In a quiet room, raging.

In space, so the movie trailer goes, no one can hear you scream. Yet another year has passed and my sessions with the lady my husband has affectionately nicknamed "La Doctora Melfi" (in tribute to our one-time Soprano's habit) are rapidly coming to an end. I will have to say goodbye to the little beige room and my talking cure. I will have to go it "alone". Being alone with the aftermath of my Dad's suicide seems to be a key theme for me. Which is why it has been so important for me to share a little of it.

Initially I was spurred to write this blog for myself and also for those who also found themselves with no one to talk to in their life as a "suicide survivor" - a term which, I hope, is understood to mean those surviving another's suicide, not those who didn't manage to go through with it. I was hoping that I might be able to reach out and at least take someone's metaphorical hand just to say "you're not alone". Quite simple really. Some of you have been kind enough to contact me to say that my words have helped you in some way.

However, I've found it hard to 'blog on suicide'. It takes too much effort and courage to dig into the raw shit of it and to try to represent the experience on a regular basis. I find I have occasional epiphanies which I want to share but on a day to day basis I think that my blogs would be something like "saw some daffodils and remembered planting them with Dad" or "getting the freezing, crushing feeling AGAIN". Pretty dull and/or depressing reading, really.

So, going back to screaming in space, or rather, raging and ranting in quiet rooms; the room was mainly my head and the screaming was almost entirely silent. I still battle with the inner/outer selves who seem to be so often at odds with one another. The image that comes to mind is as if Pandora's box were made by Apple (the iPan?) - trying to keep the smoothest, whitest, most perfect of surfaces, utterly concealing the twisting, roiling inner horrors. Except now I don't feel that the inner stuff is quite so horrific and I also realise that being a looking glass has it's drawbacks. And whilst I probably haven't let myself go enough to totally rage and rant in the presence of another, in our real quiet room I have cried me a river or two.

I find it such a wonderful revelation to watch my young daughter and see her inner life written so plainly across her face, the total transparency is a joy - like a clear yet incredibly deep well. I can't see to the bottom of it but I feel that it is crystal and pure and good, even the temper tantrums and the crying. Having grown up around someone so closed, so unknowable, not to mention critical and occasionally volatile, I learned to keep myself to myself quite early on, to present a mask and to shrink away from my own sides so as not to be discovered and invaded. But although that was a good way to get through back then as a kid in a an unhappy family, it's not so good for me now that I'm a woman with a family of my own. Applying my keep-a-lid-on-it tactics to the suicide was the final fatal blow.

So the lid-lifting is to continue in another form - photography, art, installations... I'm not quite sure yet but it's coming and there's not much anyone (even I) can do about it.

Belongings, in boxes and out of them.

I have been opening the box, literally and metaphorically, on my father's possessions. The real objects that I have kept of his fit into a shoe box (a makeshift memory box that I've never had the heart to improve upon). They consist of the following:

A pair of leather driving gloves
A Roget's thesaurus, cover missing.
A waxed cotton hat with check lining
A horses bit (that's the metal thing that goes in the horses mouth)
A heart-shaped wooden box, sealed with sellotape containing some of his (grey) hairs.
A framed black and white photograph of my father aged around 8
A metal sweet box containing dried rose petals
A CD of Jacques Loussier

I have always treated these things with the reverence and solemnity of religious relics. I occasionally would come across the box, in some tidying session or house move, and pick warily over the contents, handling them like museum exhibits. Usually I would just feel sad or dragged down. Then I'd put them away again.
I am now trying to unpack this box a little more. I am photographing the objects and I am working out how I can treat them with a little less reverence and bring a little more of myself into the equation. Growing up with my dad was to grow up not knowing how to do right by him, what I meant to him or how to connect. It meant pushing myself to one side and trying to live out some imagined life. There seemed very little that was Real, that was pulsating with Life. All was hollow, at a distance, removed.
So now here I am with this box of solid objects that I still cannot connect to an actual person because he never seemed real, even in life. Instead I am having to delve inside myself and try to find the belief that I can be free of my father's suicide and his depression. I am trying to work out what to do with these objects - should I bury them, should I give them away, put them back in the box, or should I try to re-make them, to somehow put myself into the frame with them?
Answers on a postcard, please...

