“She took her own life, Dan,” Van Gundy said, pausing to find the right words. “I’ll never ... I don’t care how long it goes, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever get over that … it was devastating. We’d been married for 35 years, and had been together for close to 40 years — since I was 24 years old. ...
My entire adult life, I trace everything, job changes, kids, everything, I was with her and she was by my side. I never, ever, envisioned that I was gonna live any day in my life without Kim. Never envisioned that. I knew she was going through a tough time, but I still never envisioned that happening. Even now, it’s been eight months, and I struggle to come to grips with the fact that I’m never gonna see her again.
I’m trying hard to stay connected. I don’t want to — my house is full of pictures of Kim. There’s a montage of pictures above my bed that my kids did for me of Kim. I’m trying hard to remember her voice, to remember her smile, all of those things. But more than anything, live her values, because her values were better than mine. She taught me a lot. And I want to live her values and a life that she would be proud of. And my kids at times over the last eight months, at times, not often, but I think genuinely from their point I’ll do something and they’ll say, ‘mom would have really been proud of you for that one.’ And that above anything else really makes me feel good, because my wife was an incredible person and the loss is huge. But I have other people that I care about, and as you said, I’ve had a lot of people support me, and I’ve got to try to go on, but I know I’ll never get away from it.”
“I just don’t think I’ll ever get over it,” Van Gundy said. “My responsibility was to take care of her and to give her a great life, and I failed in that,” he said, acknowledging that is his feeling, and not actually the truth, as his therapist reminds him that Kim had a mental disease.
“What’s keeping me going is mainly my (four) kids,” Van Gundy said later.