The Moment Everything Changed with Jay Deutsch Part 1

[00:00:00] Jay: I was driving home and I passed the cemetery, which I hadn't been to in years because I hated her too much. I got out of the car and I just started screaming at her, cursing at her, telling her how angry I was, that I hated her. And as I was screaming, a strong gust blew over me and I felt her say, I'm sorry.

[00:00:20] And at that moment, everything changed, all of the anger and hate, all that negative energy just left my body, and I remembered the love. 

[00:00:27] Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end-of-life coach. The conversations I have with my guests may challenge you to think outside the box of what you believe to be true about death, dying grief, and learning to live life to the fullest.

[00:00:44] This week's episode is a little different. I have a conversation. With Jay Deutsche about the healing journey, he went on after the death of his wife by suicide. Because the finished episode ended up being about an hour long, I cut it in half.  This week you'll get to hear the first half of the story. Next week, I'll bring the second part of his healing journey.

[00:01:05] In the 31 episodes of the podcast that I have recorded, this is the only one that has made me cry during the interview. It's a really beautiful story of love and forgiveness. Thank you for joining me and Jay for this conversation. 

 Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy that you're here with me today.

[00:01:21] Jay: Thank you very much.

[00:01:22] It's a pleasure and I'm excited as well.

[00:01:25] Jill:  Let's get  started with kind of the basic info that I like to start with. Can you tell me where you're from originally? If you'd like to share how old you are? 

[00:01:34] Jay: I was born in Brooklyn and moved to New Jersey when I was three. I'm 52 years old. My parents hated each other when I was young and at eight years old, they went through a violent and terrible divorce that dragged out for about five years.

[00:01:54] I bounced back and forth from living with my mom and my dad. My dad had a nice house on the Jersey shore, so I spent part of my life growing up on the beach and the other part in a suburban area. 

[00:02:08] Jill: When you were growing up, what kind of religious background did you have?

[00:02:12] Jay: I was born Jewish and went to Hebrew school and did the bar mitzvah thing when I was 13, but none of it resonated with me.

[00:02:21] I would say that I was pretty much an atheist most of my life. I believe that you're born, you suffer, you die, and that's pretty much the end of it. 

[00:02:31] Jill: Did you have any experiences that a loved one close to you had died?

[00:02:35] Jay: When I was about five years old, my grandmother died, and I remember the hospital didn't allow children to visit.

[00:02:46] Luckily it was on the first floor and my dad told me to go outside and he pulled me in through the window to say goodbye to her. Wow. And that's pretty much the only memory I have of it, and I didn't really understand what was going on, what death was. I just knew that they told me to say goodbye to Nanny and everyone was crying.

[00:03:07] I do remember the Shiva, which is where everybody sits around and kind of pays their respect at the end. That was pretty much my first and only experience with death at the time. 

[00:03:18] Jill: Was it upsetting to you or were you just kind of more like, I don't really know what's happening.

[00:03:22] Jay: I had no idea what was happening.

[00:03:25] My sister was a baby and I was just there eating the food. Everyone else was upset and crying, and I didn't really understand why. I remember my grandfather being miserable and crying. And I didn't understand. 

[00:03:42] Jill: I know a little bit about your story and that is really definitely where I would like to focus a lot of our time.

[00:03:47] So why don't you just get into it how ever you wanna start it? If you wanna start from the beginning, begin wherever you want. 

[00:03:56] Jay: It all starts with when I went away to college based on my background situation with my parents. My mom and my sister are narcissists. They're toxic. They're the type of people that point fingers and blame their problems on everybody else.

[00:04:11] My mom constantly blamed me for the divorce and for how she felt and that I wanted to live with my father was a bad thing. When it came time to go away to college, I picked the furthest one from home that I was accepted to. Packed my things and took off my mom, dropped me off at school, helped me carry my stuff in, and I slammed the door.

[00:04:34] That was the start of my next life, my chapter two, so to speak. I had met a couple of friends also from my high school that were pledging a fraternity, and I thought that would be a great experience for me to bond with other guys and make new friends. And one evening on the way to a party at my fraternity house, these three girls got on the bus.

[00:04:56] The moment Larissa and I made eye contact, it was like one of those magical love at first sight experiences. She had a boyfriend at the time, which didn't last long. She ended up moving into my apartment and we hit it off. It was great. We spent 26 years together. We have two children, and I found out later on that she suffered from depression.

