Rachael Siddoway - An Impossible Wife: Why He Stayed: A True Story of Love, Marriage, and Mental Illness

Siddoway tackles the impact of mental illness on marriage in her moving memoir, a follow-up to An Impossible Life. Despite such a painful topic, Siddoway effectively draws readers in with rare fluency and power, highlighting both the unequivocal love between her parents and their exhaustive crusade to take back their lives. This gut-wrenching examination of one familys tenacity in the face of debilitating mental illness is a lighthouse of hope.

BOOK LIFE, PUBLISHER WEEKLY

The brave and vital work of this family to share their individual and shared stories so openly and without reservation is a gift to all readers. An Impossible Wife is a moving story of love, heartbreak, and the impacts of mental illness on every member of the family.

INDIE READER

An emotional account of how Mitch and Sonjas marriage remained a true love storyone in which they encountered and overcame extraordinary challenges. Throughout the work, Siddoways writing is journalistically precise and confessionally candid in its revelations. As a result, this book is not only an impressively nuanced depiction of mental illness, but also a moving account of an inextinguishable love. An affecting work about maintaining devotion amid lifes difficulties.

KIRKUS REVIEW

2021 The Gap Press

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published by The Gap Press, LLC

An Impossible Wife / Rachael Siddoway 1st edition

Edited by Joel Pierson

Cover Photo by Rachael Siddoway

ISBN: 978-1-7336194-7-9 (EPUB)

An Impossible Wife has been a labor of love. The hardest book I have written to date. My father is an extremely private person, and getting him to share his deepest feelings was no easy task. While interviewing my dad about his marriage and my mothers mental illness, many silent tears were shared. I want to thank my dad for bravely opening up and making himself vulnerable. He agreed to this book, not only to support my mothers mental health advocacy work, but to help other people who have loved ones struggling with mental illness.

While there is information shared about me and my brothers, this book does not go into detail about how we felt or our lives. Our family understands this will leave you with questions. My parents feel strongly that my brothers and I should have the right to speak for ourselves. This book, An Impossible Wife, is my fathers truth.

It doesnt interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesnt interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Ambulance lights flashed through the windows of our house as my dad held my mom in his arms. Bright reds and blues swirled against the brick house, waking up our usually quiet street.

Shes barely breathing. He panicked as he frantically checked the labels of the empty pill bottles. Lamictal, Geodon, Ativan.

What was she thinking? Her head lay heavy in his lap before the paramedics took her.

She took these. My dads shaky hands showed the medic the pill bottles.

You the husband? The medic glanced at the labels.

Yes. He nodded.

Come with us.

Neighbors stood on their lawns, watching paramedics rush my moms unconscious body out of the house on a stretcher. My dad stepped inside the ambulance and watched his wife remain unresponsive as two large IVs slipped through the veins in her hands.

The sirens sounded as they sped down the streets, not stopping for red lights. The IV bags swayed with each bump in the road. Swallowed up in the chaos, my dad sought out his faith for a moment of stillness. He pleaded with God to save my mothers life.

As they entered the hospital, he could hear the whispers from the staff: Its the CEO and his wife. But none of their comments was registering. In that moment, he was stuck on the thoughts, Will my wife live? What did my son see?

My sixteen-year-old brother, Lincoln, and my mom had been fighting right before she had stormed off, locked herself in the bathroom, and swallowed hundreds of pills. Their fights had become habitual, but none had ever escalated to something like this before.

My parents friends Dean and Lorie had their son take Lincoln to their house, but my dad couldnt pinpoint when.

Once inside the ER, a team of nurses and doctors quickly surrounded my moms body on the stretcher. Nurses cut off my moms clothes as doctors promptly began pumping her stomach, trying to force out the pills she had swallowed. They pushed charcoal down her throat, hoping it would absorb the rest. The medical team worked aggressively to save her, and all my dad could do was stand by and watch as they hooked up EKG leads to her chest and ran an intubation tube down her throat to keep her breathing. He had continually been the one she depended on to keep her alive, but in this moment, he had no influence on her ability to live or die. She lay motionless as every tube, needle, and lead went into her body. My dad stood like a man on a distant shore, forced to watch his beloved ship slowly go under.

Well have to wait and see how her body responds to the overdose. The doctors voice broke through his thoughts.

My dad reluctantly shifted his gaze from his wife to the doctor.

Well put her in the ICU and do all we can to save her, but its hard to say right now what the outcome will be, the doctor apprehensively admitted.

Even though she had talked about wanting to kill herself hundreds of times over their twenty-three-year marriage, he was utterly unprepared for the day she might die. He touched the scratchy hospital blanket laid across her legs, hoping to feel some sense of reality, but no matter what he touched, saw, or smelled, the present moment remained distant to him.

My dad had decades of experience on how to remain levelheaded during my moms episodes. Hed administer her medicine, brush her hair, and cuddle her while they watched a movie until she fell asleep. If that didnt work, my parents made trips to the ER for an IV of Ativan, and suicidal ideations could lead to an admission to the psych ward. He knew how all those situations ended. But my dad had never dealt with thisan actual suicide attempt.

This was a level of the illness he had never seen, and my dad didnt know what came next. As he sat in my moms hospital room, unable to hold her without the fear of moving her breathing tube, he felt sharp cracks spreading across his heart, as thin and precise as pencil lines, and he knew for the first time his heart was actually breaking.

Dad? Lincoln stood timidly in the doorway.

Im sorry, Lincoln, my dad carefully said.

Lincoln said nothing, but each time he glanced at our mom, unconscious and hooked up to multiple tubes, he would quickly look away. He refused to get too close to her. Lincoln must have been grappling with the fact that she had attempted suicide during a fight theyd had.