E.There are phrases that just make you angry. Even if family and friends simply use them thoughtlessly or out of helplessness. “Time heals all wounds” is one of them. “The wounds don’t heal at all,” says Elisabeth Sauer, “not a day goes by that I don’t think about my husband.”
To him, whom we will simply call Jan in this text, because his wife would like to remain anonymous, which is why we have changed her name. Her husband, the successful management consultant, partner and shareholder she met in this same company. They lived and worked together, “24/7,” she says. She still works there. He is a great music lover, interested in politics, sporty, for the son of the football hero. She looks at the extensive record and CD collection in the living room. Joint concert visits, “he could be as happy and exuberant as a child”. Ski holidays, three children, a magnificent home with a large garden in a prime location in the Taunus.
Then came what was initially quite harmlessly called “burn-out”. “That’s a pretty nice word for depression,” she says. He received medical treatment, including inpatient treatment, and was given pills. She was heavily pregnant with her little daughter at the time, and he was discharged from the clinic for the birth. “Dad has a sleeping sickness,” said the children at the time, because their happy dad actually slept all the time.
Great help in a difficult time
“Suddenly he also had strong existential fears, completely unfounded, the company and we were doing very well, but he could no longer concentrate well, was afraid of losing his brilliant mind.” Nevertheless, he tried to get back on his feet in working life grasp. But when he didn’t get to a customer in Darmstadt, his wife, who was 41 years old at the time and had become a mother for the third time six months earlier, suspected that something bad must have happened. She drove to the customer and actually hoped to see that he was late. Shortly afterwards her phone was already on: he had committed suicide, hundreds of kilometers from his wife and three children, in his old Bavarian homeland. The whole family had also lived there a few months earlier. As if in a trance, she drove back home to the three children.
“After his death, I just worked really badly, breastfed the little one, and had an absolute sleep deficit. At night there were just four of us lying in the bedroom, including the two older ones with me and the baby in the marriage bed. ”Today, five and a half years later, she tries to explain how she survived this difficult time, talking about resilience, ability to survive even the worst strokes of fate.
The support she received at Sternenzelt was a great help in this difficult time. The facility for grieving children, adolescents and their parents, for which FAZ readers are donating this year, gave her support. There the children met the trained psychologist Claudia Vormann and other children who had experienced something similar and who suddenly no longer had a dad.
“The grief doesn’t get any smaller, it just makes you grow a little”
Even today it is sometimes very difficult for the children, even if the mother has a new partner in her life. The oldest, meanwhile 16, was supposed to write a German exam a few weeks ago with the topic “Describe the role of the father in the family picture!”. Your essay was short. “I have nothing to say, my father died,” she wrote. This is what the mother tells us and she understands it very much. “The wounds don’t heal at all”, there is the sentence again. Divorces are certainly not easy to cope with for children. To be widowed young, the children half orphaned, to grow up without a father, that was something completely different. In 30 years from now, the children should have the right to be sad about the loss of their father, whom they loved so much, the mother insists.
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