Warning: This post contains the details of J’s suicide.
The time it took for my life to change beyond recognition was a measly seventeen minutes. The amount of time it might take me to run three miles very slowly, or listen to a short podcast, or make chips in the air fryer and eat a couple. A ‘nothing’ amount of time, I could spend that long scrolling on my phone and not even notice. J was alive, then seventeen minutes passed, and he was not alive.
At the beginning of April 2022 J, my partner of nearly three years, died by suicide. It’s taken a while for me to move away from saying he committed suicide. I know that there is pressure to move away from using the word ‘committed’ when talking about suicide. People say it’s because there are associations with committing a crime. But you commit to someone in love or marriage, you can be in a committed relationship, there are commitment ceremonies which are a celebration. It’s not all crime-related.
Besides, the alternatives – “Lost my partner to suicide?” “My partner died by suicide?” For me they were too passive. They sounded like suicide was something that happened to him, that he wasn’t an active participant in his own death. “He took his own life” – factually correct, but even that doesn’t begin to capture the determined violence of it. At that moment in time, J was committed to ending his life: he hung himself, and I found him.
When I got back from my work trip to California, he was in a terrible state. He hadn’t slept properly for the entire week and had been drinking too much. He looked grey and drawn, he was almost unrecognisable. I was jet-lagged, a little anxious but also quietly optimistic that we would find a solution together.
In reality, we argued for almost three hours, mainly about the fact that I wanted him to get professional help and consider medication. “Why is different to me taking HRT?” I asked him, desperate, exhausted, depleted. He never gave me an answer, just kept repeating: “I’d rather kill myself, I’d rather kill myself.” Never for a split second did I think he actually would.
I’ve replayed our argument so many times but can only remember fragments that come to me in a completely random order:
Me: the only way I can see us moving forward is if you get medication.
J: I’d rather kill myself, I’d rather kill myself.
Me: But why? It’s no different to me taking HRT for the menopause. We could put a deadline on it, do it for 6 months and then review.
J: Help me.
Me: This is not a normal reaction.
Me: You can’t pin everything on me, it’s not fair.
J: You said you were going on a work trip but instead you were sightseeing. You didn’t call me enough, you knew what I was going through.
Me: We are just going round in circles
J (sobbing): I can’t make you happy
Me: Would you not try medication for 6 months for my sake?
J: Yes, I would do it for you.
I know there were points where we hugged and things were calmer. But these were short moments of respite within a tornado of emotions. He veered wildly between crying, lying on the floor, hitting himself in the head with his fists, being vicious about me and then begging for help. After a while I felt numb and started to shut down. I realise now that in his mind this confirmed everything he feared: that I just didn’t care. Of course, the opposite was true, but by that time I was so exhausted I had nothing left in me.
I was painfully aware that the kids knew I had arrived several hours ago and would be wondering where I was, so eventually I said I had to go and get them, and went upstairs to have a shower. Seventeen minutes elapsed between me messaging their dad to say I was coming over, having my shower and going outside to the garage to tell J I was going.
He was hanging at the far end of the garage, his tongue such a dark shade of purple that I thought he had something stuck in his mouth. His grey tracksuit bottoms were covered in his urine. I called out, to no-one: “He’s dead, he’s dead.” I tried to cut the blue nylon rope with scissors but they wouldn’t cut through it, so I ran into the kitchen to get a breadknife. Once I cut through the rope I threw the breadknife to the side, it slid off the top of the chest freezer and fell behind it. Weird, the things you remember. All the while I was thinking there was no point, that it was already too late. He fell backwards with a thud into the garage door, a dead weight. I tried to get the noose off his neck but it was still too tight.
I don’t remember the exact sequence after that, I called the kids’ dad C, and called for an ambulance. C arrived almost instantly and got the noose off J’s neck, pulled him so that he was lying flat and did CPR. While I was on the phone to the emergency services the person on the line was trying to count the timings for the CPR and I became really irritated with them and kept repeating: “He knows what he’s doing!” (C had worked in a hospital for many years).