[00:05:22] I didn't know what depression was back in the, in the old days it was like crazy people or ones who talked to themselves and this and that. I knew my mom was depressed and my sister was depressed, and I just, you know, I didn't really understand what it was. Over the years, her depression caused a lot of problems in our relationship.

[00:05:43] We left school together and we moved to Florida. And we had some good experiences, some bad experiences, and then we moved from Florida back to her home with her parents, and we lived there for a couple of years and her mom ended up dying of cancer and that was pretty much my first real experience, up close with death.

[00:06:12] She was home on hospice care. And I remember at that at the last moments, Larissa kind of locked herself in the bedroom and didn't want to face it. And I ended up going over there and sitting next to her mother and saying goodbye. And it kind of hit me in a strange way, seeing someone take their last breath and then just being gone.

[00:06:37] Being that I had no religious beliefs, I thought, that's it. It's gone. It's over. And because of Larissa's depression, she resented me for getting that experience and that she felt a kind of anger towards me that she didn't get that experience as well. And it caused problems with us for a couple of years.

[00:07:00] We ended up moving to Costa Rica. We lived there for about three and a half years. My son Zachary was born there, so he has dual citizenship. Lucky kid. Her depression hit real hard after she had our son, the postpartum kicked in and her cousins had to send her to Florida for treatment. So I was left there with our newborn son for about a month, and I love kids.

[00:07:28] I wanted kids, and being a dad is my number one priority in life. She came back and things seemed great. She said she was fine. She said everything was all better. We ended up moving back to the States back to live with her father. We then found our own apartment and continued on with life. 10 years later, we had another child, our daughter, Emma, who was actually named after Larissa's mother, Emma, and her middle name is Frankie, after my father who passed away from lung cancer a month before she was born.

[00:08:00] That was my second close experience with death. My dad was a smoker most of his life, and he quit probably too late, and me and my dad had a falling out when I went away to college because he wanted me to go to a state school and stay local. He didn't understand my need to get away and start over. We spoke very little over the course of my life.

[00:08:26] And we had just started to reconcile before I found out that he was dying of cancer. I remember my stepmom, Annette, who I'm very close to still, she's always been the one that's been there for me in life. I remember getting the phone call that he was at Sloan Kettering and that we needed to come.

[00:08:47] Larissa, me, and Zachary, who was almost 10 years old, we jumped in the Jeep and we drove to the city. And I remember my dad saying, don't feel sorry for me. I chose to smoke. I knew the consequences and I did it anyway. And I smoked also. He told me to throw my cigarettes in the garbage for my kids, and he took his last breath and he passed.

[00:09:15] And I remember apologizing to him for being so stubborn. So I threw away my cigarettes. I quit smoking. And Larissa and I left. We took Zach home and a month later my daughter was born, and Larissa again fell into a pit of postpartum depression, and she had her first attempt at that time. She called me at work and told me that I needed to come home, that there was an emergency, and she hung up.

[00:09:48] And you know, I kind of freaked out. I knew that she wasn't great with the kids alone. They bothered her. I raced home and when I opened the door for the first time in my life, I experienced crazy firsthand. She was standing in the kitchen holding a backpack and a steak knife, and she looked me in the eyes and said, there's nothing left here for you.

[00:10:11] You need to take care of your kids. I'm leaving. And it wasn't her. I saw her body standing there, but it was not her and her eyes, and I kind of got scared. I freaked out a little bit. She pushed past me, jumped in the Jeep, and took off. And Emma was a couple of months old and I grabbed her, threw her in the car seat, and we chased.

[00:10:34] After Larissa, she pulled into a cemetery up the road. And I told her, we need to get help. We need some help. And she wanted no part of it. She was angry, and aggressive, and I called her her sister-in-law, and Larissa was furious that I was telling other people about her business and her sister-in-law.Kathy ended up calling the police.

[00:11:03] And Larissa was so angry that she threw her purse, got in the Jeep, and took off again, and I followed after her, and the Jeep went into a ditch and got stuck and she got out of the car with her bag and ran off into the woods. Now, the house that she grew up in was probably about a mile through the woods, which is where she went to hide out.

[00:11:30] The police came, and the detectives started questioning me. They searched for her all night and couldn't find her, and the next morning she came walking up the driveway like nothing was wrong. Her entire family was there and she's giving everyone the finger and telling 'em to fuck off and mind their own business and go home.

