Gunfights are lost in milliseconds. Who we have become in the years leading up to that moment can make the difference between life and death. The ways we respond in the long hours and days after shape a life of grief and suffering, or a life of post-traumatic growth.
In this gripping and heart-wrenching memoir, Abby Eichorn relives her last moments with her ex-husband, Clay, as he attempts to murder her in a drunken stupor, and she struggles to stay alive. In the aftermath, she realizes she had been fighting to survive for years, and the hardest struggle was yet to come.
Abby structures her memoir through letters to loved ones written while desperately seeking peace. She reflects on her early dating experiences, her upbringing in the Christian church, generational family dynamics, and her own growth, all while vividly evoking the events of that night. She walks us through her first year without Clay as she cycles through raw grief, healing, and self-discovery, and shares the recovery milestones reached while fighting to reclaim her life and identity after trauma.
Gunfights are lost in milliseconds. Who we have become in the years leading up to that moment can make the difference between life and death. The ways we respond in the long hours and days after shape a life of grief and suffering, or a life of post-traumatic growth.
In this gripping and heart-wrenching memoir, Abby Eichorn relives her last moments with her ex-husband, Clay, as he attempts to murder her in a drunken stupor, and she struggles to stay alive. In the aftermath, she realizes she had been fighting to survive for years, and the hardest struggle was yet to come.
Abby structures her memoir through letters to loved ones written while desperately seeking peace. She reflects on her early dating experiences, her upbringing in the Christian church, generational family dynamics, and her own growth, all while vividly evoking the events of that night. She walks us through her first year without Clay as she cycles through raw grief, healing, and self-discovery, and shares the recovery milestones reached while fighting to reclaim her life and identity after trauma.
February 16, 2019 Hey Pretty Girl,
To be real, though, you’re probably not looking very pretty right now if you’re reading this letter. You don’t have to wash your face yet, but in a few minutes you will, and you’ll be happy that you bought dozens of face masks to help with the puffiness. But right now, just cry. Because you miss him and that’s okay. He was your pillar for many years; you wouldn’t be who you are today if it had not been for the ten years that you had with Clay. And you know what? He loved you too, he just didn’t know how to show you, but he loved you so much.
So, cry. Grieving is normal, and mourning has to happen if you are ever going to heal from this. It is the price you pay to have loved so hard. Be sad, be angry. But then, when you’re done, I need you to be grateful for the life you still have. Because as much as he loved you when he was sober, he still hurt you when he drank. And Abby, he tried to kill you. He put a gun to your head, and if you hadn’t been such an over-confident badass and fought for this life that you have now, he would have pulled that trigger. Clay would have killed you if you would have let him. But you didn’t. And the life you have now is hard, but it is blessed. You are going to save lives and inspire millions with your story. In this moment, it sucks so bad but close your eyes for just one minute and envision the difference you will make in all those young lives. And breathe. Just breathe. Write it down. Breathe some more. You’re going to be just fine. Now, go wash your face.
A letter to you, from you.
Because I love you the most,
Abby
“I just need a notebook.” This was my first request to my mom when I woke up the next morning. My head was pounding so hard I couldn’t open my eyes, my face was puffy and swollen from the continuous sobbing, my brain still in a fog. I had been hoping I would wake up and find it had all been an awful nightmare. But it wasn’t. And I wasn’t anywhere ready to start healing. But I needed to start writing it down. All these emotions in my body were screaming at me, pouring out in uncontrollable tears and leaving my head spinning in confusion. The fear and hurt came first, followed by a grief that rattled my body in a way that I had never been shaken before, throwing me to the ground, pinning me to the bed, unable to breathe. These emotions would cycle quickly, triggered by every passing thought about the night before and the ten years leading up to it.
I started listing the things I needed to do, the insurance companies that needed to be contacted, the people I needed to call, the things I would need to prioritize replacing. I would have to follow up with the detective working on my case. I wrote all the things I wanted to say to him, to Clay, but never would be able to. I started a list of mantras to help me begin processing what had just happened.
“Mantra: Start with washing your face.”
“To do: Pro bono attorneys?”
“Mantra: Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
“Need: straightener, blow dryer, dog food…”
“To Do: Victims advocacy, insurance, doctor—wrist, Rebecca at 2…”
“Mantra: Get out of your head.”
“Need: folder, running shoes, panties…”
“To Do: get property back from PD, new debit card, call Pastor…”
“Mantra: You can’t think about it that way.”
