I asked his parents to come at a different time after all the paperwork was handled so we could view him and I could give them each something that belonged to him. Instead, his mother and his aunt decided to camp out the funeral home and gain entry hours before me, removing any privacy I would have had to handle affairs and beginning a consistent refusal to respect any type of boundary I requested. As it turned out, however, due to negligence on the funeral home’s part, we would not be able to view him that day. It would be almost another full week to be allowed to view my husband after his body was mistreated, not stored correctly, and his skull had been broken during embalming. When I finally did get to see his body, they had destroyed his hair, made no attempt to place cosmetics on him, and he smelled of putrid rot. The director tried to claim it was a normal smell, but I have attended funerals before like most people my age. I knew the difference—my husband was rotting in front of me. I had to demand professional behavior from the funeral director to actually apply makeup and fix his hair. He agreed to fix the makeup, but refused to change his hair due to the “fragility of his skull,” which he attributed to a lack of care from the coroner. I had spoken to the coroner, however, who had said he was in perfect condition for an open casket, that the bullet had not pierced his skull and that my husband’s body was not in the condition the funeral director claimed when he left.

I have been struggling with the aftermath of my husband’s death ever since, not just financially but having received a diagnosis of complex post traumatic stress disorder from all that I experienced after his death. I had to view my husband as a mistreated, rotting cadavar, I had to endure harassment and accusations from one side of his family, and I had to clean dried blood off of his glasses and broken phone in my sink. Alongside the grief, the problems we had before he passed where we were no longer living in a safe apartment were still present. Even now, I feel I have not properly grieved him to the extent I wish to. He believed in a custom to release ashes after a year of having them, yet I still have his ashes because I cannot afford to release them where he wanted. And though this is something I thought I’d never do, the fact remains that I have no easy way of doing what I need to do without help. Sadly, all the decisions I made to support him over pursuing my own career goals rendered me unable to care for myself. The hardest part of all of this I think, has been the absolutely ludicrous gaslighting from his mother and sister about their false narrative concerning our marriage when there is endless physical proof and witnesses to how much we cared for each other, and a pile of abusive texts and online messages from them over the years putting on full display what monsters they were to us.

My father in law and my husband’s step mother intend to help us the best they can, but right now they do not have the ability to intervene. We need time and we need safety.

Donations will go towards the following:

-Relocating to a safe, better-condition apartment that has no mold or maintenance issues

-Paying off medical, funeral and living expense debt accrued in the wake of my husbands death

-Mental health services for me

-Researching and building on a home business with an experienced friend to earn my own income so I can be stable alone for the future.

All donations in excess of the requested amount will go towards furthering the goal of building stable income at home

Please donate, and if you can’t, please spread the word and repost. Thank you for any support you can provide, and thank you for reading. I apologize if any of this sounds robotic or frantic, I have been trying to write about this for several months and required the help of a good friend to even put it to text.