"Why haven't you killed yourself yet?"

I can not adequately describe what the assessments for the sick and disabled are like for those whom have never experienced them. As though the validity of your whole being is called into question. That your illness or disability (or both) that you have struggled with, railed against and finally gotten help for is now nothing, you are nothing. A waste. A liar. The words of doctors and nurses meaning nothing the words of The State humiliating and degrading you.

"Why haven't you killed yourself yet?"

My lone vigil after the first assessment for my darling suicide watch is still an ache in me. One that years later makes me weep uncontrollably. That we came so close. That they pushed him so far. Three weeks. Three weeks and everyday I woke to the dread question "is it today I lose my husband?" Will I lose him too?

So you cry in the bath so they don't see you. You clean and cook and smile and joke. You fight. You write letters and take calls and fight for him, fight so he will live. You pray and pray and pray.

You use diet patches so you eat less because you don't want anyone else to have less food. You live on next to nothing and you don't complain, no matter the ruined Christmases. You hold it it because holding it in and holding it together are not a choice.

You win. Sort of. Then all too soon you have to fight again. Wiser this time, savvy even, but still fear that shadow darkening over his face once more. That dread creeps over you. The taste of tears in the back of your throat and death's shadow falls over his face again. It bleeds out all the colour from him, and try and remember that he has blue eyes.

You make yourself all kinds of promises. Ones you can't keep. Never again. Never again but then that envelope heavily hits the mat and the dread, the humiliation, the horror of it washes over you and you are sobbing again, shaking uncontrollably. 

Yet you are one of the lucky ones. So many dead. So many you half knew and never knew vanished into that long bureaucratic death.

I don't think you understand yet. Stand or sit before these people and they will judge if you deserve to live, with any kind of dignity or even at all. For them to look you up and down and tick a box and ruin what little life you have.