As my husband, and for years as my best friend, Clay had repeated this last mantra to me over and over again. I could hear it in his voice for days after he was gone. I was trying to follow this advice, to “not think about it that way,” to think about it in any other way that I could make sense of it all. Trying desperately not to think about the fear he must have been feeling in those final seconds of his life, or worse, wondering if he had any conscious thought left at all when his finger had pulled that trigger. Trying not to think about my destroyed home, covered in his blood and tear gas. Trying not to think about never seeing him again, that Hunter would never see him again.
For the past ten years, when things had gotten hard and life wasn’t going the way I wanted, Clay would say things like, “Don’t let the bastards get you down” and “Can’t suck blood out of a turnip.” He mostly meant it to be encouraging, but we had both been raised to push down our emotions and face the world head on with a tough exterior. In our different ways, we knew we were expected to “just get over it” and to pretend like nothing bad was happening. Our feelings and our disappointments were not to be expressed; there was no feeling sorry for ourselves, and you were lucky to get what you got, “blessed,” and it was far better to pretend like the evil in the world didn’t exist in yours. You were expected to sweep the really bad stuff under the rug and give Christian grace by making excuses for others. You put a smile on your face, turned the other cheek, and then charged forward like nothing was wrong. For generations, on both sides, this was the way it was.
This night, though, as with many nights over the next several years, I was faced with a small dilemma: I couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to wash my face and I couldn’t “not think about it that way.” I didn’t feel like I should be grateful just to be alive. Mantras weren’t working; the positive self-talk wasn’t getting me anywhere. I couldn’t hold up the tough exterior I had been forcing myself to wear anymore.
I had dragged myself off the couch long enough to force feed myself dinner. I pulled myself off social media, which had increasingly become an escape from my reality, as I doom scrolled through other people’s perfectly curated lives. I had fought with all the will I had left in my exhausted body just to stay out of bed for even just a few moments longer and stumbled into the bathroom. There I stood, doubled over the sink, the countertop the only thing holding my heavy body up, pools of black tears from my mascara splashing into the sink, loud uncontrollable sobs echoing off the bathroom walls and saliva stringing from my open mouth as I gasped for breath, my body shaking violently, convulsing.
I mean, this was some real ugly crying and unfortunately, it was not new. I had been prone to this type of crying for months. Once it started, I couldn’t get it to stop, and I didn’t know who to ask for help. Who would still be around to help me pull myself back together after all these months?
I felt as if I had worn out the understanding of even my closest group of girlfriends, and that I could no longer go to them for comfort after all this time. I don’t know if this was true. But I had just returned from my second trip abroad, had checked some truly amazing experiences off my bucket list, and taken some leaps of huge success at work. I worried I was the envy of my married friends whose time and income was spent supporting their families while my social media accounts were filled with elaborate trips and great adventures. Little did they know that I envied them. They were living the life I wanted so desperately to have back but felt I had failed at entirely. And how could they understand why I was still crying about this, about the loss of a man who had tried so hard to take my life from me? No, I couldn’t go to them, not anymore.
I thought I had met someone I could move on with, that I could finally break my ties to Clay and escape the chaos with someone who was good for me. I felt that was part of the reason this had happened. Clay had found out I was seeing someone new, and it had triggered his drinking, and his rage. And now, the new guy I was seeing was nowhere to be found.
Even my own mother had become engulfed in her grief. The loss of her son-in-law and consequentially losing touch with her grandson had overwhelmed her capacity to regulate her own emotions. She barely seemed to have noticed my near-death, or how losing Clay and losing custody of our son could have been as earth-shattering to me, since, after all, it had been my idea to get the divorce. If I called her in these moments, the roles would inherently reverse and I would be the one consoling her.
The loneliness I felt radiated off the walls back at me with every grief-stricken scream that escaped from my body. When this crying started, I didn’t know how to make it stop. Usually, I would end up exhausted in a heap of unconsciousness on the floor, curled up with my arms wrapped tightly around my knees, shivering from the fatigue of having cried so hard. I would wake up the next day in a grief hangover, my head pounding, face puffy, dehydrated, contacts fuzzy from the salty tears caked to them, but at least the crying would have stopped. My biggest fear was that the time would come when I wouldn’t wake up at all. That one day, the grief and the guilt would just be too strong, and I would succumb to the statistics. I would fall victim to the end that everyone expected, that I might experience a fate similar to Clay’s.