The paramedics arrived, a helicopter landed in the field opposite the house. The neighbour from over the road (the kind of neighbour you say hello to and not much more) came over to give me a hug and then stood next to me watching as the paramedics tried to revive him. I had to ask her to leave, I don’t remember what I said exactly, but I have no doubt it was more polite than the circumstances warranted. She later messaged C to tell him that she’d asked her daughter to delete the footage she’d recorded of the incident on her phone.
The paramedics found a heartbeat and took J to the hospital. To this day I don’t know whether an ambulance or the helicopter transported him.. In films the distraught partner travels in the ambulance with her love and holds his hand on the way, begging him not to leave her. In reality, I was left unsure what I was expected to do. I asked one of the paramedics if I should go to the hospital and said: “It’s up to you.” As if I was in a fit state to make any kind of decision, let alone that one.
I had to give a police statement. The female police officer sat on the sofa in the living room asking me to go through what had happened, while Larry (J’s puppy) repeatedly tried to hump her arm. Once the police had gone, C and I hugged and sat in the living room. In the end I asked him to take me to the hospital. I had a thought that if J suddenly came to he would be alone and confused. I needed to be there. He didn’t come to.
The hospital kept J in an induced coma for a few days. I went in to see him once during that time. Is that odd? Should I have been there every waking hour that was allowed? They told me to talk to him, but I found it uncomfortable. In my heart of hearts I knew he was already gone. But I tried. I told him that he needed to wake up. If nothing else so that we could laugh about the fact that it was C who had saved him. He had never been C’s biggest fan.
While I was there, trying to speak to the body that was lying on the bed, that looked like him but didn’t look like him, the nurse was calling the HR department to discuss booking her remaining holiday. She was saying that her husband worked at the pharmacy and was having difficulty booking his holiday on the system. I was sitting there with the person I loved, awkwardly talking to him while trying to convince myself that he could hear me. While right in front of me normal mundane life continued. It jarred, I was only there for an hour, couldn’t the conversation with HR about holiday have waited?
I felt guilty, I was saying all the words but inside I was willing him to let go. When I found him, I thought he was already dead. Those few days in ICU prolonged the suffering. But they also gave me time to think about what would happen if he woke up? If he had suffered brain damage he wouldn’t be the same person and would be desperately unhappy. Would I be the one looking after him or would his family want to take over?
But even if he hadn’t, and he woke up like nothing had happened, the devastation he had caused would traumatise him. To this day I am convinced that he wouldn’t be able to live with it and eventually would just try again. Maybe not straight away, but one day. I would be permanently treading on egg-shells around him. After every disagreement or argument I would be left feeling: is this the day?
The one thing C said to me during this time of uncertainty – quite rightly – was that if J recovered, he couldn’t come and live with me and the kids again. If he woke up, he would be waking up just to realise that he had already destroyed everything. I’m not sure he would have wanted to continue living.
On 6th April, four days after I found him, I got the call from the hospital to say he wasn’t going to recover. That’s the date on his death certificate, but for me it will always be the day I found him. After that, I started writing to him every day. There was suddenly a gaping J-sized hole in my life. I needed somewhere to dump my thoughts, now that I no longer had the person I’d normally share them with. From one day to the next. He was there, and then he decided not to be. ‘Decide’ is probably not the right word. His brain not only tricked him into thinking that suicide was the solution but it also failed to protect him. But at that split second it’s what he thought he wanted. Or even worse, what he thought I wanted?
Despite what people like to tell you, grief isn’t a process. It doesn’t have stages or steps – at least not in the tidy linear way we are programmed to believe in. Writing to J helped me still feel connected to him. It was somewhere I could put down what was going on in my head in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone else. This blog is an attempt to take what I’ve experienced and make sense of some of the chaos.
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