I married the love of my life, or at least so I thought. I was happy; I had someone who I thought would be there for me always and I vowed to be there for him too.

When we got married, we both had our separate jobs, but a few months into the marriage, he asked me to resign. He made enough money for the both of us, and I trusted him to keep doing that, so I resigned. My boss gave me a golden handshake and the next day I was home ready to lead my new life as a house wife.

Then things started changing. The changes crept in bit by bit until after some time, our life was unrecognizable. He had become distant, he abused me a lot: verbally and sometimes physically. I don’t know if I was suffocating him with too much attention now that I had no job, or maybe my not having a job made me useless and undesirable.

I stayed in my marriage hoping he would change and get back to the man I had married. I rectified whatever little things I thought I did wrong, but nothing seemed to work. By this time, we already had a child together.

A friend of mine called me one day to tell me that she had seen my husband with another woman. She asked me if we had separated because it seemed like the two were a couple. I was shocked, and considering what we were going through, I decided to dig around.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

The more I asked around, the worse it got. It seemed that people knew the two – my husband and this other lady – as a couple. In fact, according to one source, he had just paid the dowry for the lady, and they were to get married.

To make matters worse, when I confronted him, it came out that these romours were true and that my golden handshake – the money I thought we would use in our new life together – was part of the money he used to pay for the bride price. Apparently in his mind, he was marrying a second wife. In my heart, he had abandoned me and our child; he didn’t care. I couldn’t stand it. So, I left.

My story and journey with this man should have ended here. But it didn’t. I kept hearing about him and other women and at times seeing him go out with other women even when he was married to the ‘new wife’.  It is like he could not resist women and women loved him too, I think.

Several months went by and another friend of mine told me that she met my ex-husband and that nothing in him looked good. He was sickly and jobless (apparently, he had stolen some office stuff and got fired). And his new wife, well, she left him.

And then one morning, he called. Asking me to meet him, that he wanted us to talk. I wasn’t surprised.

I have a soft heart – which is both a blessing and a curse. I took him back; he looked like he really needed someone on his side at the time. While he was with me, he even got another job at a local hotel. But while this aspect of his life was getting better, his health wasn’t. He kept getting worse as the days went on. Soon, it was clear that he had HIV.

He died just as we (my child and I) were getting used to having him around in the family once again. The virus got the better of him.