I lived, clouded in this terror, that I would eventually give in to all the guilt that I didn’t deserve, the blame that should have never been mine, the grief that I couldn’t control. So, I wrote myself this letter. I filled a basket with expensive chocolates, fancy teas, and a gross number of face masks. I made a list to remind myself of all the things I could do to bring a little peace and love to myself when I couldn’t seem to pull it back together. I had to teach myself how to comfort myself and sit peacefully in my own company. To find some self-compassion despite not being able to look at myself in the mirror anymore. I felt so alone in these moments, but I had to refuse to let this beat me; to keep from turning it all back on its head. I had to see God do good with what the devil had meant for evil. I had to live.
July 14, 2018: Day one of this nightmare. Or so I thought. Years of therapy have shown me that I had been living in a nightmare for over a decade.
That night had just been the peak of the entire journey. But how do we know we’re living in a nightmare when everyone else around us acts like our experiences are normal? That life was the only one I had ever known and had been the journey of many of the women before me who had raised me. It was even beyond the original expectations set for me by my upbringing, and so it felt stable, safe, comfortable. Then it was all taken away abruptly that night, spinning me into a world of confusion and self-discovery, grief and desperation, and also, dare I say, hope?
But I thought this kind of sobbing would be over by now. That I would have surely pulled myself together and had started to accept this new normal. Six months, I had read in my first book on grief, Option B by Sheryl Sandberg, six months until the acute grief would subside. I had grasped onto those words, intentionally reading them out of context. I convinced myself it meant that as long as I could get through those first few months, the pain would subside. I thought I was doing everything right—the therapy, the exercise, the meditation. I had done the research, read about grief recovery, and I looked forward to meeting my six-month mark so I could feel recovered from my trauma and ready for the self-actualization. I had also read that it would be about six months until the post-traumatic stress disorder might kick in, but in this case, I ignored that paragraph completely. I only wanted to know what it was going to take to start healing. Let’s keep this positive, I thought, not realistic.
The first three months were the slowest days and weeks of my life. I kept track of each day because they crawled by so slowly that I felt as if time was dragging through molasses. The hours felt like days and the days felt like weeks, but I would look at the calendar and realize I was only a month into my nightmare, then only two months, and then I would realize that the nightmare was not something I was ever going to wake up from. I would be counting these days for the rest of my life. Somehow, though, I thought by the end of that January, I might be okay. Well, I suppose I had at least figured out that I would probably be okay; I just thought I wouldn’t still be trying to convince myself of it.
When Clay and I talked about his death, it wasn’t in these terms. I never thought my life might also be in danger. When we would talk about him dying, we’d typically be in a screaming match. I would be crying angry tears, and he would be in denial. It may sound odd that this was even a topic of conversation, but Clay had come so close to dying so many times that I knew one day I would be living through the horror of losing him. But it didn’t matter how many times he would wake up the next morning without a single recollection of the night before. He had survived the night, or the drive, or the blackout, and he was still alive the next day. So, in his mind, he would always wake up the next day, asking me to sweep the whole incident under the rug, to stop thinking about it that way and forget it had ever happened, just like he had been doing his entire life, just like the example his mother and father had set for him. And he knew I would always be there when he did, just like I had been our entire relationship. I would scream and cry about how sick I was of living through this but when the fighting would stop, I would be quick to forgive him and keep up our façade of a happy family. It was just the three of us—Clay, his young son, Hunter, and me, and to try to protect us, I would stop “thinking about it that way.” In my mind, though, I knew. I lived with a sick foreboding that the day would come that he would start drinking and never wake up.
One day, I feared, I would passionately but ineffectively argue with him, he would get angry-drunk at me for the last time. He would get into his truck and speed off, killing himself, or worse, someone else. Or he might take off on his beloved Harley Davidson, like he had done so many times before. In the dark, he would make a poor judgement call and be thrown from the bike.
My most frantic arguments came after the times he took his gun with him in the truck, or when I woke up in the middle of the night and found him blacked-out drunk but awake, staring with a familiar blank, miserable look at the silver pistol, the five-inch Kimber 1911 that he had carried on duty for years. When he sobered up the next day, he would ask that we didn’t talk about it; he would reassure me that he was going to stay alive and that I had no reason to be worried or angry. No matter what happened, he promised, he would watch his son grow up to be a man.
Many nights, I stayed up and watched the front door, listened for the sound of his truck and wondered if he would come home, hoping he would make it back alive but not sure what repercussions waited for me if he did. Most of these nights, I stayed up with him, risking his anger to sit and watch that gun with him, to be sure it stayed there, lying on the table between us. I would be too terrified to close my eyes and fall asleep because of what I thought he might do to himself, but never for fear of what might happen to me.