[00:11:52] She came into the house and the police and the EMTs went in to question her. And she agreed to go to psych for an evaluation. They took her off in the ambulance and I followed behind. And when I got there, I was talking to her, asking her what was wrong, and she lied and said everything was fine, and she doesn't know what came over her and her brother Russ, who was a prison guard, showed up a short time afterward, and I think he was a little bit afraid that if the family name got into the system, it would affect his work.

[00:12:27] Because he's a state employee, he coached her on what to say to get released, and I truly believe in my heart that she needed a vacation. She needed some time to talk to somebody, get some medication, get some help, and figure out what was going on with herself. But she just wanted to go home. So she lied and said she was fine, and she was released an hour later.

[00:12:55] And I remember on the drive home, all she could do was complain that they didn't give her any medication. And I was thinking to myself, if you need medication that bad, you should have stayed and told the truth. Something that I have found through my research and my studies is they lie about it out of fear.

[00:13:13] Fear of being tied up in a straight jacket and thrown in a rubber room, and she didn't wanna lose her kids or me or her life. So she lied and covered up her depression and whatever other undiagnosed mental illness she may have had. She did try to get a psych appointment, but our healthcare system is a little bit broken in that department and our local hospital, our local healthcare provider, told her there was a year-and-a-half waiting list.

[00:13:46] They put her on the waitlist and she went to her primary care, her physician. Who wrote her a prescription for Xanax and sleeping pills to help her sleep and to help with her anxiety as she called it, and things went okay. We got into a huge fight with her father because her father blamed me for her depression.

[00:14:11] We lived in a house that I renovated with her father. He lived upstairs and we lived downstairs, and he and I just, we got into it one day. And things were said that probably shouldn't have been said on both sides. He blamed me for Larissa's suicide attempt and I blamed him for his wife's cancer and he threw us out.

[00:14:35] We found an apartment in a low-income town. I didn't know at the time how bad it was, but we spent about three years there until Larissa ended up taking her life. 

[00:14:48] Jill: There's a lot in my head right now that I'm thinking about, you touched on a really important point in that our healthcare system is kind of backward when it comes to a lot of mental health issues, and I could understand that fear that she had of, if she was honest about how she was really feeling, being locked up in a room, it's not gonna help anybody, but that is what happens to some people.

[00:15:15] Yes. And postpartum depression. I could say now, especially looking back that after having our second child, I definitely went through a period of postpartum depression. You don't even know why you feel the way that you do, because you know that you love your children, but also at the same time, you're just feeling so overwhelmed by all of it that there are definitely times when you're thinking to yourself it might just be better if I wasn't here at all for them, because I might do more damage than good.

[00:15:46] Jay: Yeah. And for someone who has suicidal ideations and mental illness to begin with, correct. Postpartum depression is just gasoline on the fire.

[00:15:56] Jill: I really feel for her. I feel for all of you, you and your children because that must have been a really difficult experience, not being able to help and wanting to.

[00:16:08] But in the long run, there's nothing that anybody else can really do, cuz you're right, our healthcare system is just not well designed. Ideally, she would've gotten better help when she was younger, when she first started having depression, like that's when the help really would've been the best to have.

[00:16:28] Jay: I truly believe that depression can become a terminal illness if left untreated. Yes. And a lot of people think that suicide is a choice that people make consciously, and although I do believe that we all sign soul contracts and agree to live the life that we're gonna live and die when we die, how we die.

[00:16:52] I do believe in my heart that she was murdered by her mind and that it was not a conscious choice that she made. 

[00:17:00] Jill: If somebody has cancer, getting the right treatments is so important, and if somebody is at the point where they're like, I'm really suffering badly, I'm in a lot of pain, I think I might want to end this.

[00:17:12] There's people that would support that, but yet on the mental health side, It's like, well, no, what do they say? Like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. 

[00:17:20] Jay: Like just get over it. 

[00:17:22] Jill: Be happy. It doesn't work that way. And if you've never experienced that type of feeling, believe me, if I could have easily snapped myself out of the way that I felt when my children were younger, I would have, why would I have wanted to feel the way that I did?

[00:17:37] Thankfully, through a lot of work on my part, a lot of therapy, and a lot of just like self-healing work, I have been able to really completely turn that around. But again, I also didn't have severe depression before that. You know, like it's, it's totally different. Like you said, it's that fuel on an already burning fire.