No more numbers. Taking it personally.

Enough numbers already! Ten years since I last tried therapy and it didn't go so well. Tip: don't have "therapy" with a non-accredited counsellor of the opposite sex. Really. Ever.

So (it's been ten years) since I last tried to unravel some knots and here I am again. Because I'm still hitting my head against the same walls. Still feeling like a failure. Still thinking there's something wrong with me. 

So, on Tuesdays it's an hour of just me and another woman in a cream room with a box of tissues to hand. Talking... mumbling, purging, admitting, dreaming, saying, stating, discovering, deciding, realising... Going over the same things and suddenly, unexpectedly taking what seem like complete tangents. 

In the midst of all this, realising one very stark fact. That I took my father's suicide personally. Which sounds ridiculous. Of course I did... He was my Dad and he chose to die (THEREFORE) I was not worth being here for. And at the same time, how could I? It was his life to take. It was nothing to do with me, it was all to do with him. That second argument still sounds so much less convincing.

I'm a mother now. I know what it means to have a child and how important I am for her. I don't want to pass this on. I know it's my responsibility to make sure it ends here. At the same time, feeling parental love makes it harder to understand. Maybe I have to accept that I will never understand.

 

14. New Year, further on still

It's mainly time that helps with grief - at least, that's what I've found. 

But sometimes we get stuck and can't grieve and then time becomes irrelevant - things go on hold and we grow older, many things in our lives change, but part of us - part of what happened, of our grief - is frozen in time. The longer it waits there, ignored, banished, frozen out, the greater a shadow it casts. Even this shadow can be ignored, it mixes with the palette of our everyday life, muting the colours, touching every corner in a way that can be so subtle that we start to accept that our life is simply a little duller than it might be, somehow there is less life, less light. But that's OK. Better than looking at what's casting the shadow, surely better than touching the cold?

How to unfreeze that grief when it is so terrifying? How to melt away the shadow and let vibrancy in? 

You are stronger than you think.

You have already survived the worst.

You must believe you can do it. You can.

12. A Near Miss

On my way to work this morning I was hit by a large, black 4x4. When I say hit, I mean I had a very lucky escape - the driver saw me and was braking so, whilst there was impact, I wasn't hurt. I was crossing the road and the land rover turned out of a side street onto the wrong side of the road - one moment I was looking left and crossing the road, the next I was turning to face a black charger, intent on running me down - I felt like a complete victim.

Two thoughts, almost concurrent, well actually, a thought and a feeling. While my mind was trying to work out whether I would go up and over the bonnet or under the wheels - thankfully it turned out to be neither, my heart sank like a lead plumb line. I felt incredibly, desperately sad. I didn't want to go and leave my family behind. I wanted to stay and not be rubbed out by a yummy mummy dropping her kids off to school. My first gut reaction when I realised that I was possibly not long for this world was how wrong that would be and how I didn't want to leave my husband behind. Once I opened my eyes and realised that I'd survived the impact unscathed, made it to the pavement and assured the red-lipsticked driver that I was alright, I felt a sob in my chest. By the time I'd made it back to my front door I was in full floods of tears.

I'm thankful really. After dad killed himself, I sometimes had what are generally termed as "dark thoughts about suicide". Lets face it, what that really means is - my parent killed him/herself and now I'm scared shitless that I'm going to do the same thing... Parents are supposed to lead the way into adult life. Ideally they would lead us to a happy, positive future. Not to the dark, soulless box of suicide. I don't know if we should quantify our lives by how much we have to live for because it seems to be more about a desire to live, full stop. It doesn't matter how many or how few things tie you to life, in the end, either you want to live life, or you don't. And I know for sure that I for one intend to keep on living for as long as I can.

