I think I am a coward. The hardest thing to admit to others it that which we can't admit to ourselves. Although I know in my head and - after 12 years - in my heart, that my father took a shotgun, walked out of the house to the back garden and knelt? lay? stood? under the pear tree and pulled the trigger - it is still hard to admit. So in my previous "admission" I didn't admit that much.
Here are the facts:
He was suffering from depression.
He was on, then off, then back on, anti-depressants
On the day it happened, my mother left him alone in the house for an hour and went to fetch my sisters from school.
I was not there - I was at university.
I still haven't asked my sisters exactly what they saw before they started screaming, before the police and the ambulance came.
I got there that same night. I carefully collected the grey hairs from his pillow.
The next day I walked outside and saw the grass under the old pear tree flattened where he lay - that made it seem more real.
The "facts" don't help very much, do they? It's the huge hole inside of you that needs help, the falling sensation when you receive the news. How to right a world the has turned upside down.
Wednesday 31 January 2007
3 Dad and the Pear Tree
My father wore his depression like a grey cloak. I don’t know if the purpose of the cloak was to hide him from the world or to hide the world from him. In my mind it is a grey swirling cloak, like a magician’s. Then again, it could have been a long soldier’s great coat, like the Russian uniform. Whatever kind it was, it made the distance between me and him seem enormous and impassable, was like a grey, suffocating fog that I was afraid of. He used to wear a lumberjack’s padded jacket, made of wool, with a shaggy sheepskin type collar. When I was a teenager, I appropriated it and wore it on family walks. It smelt of earth and stale sweat and creosote and was too big for me. He used to get annoyed at seeing me wearing men’s clothing, so I wore it all the more.
The oldest pear tree in our garden is taller than the house and its bark is silver-grey with time and the pale lichen that encrusts it. There are large cracks between squares of bark and ants have made their home below it and scurry up and down the tracks between the bark squares all summer.
The pear stands proud; I am in my thirties now and it was there, tall as ever, when my parents moved in 1974, with me as a baby. There is a view of it from my old bedroom window. In fact, the window frames a view of the pear tree, which stands on a small hillock, to the left of the goose house (no geese have lived there for well over twenty years), in front of a large mature bed of shrubs. Beyond are tree tops and in the winter, between the trees, lies a view of fields. In summer it is all the greens of foliage and the Mendip hills far beyond. In winter the hills glow silvery, with a light covering of frost or snow. At least, in my mind, there is clear light and snow.
Pear trees are more elegant than apple trees. The leaf is more delicate, glossy silver-green. The form is umbral, the pears themselves, tear shaped – not at all like the robust apple with its buxom pink blossoms, endless leaf, heavy fruit. The old pear in our garden is a tree in a medieval fresco – each branch defined and curved, each leaf lovingly drawn. When it fruits, the pears are large, somewhat misshapen and often blighted with dark spots. They fall onto the grass below and give the wasps one of their last drunken feasts of the year. When I was young my mother would collect up the best of the windfalls and make pears in ginger – the pale green pears, peeled and cooked would magically turn to a tender pink blush, and the syrup so sweet yet spicy would catch the back of my throat, then warm my belly.
We have many other trees in our garden. My father was a great planter of trees. I assumed at the time that all fathers spent their entire weekend hunched in the garden, sweating and covered in sticky burrs, planting trees and mowing the lawn. He would come in to eat – those terrible, oppressive, irritable meal-times – after my mother had rung a bell to let him hear that food was served. She got sick of yelling. When we had friends over they used to want to ring the brass bell. They always laughed.
Now there is no bell. The pear tree is tended by a gardener who prunes it far better than my father ever did, if indeed, he did ever prune it. As a gardener, he planted, but his tending was erratic. Sometimes he left the ties on the trees for years and then they cut deep into the growing trunk. To prune was to lop off a limb and leave the plant lopsided – too much, too late. Lucky for him nature is a good doctor.
The oldest pear tree in our garden is taller than the house and its bark is silver-grey with time and the pale lichen that encrusts it. There are large cracks between squares of bark and ants have made their home below it and scurry up and down the tracks between the bark squares all summer.
The pear stands proud; I am in my thirties now and it was there, tall as ever, when my parents moved in 1974, with me as a baby. There is a view of it from my old bedroom window. In fact, the window frames a view of the pear tree, which stands on a small hillock, to the left of the goose house (no geese have lived there for well over twenty years), in front of a large mature bed of shrubs. Beyond are tree tops and in the winter, between the trees, lies a view of fields. In summer it is all the greens of foliage and the Mendip hills far beyond. In winter the hills glow silvery, with a light covering of frost or snow. At least, in my mind, there is clear light and snow.