[00:18:00] How old were your children when your wife? 

[00:18:02] Jay: They were three and 13 at the time. My daughter was three and my son was 13. He was a complete mama's boy, and it broke him. He was devastated. My daughter like me, when my grandmother passed away, she really didn't understand what was going on or where mommy went.

[00:18:19] And one thing that I did immediately was I told them both the truth. Okay? I feel that when we lie to our kids or hide things from our kids, we teach them to become liars and deceivers as well. That morning I was in bed with both kids, cuz the argument that we had was at about 11 o'clock at night and it woke up both kids.

[00:18:40] And they were crying. Where did Mommy go? Where did Mommy go? So we all jumped in my son's bed and we fell asleep together. The police came probably about five o'clock in the morning at sunrise and they were banging on the door. The dog was barking, and I went downstairs and, uh, she had left in the middle of the night a few times prior, after these heated arguments.

[00:19:05] She would always return in the morning and apologize. But there was always that narcissistic apology. I'm sorry, but I'm sorry, but you made me angry. I'm sorry. But you said this, and I think that is a common trait among people who suffer from severe depression is that they try to deflect their behavior on others because they don't understand why they think and feel the way they do.

[00:19:32] There were two officers at the door. And I remember yelling at them, you better have a warrant. You're not taking my kids. Because I thought that she was there with her brother to come get the kids. When I opened the door, they said, no, I'm sorry sir. You need to open the door. And they were standing there.

[00:19:52] They asked if Larissa was home and I told them we had an argument last night and she left and they showed me a prescription bottle. That was empty with her name on it, and they said, is this hers? And I said, yes it is. And it was an empty bottle of Xanax that was full the night before. And they showed me a picture of a tattoo that she had on her ankle for identification.

[00:20:16] I remember just being in a state of disbelief like it was a bad dream, and I fell to the floor and my first thought was to grab the cop’s gun. Because I saw no reason to live, and my second thought was my kids upstairs and I needed to be there for them. So after a few minutes of hysterics, I got up, the cops came inside, and they questioned me.

[00:20:48] I told the kids what happened. About an hour later, Child Protective Services showed up. Social workers showed up, more detectives showed up. And they ended up taking me in for questioning for murder, which I hear is quite common in suicide cases. They said they had some video footage nearby from the school of a van pulling up to the location where they found the body and the timeline turned out to be incorrect.

[00:21:18] They asked to look in the garage to see if there was a van there. And the cops were really insensitive. They were treating me like I had something to do with it. The whole time I'm thinking my kids are home alone. There were just cops walking around and they released me. I went back to my apartment and I called my stepmom in Florida and I called my mom and sister in New Jersey, and believe it or not, my stepmom got there from Florida before my mom and sister got there from New Jersey.

[00:21:52] She went directly to the airport, jumped on a flight, and was there in a few hours. When my mom and sister arrived, they were furious with me, that my stepmom was there, that she beat them there. My mom, once again, the way she treated me in the past, it was my fault, and she was crying and upset. More concerned about her own feelings than mine and my kids.

[00:22:20] My sister got very angry and demanded to take the kids with her. And I was like, no way. And my sister looked me in the eyes and said, Larissa died because you're an asshole. And I turned to the police officer and I said, have her removed before there's another body. The cops took her and my mom out and asked them to leave, and that was pretty much the last time I saw them for a couple of years.

[00:22:47] My stepmom stayed with us for about a month. She helped pay to get my daughter into daycare, and my son ended up not going back to school for the rest of the year. It was only about three weeks left, and I remember the principal of the school calling me and asking me to come in to pick up a card. And some of his stuff out of his locker, and apparently the teachers in the school had put money into a hat for us, and there was about $500 in a card, which was very thoughtful.

[00:23:22] There were a lot of stories on Facebook of people from the neighborhood making assumptions saying that it was probably drug-related or it was gang-related. That kind of really triggered me and pissed me off. And because I was the angry, miserable person that I was, I lashed out at them. I lost my job.

[00:23:46] Three days later, my boss was offended that I didn't call her directly and tell her what happened, that I told one of the other employees that I was friends with. And so about three months later, we were evicted from our apartment cuz I couldn't pay rent. They say hindsight is 2020. It's funny, I look back and a couple of years before this happened, Larissa had convinced me to get my student loans out of forbearance and to start making payments on them again to rebuild my credit.