10. Ten Things about Anthony

Your favorite song was The Beatles' "I've Just Seen a Face"
You were there, but not there at the same time
You berated me for bullying my sister - when you bullied her far worse yourself
You loved to be behind the camera, so we have very few pictures of you
You are the only father I will ever have

You are the ink stain on my soul - I will never scrub you away

On holiday, you loved not having to shave - we called you Bluto
When you were young your hair was black as crows feathers
Your garden was your refuge
You break my heart

9. Written 16th Feb 1997

Painting
Presently I am painting a house. Well, actually, not a house, more a building conversion - converted for the cause of lost souls and those in search of comfort, peace and reflection. I apply bright new almond scented paint over the old pastels whilst singing along tunelessly to the Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
Mostly I think. This activity of covering over the old, changing one set of ideas for another new, improved and more colourful version, seems to sink into and blend with my thoughts. The first layer goes on slow. Time is taken masking, edging and evenly applying. But the result is thin, the old colour shows through like badly applied make-up. I hate this stage, can't wait for it to be over. I reminisce about old love affairs turned sour, jealousies and unspoken regrets rise up to the surface and float there, old paint, old colours.
When a room is covered, still the old room, but covered, I turn up the stereo and start grooving to Helter Skelter. It's not conscious at the time but there is a sense of impending completion, of that smooth and total coverage that no longer looks like a covering but takes on itself the newness - IS the room. A new breath of life in less than a millimeter of pigment, latex and water.
I slap it on freely now, firmly rollering back and forth, feeling optimistic about my future, making plans. I sing, stop occasionally to admire the green-blue view and to visualise myself in a tender embrace amid cacti or tall cedars. When it's done I peel off the masking tape earlier than is probably wise - patience being a virtue I have never possessed, at least not in this kind of context - in order to get the full effect of the room. Familiar but different and radiant, the colour moving and changing in each corner, like the changing memory of my father's face.

8. The Funny Thing About Suicide.

I was listening to the radio this morning and there was a piece about a short story competition. I don't know what the story ("How to Get Away With Suicide" by Jackie Kay) is like, but it set in motion a train of thought that started as I was listening to the interview.
Mention was made of how suicide is a taboo subject, which I have found to be true, and even censor myself regularly on it (just not here, which is a relief). As I was getting ready for work I found myself making my mental check list of ticks and crosses, agreement and disagreement, against what was being said. Often, when suicide is mentioned - especially on radio phone-ins and on TV talk shows - there are more crosses than ticks in my mind's eye and the irritation and anger wells. But in this case author seemed sensitive towards her subject and interested in confronting the more difficult aspects of human life and relationships.
Only a short section of the story was read out . It's about a man who has just left his family - so far so believeable - and is looking for the perfect way to kill himself yet make it look like an accident - and here we enter the realm of fiction. In order to approach a subject as "difficult" and taboo as suicide the author talked about using black humour. It's not a new thing of course. In fact, in film suicide is either a tragic (yet somehow romantic) end to a life - or a way of eliciting a guilt-ridden laugh. The recent film "Little Miss Sunshine" springs to mind, in which one of the main characters (a gay, Proust-reading, scholar snubbed by lover for another) fails at his suicide attempt and (ironically) is the character who the viewer most identifies with as the rest of his road-tripping family are completely bonkers. He is depressed, but he is amusing and self-aware in his depression - something most truly depressed people are not.

I felt a little let down when the humour side was mentioned - listening to the radio article I had started to hope for something that might resonate with me, that might show that someone understood and was explaining to others a little of what it means for someone to end their own life and why it might be that some people do this, what state they might be in. Certainly not lucid enough to cunningly choose a way of doing it that would look like an accident (thus sparing their family and friends somehow?).