Those nights, if I could sit quietly for long enough, he would start crying and telling stories about his childhood. He felt bitterness toward his father for the abuse he had endured as a young boy, and he would writhe with fear at the thought of abusing his own son. He would tell stories of his law enforcement days and the horrors he went through to cover up mistakes at the sheriff’s behest, the deaths that went unreported when a case didn’t go the way that they thought it should have, the times they took justice into their own hands, and the guilt he felt from being their hired gun.
One night, he came home angry at me for something I can’t remember. He went into an all-night rage about whatever it was he thought I had done wrong, calling me a bitch; I couldn’t sleep with his angry yelling and insults waking me up every couple of hours. The next morning, when he was sober again, he explained sheepishly that he had been called out earlier the day. The subject of their call: a man, broken down from addiction, had stood off with police for hours, while Clay kept his sniper sight trained on him. The standoff only ended when the man took his own life in front of them all.
Some nights, I left him, sick of the fighting, unwilling to endure another all-night bender of sloppy, drunken anger. I would drive to a local hotel room so I could get sleep and try to maintain some stability in my life until he sobered up.
So why then, six months later, was I still choking on my tears multiple times a week? Doubled over the sink, unable to catch my breath, asking myself, “What would Clay be saying if he were standing here next to me?” I knew he would be telling me to pull it together. He would be telling me that I was the strongest woman he had ever known. He would say, “Ab, you saved your life. You didn’t let me take you. You are such a badass, and you are overcoming everything I put you through. Now wash your face and don’t let the bastards get you down.” That was his favorite piece of advice, no matter what I needed to hear in my moments of distress, and I could still hear his voice in my head saying it.
Still, I cried, because like many strong, independent, and very capable women, I loved a man who had demons. I cried because there is more to domestic violence than the stereotypes of drunken, mean men and weak, sad women who do not love themselves, as I had been taught growing up. I cried because I was deeply and passionately in love with a man who loved me back just as much but had never learned how to demonstrate that love. Clay was a man who had been betrayed by his family, by his law enforcement brothers, and who had sacrificed his own sanity for what he thought was service to others but then could not live with himself afterward. I cried because I had been raised to believe this was all something I could handle, that this was normal in relationships and I had been the one failing. But I couldn’t control it, and I wasn’t supposed to have ever taken that responsibility onto my shoulders to try.
Even when Clay was sober, he was not particularly affectionate. Regardless of whether he was trying to apologize or win me back after an argument, he was too practical to bring me flowers or buy me pretty gifts, too sensible for cuddling. But in those final months, something changed, and it was like he was trying to tell me the end was coming. He would lay his head on my chest, hold me all night, and look at me with those sad, soft eyes filled with so much emotion. He had been my best friend, and he is the person I can attribute so much of my strength and success to, even if most of the time it was in spite of him and his constant challenging and discouragement of my dreams.
When his demons came out, as they so often did, he did not know how to hate anyone more than he hated me. I was the only person who had never left him or let him down. I had been there through all of it and never let him fall. After all this time, I can now admit to enabling him at times, many times. But he knew that when he woke up the next morning, I would still be there, until one day I wasn’t anymore. My guilt comes from knowing that was what finally broke him.
Nights like this, when I am begging God to let me fall asleep at 6 p.m. because I can’t stand the silence of the loneliness around me and the depression screaming inside my head, I question my decision to leave. I question every decision I made to love myself more than I had been and to live the life I knew I was meant to live. Was I right to have followed my own dreams and let him fall without being there to catch him?
Knowing now that I would lose Clay so violently, that our son would be taken from me, that I would be single and alone and without the family I sacrificed so much of myself to have, I wonder, would I ever go back to the way my life was before I had said “enough”?
In the years following these nights, I have learned through this ugly and heartbreaking process that the “what ifs” will not do anyone any good. No amount of questioning what could have been can change my truth. Wondering what I could have done differently only leads to more heartache and doubt. It only slows my recovery, and it can’t bring them back to me, no matter what my answer is to any of those questions.
But fortunately, part of having survived such an experience, of still being around to make these mistakes, is that if I want to sit in the “what if” and “should have been,” then I get to do so without judging myself. So, I sit here on my darkest days and I ask myself, “When Clay gave me my ultimatum, to choose my freedom or to choose him, and I chose myself, would I take it back? Would I go back and sacrifice this person that I get to be now so that he could still have the life he was living with me in it and I could keep him, keep Hunter?” The answer, every time and without hesitation, is no. I still would have chosen my freedom.
