When the Hurt Runs Deep by Kay Arthur

Author:Kay Arthur [Arthur, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45712-7
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

TOM’s SUICIDE

I married Tom at age twenty, and we divorced six years later, by which time we had two sons. At age twenty-nine, I became a child of God. It was soon after this that Tom committed suicide.

At the time, I was so young in the Lord that I can’t even remember praying and asking God to show me what to tell my sons. But I do remember calling my parents, telling them what had happened, and asking them if I could leave the boys with them while I went to Cleveland, Ohio, for the funeral. My two sons were young—too young, my parents thought, to handle the concept of the father they loved taking his own life. So we told them he was sick and died. It wasn’t until they were older that I finally told them. Little did I realize the emotional havoc it would play in the hearts and minds of these boys who so dearly loved their daddy.

As I mentioned earlier, Tom was manic depressive, bipolar, and we didn’t know it. I didn’t understand much about the condition, even though I was working at Toledo State Mental Hospital when Tom and I were dating. All I knew was how hard it was to please him, that sometimes nothing could make him happy, and how he would so often simply come home, eat, and then go right to bed.

Tom had been an incredible athlete, voted most likely to succeed, intellectually at genius level, poised, good looking, a great dancer, and a good lover. He was faithful in our marriage, interested in God, and fully responsible to provide for his family.

I just couldn’t understand why he was so overwhelmingly restless and bitterly unhappy. It made no sense to me as a young woman, and I simply wasn’t prepared to deal with that reality. So I listened to the ungodly, unbiblical counsel of two clergymen and left him.

In those three years between our divorce and my salvation, Tom would call me and tell me he was thinking of suicide. I did the only thing I had ever been taught to do in such a circumstance—try to bluff him out of it, or make him so mad he wouldn’t do it.

So I would say, “Do a good job, so I get your money.” Or, “Why don’t you fly your plane into the side of a mountain so I can get your insurance?”

How absolutely horrible—to tell someone his life is worth money! But as I said, I was lost and didn’t fully comprehend the destructive power in my own words. The Bible says the tongue is a little member, but set on fire by hell!2

After I came to know the Lord, I told God I would go back to Tom, because I knew God hated divorce. In fact, I was all prepared to do so.

Then the phone call came. It was my father-in-law, saying, “Tom is dead, Kay. He hung himself.”

I hung up the phone, fell down on my knees beside the bed, and grabbed the phone again.

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