I can understand. I think that this suicide-for-laughs approach allows writers and artists access to a subject that would otherwise be out of their reach. The seriousness of suicide is what makes it so * . The complete and utter misery of it and the misery it inflicts would not make easy reading or viewing for most people - authors must sweeten the pill somehow in order to use it in their stories, otherwise it would simply be too much. Most stories and films require both conflict and resolution, but suicide can never give us any resolution. It is a story that must remain open ended, without even a full stop, simply space and ?
The rest we must make up ourselves.

6 Nervous Energy

So...
I did my usual thing of starting something with much energy and then the doubts started to creep in and I froze to the spot. Which is why there has been nothing new on this page for well over a month. Who am I to think that I can help anyone else? What the hell do I know? Etcetera, etcetera.
I almost deleted my blog, feeling it was selfish and wrong. But luckily in the meantime one or two people who are also struggling to find their way through the fallout of a suicide had left comments, which reminded me that:
a. This is for me and that's OK because it will also speak to anyone who is looking for it.
b. There is such a dearth of support and information in everyday life for survivors of bereavement by suicide that any tiny drop in the ocean has to be good.
It is a nervous kind of energy that has, for the most part, kept me going, kept me moving forwards even when it feels like going backwards, or just stuck. But the problem with living on your nerves is that it's very tiring and can make you ill. I was discussing this with my friend M and she asked me what I'd do if she could wave a magic wand and this nervous energy could just disappear... what would it feel like?
The thought was quite scary actually - what would fill that hole? All these things that I do to keep myself occupied, busy, propelled forwards in some kind of motion. I am afraid that nothing would replace it. Now I can sidestep to my Dad. Because here is the irony - he was very much a person to live on his nerves and I can recognise that I have the same traits and whilst I don't want the life he had, I also don't want to lose what few links I have with him, even if they are negative ones.
So how to deal with those similarities when, in order to survive, to carry on with the big mess that is living as opposed to choosing to die, I almost need to deny him completely - to see myself as a totally separate entity? I vacillate constantly in this aspect - he was my one and only father and no one will ever replace that and he is/was part of who I am. I grieve for him and want to keep him close... But he also almost destroyed me at 20 and has been responsible for the single most selfish and painful act you can inflict on a loved one. I wish him here, but I wish him other - different, not the person he was; the person who made me but does not define me.

5 Just after

blinking cursor...
I don't know where to start!
After it happened, after we stood in shock in different rooms of the house, after we pulled together for comfort and each withdrew in some way as well, after I had awoken on several mornings feeling normal for a second or two before the awful reality came bearing down on me... after the funeral with its disbelief and yet comforting routine, after thinking I must be in a film, and how if only I could fast forward a year I wouldn't feel so god-awful...
After the endless telephone calls, after the police returned me his watch and ring in a plastic bag, after not being able to cry when I wanted to and not being able to stop when I didn't... after flowers and cards and candles and more fucking telephone calls... After smelling his clothes and blinking in utter disbelief, after wanting to kill my aunt for saying how I reminded her of him and after sleeping in the bed he had spent his last night in
I had to face normal life.
And this was the worst part by far.

I don't know how it happened but I made the decision to return to University as soon as possible. What else was there to do?

Except that I returned in a new skin, one that was as if transparent and made of pure nerve endings. I felt as vulnerable as a child and utterly raw. Anyone could say anything at any time that could cut me to the quick and I couldn't protect myself - not that they meant to, but it didn't matter, it hurt anyway because they didn't understand. I was banished to an island far from the shore and there was no way I could cross back. I was - I felt - utterly alone in my grief.

I wandered around the corridors trying to focus on where I was going, but in my mind was a mantra
dad's dead dad's dead dad's dead
It was relentless. And of course, those terrible, awkward moments when friends - and acquaintances - wanted to say how sorry-they-were-and-if-there-was-anything-they-could-do-just to-say. Poor people, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. Because everything hurt. Simply everything.

That awful feeling lasted a long time, but it didn't last forever.

4 No Frame of Reference

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.

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.

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.

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...