Everything can change so fast

*Baby and I are fine---just saw the Doc today, everyone breathe out, it's the rest of the family this time.*

My husband has just gotten into an airport limo and is flying to Belgium to do his duty for his brother. There are 7 kids in his family, or as they always put it, his mom had 8 children, 7 are living.

And by tomorrow morning, there will very likely be only six living.

You might remember my BIL P? After last March's hospitalization, he was put into rehab in the UK, got his meds readjusted, and started back trying to live his life again. He had a place to live in London and was working out and taking care of himself and his AD's and/or whatever other drugs they had him on were working. Some members of the family had reconnected with him on Facebook and he had sent us several touching, perfectly coherent emails. My husband had spoken with him on the phone several times. Various people had visited. Although he had never quite gotten a job at the same financial level as he had before, he was supporting himself decently.

So what changed in the last few days? I think his inability to see his children regularly finally sent him round the bend. Truly, they were the only things he had left to live for. And when he couldn't see them more than once or twice a month, he viewed it as a serious loss, the kind that he simply could not recover from, after losing custody of his first child, my nephew. He had done everything required of him, by the almost ex-wife and by the courts and still he would not be able to live with them, to coach the teams, to see them after school, to see their joys, and their sorrows.

For a devoted Dad, that's agony.

As a grieving mother, I do understand his sadness, but I wish he had found another solution----other than the one to try to take his own life.

We got a suicide email at 5:00 am our time and since he has a pretty sophisticated understanding of science & medicine, we knew he would know how to do it. He drank a large amount of antifreeze, and took a lot of pills. And then drove to his ex-wife's house in his delirium. We got the phone call from the police later that morning telling us he was in the hospital on a ventilator in a coma.

Because it is a conflict of interest for his almost ex to make any end of life decisions, my husband, and a few of his sisters and brothers are now converging on the hospital, wondering what will happen, praying they don't have to do it themselves. I have very little faith he will survive the night. If he can't make it back to health and a decent quality of life, I really hope that he dies quickly and painlessly, because I can't imagine any person, much less one I care about remaining in a vegetative state for months and years.

I feel so helpless. This didn't have to happen. It's just so fucking wrong.