I woke up this morning under the influence of survivor guilt. I am wrestling with the feeling that maybe if I hadn't left ex, maybe if I had stuck around and really worked with him, he might not have fallen apart the way he did. I think it's partly triggered by seeing the old pictures and hearing the stories at his memorial event - from days when we were together and he looked happy, outgoing, enjoying life, etc. And the fun stories people had to tell about him were all from the era before I left - nothing from the last 8 years.
Even if I look at it objectively - he was an outwardly functional adult when we were together, then decompensated after I left, then there was a bit of an uptick with his second wife, then when she left he pretty much plummeted straight down, with one brief interlude just after he went to rehab (that lasted about a month). Crazier and crazier and drunker and drunker. I have a friend in the military who says this pattern among soldiers is known as being on "wife support".
I know rationally that I left because I had tried everything I could to stay married and I wasn't able to do it. I also left because I had a child and I did not want her to grow up with this household as her standard for what to expect in adult life. I left because I was being treated really badly and ex was not open to the idea of changing how he spoke to me, behaved with me, and blamed me. If I had stayed, ex might have remained a functional adult for a while longer, but I would have absorbed the damage in the form of the destruction of what remained of my self-esteem, and ongoing emotional and physical health problems. In hindsight I know ex was drinking alcoholically for a long time before I left, and I could not have forced him to stop. I did the right thing to save myself and Kid. He was not capable of being a healthy parent for her.
(But maybe if I had made him happier, he wouldn't have wanted to drink. Maybe if he had been more content with life, he would have tried harder to preserve the good things he had. Maybe I should have been more compassionate, more tolerant, put up with more of the craziness for longer, and he might have come out of it. Maybe the "golden boy" of our earlier years would have come back, and I just wasn't patient enough with his midlife crisis. Maybe ..).
I know this is all crap and with an active alcoholic all you can do is save yourself, but it's amazing how strong the guilt can be - guilt that I not only survived but thrived after we separated, and he did not.