The survivor’s guilt is strong, and it eats away at my resolve when I think of having my own life to live to the fullest, that I continue to enjoy the activities he and I loved doing together and that I’m experiencing things he would have never wanted to try. The guilt I feel for his death, especially when I think of one day falling in love again, of having another family, remains persistent in the back of my mind, nagging, even after all this time.
The grief and trauma sometimes cripples my hopes and dreams. The anguish of losing my best friend in such an awful way, before he could see his son grow up, before he could say goodbye to his mother, wreaks havoc in my body and mind and causes unimaginable depression. The trauma of knowing our last minutes together were of him hating me so violently that I had to defend my life against his attempts to take me with him is the theme of constant nightmares.
But would I go back? Would I undo all of this to return to a home where his demons and drinking ruled his life and mine? To a time when I could not hope to have career ambitions or plans for a bigger family, living constantly with his fear of change and insecurity? Would I sacrifice all the hopes and dreams I had felt, now so within reach, to raise a little boy whose biological parents underestimated the selflessness and sacrifice it takes to be an intentional parent? If I knew that I could have Clay alive and Hunter back home with me and could shield them both from all this evil and cruelty, would I change my final decision to choose me?
No. I wouldn't. Because once you have experienced the peace that comes with giving up the illusion of control; when you finally choose to love yourself most, knowing that nobody else but you can, you walk away with enough strength to overcome the guilt, the grief, and the depression. It doesn’t make it go away, you still have a tendency to want to control things, thinking, knowing, the good you could do in someone’s life if they would just “let” you fix them, is still strong. But when you feel this love and compassion for yourself, you start to step away from who you ever “thought” you should be, and you begin to find out who you are really meant to be, and that you don’t have to live your life for someone else.
The joy of loving yourself first, that ever-elusive concept of self-love, is real, and it really does overcome all things. Even the most heartbreaking, darkest, most traumatic events of your life can be overcome by a mindset that can change post-traumatic suffering to post-traumatic growth. It is not easy, and for most of us, it is probably not even something that can be accomplished without community, resources, and a helluva therapist. But it can be done. I am doing it. I am a living, breathing example that you really do control your own responses, and what you allow others to take from your life. I don’t know how long this journey will take me or what is waiting on the other side of it. All I know is that I chose to love me and so I can continue to move forward with faith. I would give anything in the world to have my best friend back, but his choices were not mine. All I did was choose me, because in my life, I get to do that. If I hadn’t, nobody else would have.
Abby Eichorn’s debut memoir is a beautifully-rendered, passionate story of the aftershocks of domestic abuse and long-term trauma, and how she has managed—slowly but surely— to put one foot in front of the other to survive both. Uniquely structured with journal entries, letters, lists, and personal recollections and anecdotes from life, Eichorn brings a most heart wrenching story of abuse, survival, and redemption to light. And she does so with creativity, efficiency, grace, and dignity.
Eichorn relates how she came to be the wife of a severely alcoholic ex-law enforcement officer damaged from a lifetime of personal and professional scars. Despite having complicated family history of her own, for a full decade in her twenties, the author finds herself deep in the dysfunction of being married to “a good, upstanding guy” who was also deeply troubled and terribly abusive. When this “good guy” finally snaps from the pressures of existence, and one night attempts to take her life, Eichorn is granted a second chance at life and a clarity she never thought possible, complete with a glimpse of the life she had been trying to live all along.
This memoir documents the author’s non-linear, unconventional path of grief, growth and healing in the years since her ex-husband’s death, also while trying to maintain a relationship with the son she dearly loves. The book is a testament to the days when Eichorn thought she couldn’t make it through to the next, and is a rather detailed road map of how she has defeated unimaginable odds to break through to the other side. Replete with harrowing details of the dysfunction she endured for years, and ending on a hopeful, redemptive note, this memoir is not just about abuse and tragedy; it’s also about believing in oneself, the power of community, renewed faith in God, and still, love.
This memoir is deeply rendered, deeply felt, and perfectly expressed; it is the document of a woman who is no longer the sacrificial lamb for the loved ones in her life, who has crossed from the bridge of pleasing others to understanding that at the end of the day, the only person she can save is herself. It is a must-read, for those who have experienced similar events, but also for those who desire a story of survival, clarity and eventual self-love.