Pear trees are more elegant than apple trees. The leaf is more delicate, glossy silver-green. The form is umbral, the pears themselves, tear shaped – not at all like the robust apple with its buxom pink blossoms, endless leaf, heavy fruit. The old pear in our garden is a tree in a medieval fresco – each branch defined and curved, each leaf lovingly drawn. When it fruits, the pears are large, somewhat misshapen and often blighted with dark spots. They fall onto the grass below and give the wasps one of their last drunken feasts of the year. When I was young my mother would collect up the best of the windfalls and make pears in ginger – the pale green pears, peeled and cooked would magically turn to a tender pink blush, and the syrup so sweet yet spicy would catch the back of my throat, then warm my belly.
We have many other trees in our garden. My father was a great planter of trees. I assumed at the time that all fathers spent their entire weekend hunched in the garden, sweating and covered in sticky burrs, planting trees and mowing the lawn. He would come in to eat – those terrible, oppressive, irritable meal-times – after my mother had rung a bell to let him hear that food was served. She got sick of yelling. When we had friends over they used to want to ring the brass bell. They always laughed.
Now there is no bell. The pear tree is tended by a gardener who prunes it far better than my father ever did, if indeed, he did ever prune it. As a gardener, he planted, but his tending was erratic. Sometimes he left the ties on the trees for years and then they cut deep into the growing trunk. To prune was to lop off a limb and leave the plant lopsided – too much, too late. Lucky for him nature is a good doctor.
Sunday 21 January 2007
2 "So... ...was there a note?"
There was a note. It was three words, in shaky handwriting, I only remember the first two. “You will…”
…not understand?
…not forgive?
…not know?
I’m sure “Not” must have been the third.
…not understand?
…not forgive?
…not know?
I’m sure “Not” must have been the third.
Wednesday 17 January 2007
1 Admission
It is a clear, crisp October afternoon in 1994. The shadows are long and I cycle home from Uni’ through the park. I am in a positive mood – I have just had a good tutorial and feel that I might be on to something with my work. Also, it is the first time I tell a member of staff that my dad is receiving ECT (electroconvulsive therapy also known as electroshock therapy). My tutor is great – understanding and sympathetic, if a little shocked (excuse the pun).
I push my bike up to the front door, the sun on my back, walk into the house and my world falls though the floor.
How to describe the * of the suicide of a parent (or brother, or sister, or mother, son or daughter I imagine) to someone who has not experienced it? There are no words, I think partly because suicide is not spoken of. Suicide robs us - of the words, of a person, of an explanation. There is no fault, no blame, no enemy but the person who has gone. After 12 years, I still skirt around the issue. I can now, at least, say “my father died x years ago”. This will be when I am confident that there is a way of diverting the conversation away from the cause – though actually, people rarely ask, already too embarrassed by the admission of death. Very occasionally I will lie – he had a heart-attack - which is close, in a way. If I were to meet someone whose father shot himself, would I want to know? I wonder how many others I have spoken to who have lost someone to suicide and neither of us have known?
So, this blog is for myself, to get it off my chest as and when. And just as much, it is meant for the I-don't-know-how-many-others who have lost someone to suicide. I don't know where it will go or if it will mean much to anyone else. But I hope it may help someone else who is going though what I've been though feel slightly less alone or slightly less crazy...
I push my bike up to the front door, the sun on my back, walk into the house and my world falls though the floor.
How to describe the * of the suicide of a parent (or brother, or sister, or mother, son or daughter I imagine) to someone who has not experienced it? There are no words, I think partly because suicide is not spoken of. Suicide robs us - of the words, of a person, of an explanation. There is no fault, no blame, no enemy but the person who has gone. After 12 years, I still skirt around the issue. I can now, at least, say “my father died x years ago”. This will be when I am confident that there is a way of diverting the conversation away from the cause – though actually, people rarely ask, already too embarrassed by the admission of death. Very occasionally I will lie – he had a heart-attack - which is close, in a way. If I were to meet someone whose father shot himself, would I want to know? I wonder how many others I have spoken to who have lost someone to suicide and neither of us have known?
So, this blog is for myself, to get it off my chest as and when. And just as much, it is meant for the I-don't-know-how-many-others who have lost someone to suicide. I don't know where it will go or if it will mean much to anyone else. But I hope it may help someone else who is going though what I've been though feel slightly less alone or slightly less crazy...
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