[00:24:19] At the time, I had no idea why I had just gotten my loans back into good standing and was able to file my tax returns for the first time in probably seven years because every time I did the Department of Education took my refund. I ended up getting about $8,000 in tax returns and was able to move the kids and get a new apartment, and I thought it was best that I moved them back to her hometown.

[00:24:48] Because she came from a huge family that I was a part of for 26 years. I thought I would get support and the kids would have aunts, uncles, cousins, her grandfather, and her uncles. For the first two months, things were great and then we never heard from them again. I'm totally fine with it. I do feel a little bit bad for my kids that they don't know what a huge family they have, and I feel bad for them.

[00:25:17] For not knowing how amazing my kids are and how much like their mothers they are. 

[00:25:23] Jill: Thank you for sharing that story. I'm sure it's not easy for you to talk about it. 

[00:25:28] Jay: It's gotten easier with time. I still get choked up a little bit, but I'm authentic and I'm an open book, and if I can help others with my story, then I'm serving my purpose.

[00:25:41] Jill: So I'm sure there are other people out there that will listen to this and part of it will connect for them and maybe it'll help them to understand one of their loved ones or even understand themselves a little bit better, and so I really appreciate you sharing that. 

[00:25:58] Jay: Larissa and I drank and smoked pot since college.

[00:26:01] It was kind of her self-medication and probably the same for me. It was a way of escaping my childhood and how I felt and the thoughts that I was having. I started going to the bar every night. There was a nice little tiki bar right down the road from our apartment, so I would walk there. I'd leave her cell phone.

[00:26:21] I got a baby monitor app for the cell phone where if there was any noise, it would call me. My son was 13 at the time, so he was okay staying home alone with his three-year-old sister while they were sleeping. I would crawl home drunk every night. When we moved to the new apartment, an old friend from when we used to live here called me up and he is like, oh, you know, I'm really sorry about your loss, and there's this bar that I go to.

[00:26:47] I think you'd like it. They have pool tables and dart boards and. I'll introduce you to everybody. So for about four and a half years or so, I was going to the bar seven nights a week. It was a dark, dingy dive bar and the crowd was very young and they were very negative. Everybody bitched about how much work sucks and how much their relationships suck, and I fit in perfectly if I told people my story all the time, oh my, my kid's mom killed herself.

[00:27:19] Life sucks and. I'm miserable and I got along great with everybody and a lot of people accused me of hitting on girlfriends of other guys I know now. I was just seeking connection and compassion from other people. I did discover that I'm an empath and I turned into a serial hugger. I would show up at the bar and I would hug everybody to get a feel on their energy.

[00:27:49] A lot of the guys looked at that as why is this asshole hugging my girlfriend? They started talking shit about me and talking behind my back and starting rumors. It was probably about the same time that I started to hate the life that I was living now more than the life that I was living in the past.

[00:28:10] My first spiritual experience was one day I was driving home from picking up weed, and I passed the road that the cemetery is on, which I hadn't been to in years because I hated her too much. I resented her for leaving me alone with the kids. So I felt no reason to go to the cemetery and visit her. I kind of blacked out, and when I came to the car was parked in the cemetery across from her, her, her grave.

[00:28:41] And I remember sitting in the car and I was hysterical. I was crying, I was yelling. I was hitting the steering wheel. I was angry. And I got so infuriated that I got out of the car and I just started screaming at her, cursing at her, telling her how angry I was that I fucking hated her. How could you fucking do this to me?

[00:29:05] How could you do this to your kids? And. As I was screaming, a breeze blew over me. It was a perfectly sunny, calm day. You know, there was, there was no wind. A strong gust blew over me and I felt her say, I'm sorry. And at that moment everything changed. 

[00:29:27] Jill: That's so beautiful. It's making me cry. I mean, that's really beautiful.

[00:29:31] Jay: It's almost like I felt her hugging me and saying I'm sorry, and all of the anger and hate just. That all that negative energy just left my body and I remembered the love the 26 years. That's amazing. That's what I call my shift. 

[00:29:51] Jill: Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death Clearly. Be sure to come back next week to hear the rest of the story of how Jay has transformed his life after the death of his wife.

[00:30:03] You don't wanna miss the end of this story of how after the shift, he went through a dark night of the soul and came out the other side completely transformed. He now uses his experience to help others. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and share it with a friend.

[00:30:23] I'll see you next week for the second part of Jay's story on seeing death clearly.