The first few months after losing J to suicide were, unsurprisingly, the hardest. During that time, I wrote to him every single day. Writing to J made me feel closer to him and gave me somewhere to offload what was happening, in a way that I couldn’t do anywhere else.
I recently listened to a podcast with Richard E Grant. He spoke about writing an email to his late wife Joan every evening. It made him feel connected to her, that it was keeping the conversation that started 38 years ago, going. He writes to her about what happened to him that day, trivial or not, and imagines her response.
In the beginning it was the same for me, the difference is that over time my feelings changed. At the start, while there was some relief at being released from the shackles of living with his mental health issues, I wanted him back with me. As time went past and I understood the deep-rooted history of his troubles a little more (though – of course – never fully), I started to realise that he would never have been ‘cured.’ He refused to seek professional help or consider medication. As the doctor said to me on the day his death was officially declared: we would have ended up in this situation at some point, if it hadn’t have been that day it would have been another one.
At the two year mark I stopped writing to him completely. I had gradually lost the urge to share the minutiae of my life with him daily and the gaps in-between writing were getting longer.
I need to be fully transparent here: anger also drove me forward. It didn’t come straight away, but when it did it hardened my resolve. It doesn’t consume me or affect my day to day life, and I also recognise that I can never understand what he was going through at that moment in time. But he left the garage doors wide open for me to find him. What I struggle to forgive him for is that it could have easily been one of the kids that came looking for him. Why didn’t he drive off? Disappear? There was a message being sent to me, I am convinced of it, a punishment for (in his mind) abandoning him in his hour of need.
Richard E Grant spoke of being unable to forgive friends who disappeared after his wife died. He said he could forgive it on an intellectual level but not in his heart. That’s how I feel about what J did – on an intellectual level I understand that his suffering was so extreme that his brain convinced him suicide was the only solution, and that we would be better off without him. But my heart has been irreversibly hardened and, terrible though it sounds, I don’t want him back. Not like that, anyway.
I am grateful for the anger, as it has helped me look to the future rather than dwell on the past. I am also grateful for the wake-up call – nothing has confirmed life’s fragility in quite the same way as those fateful seventeen minutes did: alive, not alive.
As well as writing to him every day, there were other things that were instrumental to my recovery early on.
1. Getting out in nature
In the myriads of crises we each face on a regular basis, has a single person ever been told: “Whatever you do, avoid going into nature?” It’s almost a given that spending time in nature is a good idea for pretty much everyone and anything. I can’t be bothered to look it up but let’s just assume I did and there is plenty of science-backed confirmation that Going Out in Nature is Good for You.
I had to walk the dogs every day, whether I wanted to or not, whatever the weather. The fields surrounding my house became the place where I stopped trying to control my emotions, stopped trying to be strong for my boys or present to the outside world that I was coping just fine. In the first few days, weeks, maybe even months, I cried – a lot. But gradually I stopped needing to cry as much, and could start to focus on the changing seasons, the trees, the birds, the sounds and just appreciate it. And that science I couldn’t be bothered to look up was right – it made me feel better.
2. Talking!
This was key for me, though looking back on it, I might have taken it to the extreme. I didn’t want to shy away from what happened, I wanted to talk about it. The only problem was, I wanted to talk about it all of the time. For a lot of people it’s an uncomfortable topic. But what was fascinating to me was that most people assumed I would want to keep it a secret. In reality, I wanted everyone to know. I wanted to come out of my body and observe other peoples’ incredulity when hearing it. Nodding along with them.“I know, it’s crazy, right?” I can’t explain it. Was hearing it being spoken aloud my brain’s way of learning to accept that it had really happened?
It was such an unexpected, surreal situation that I would often find myself thinking: “I can’t believe this has happened.” But I also felt strongly that if J had died of cancer we wouldn’t be covering it up. So why should we with this? He was ill. That’s what I told the kids. He was ill and refused to get help for it. Like someone with cancer refusing to go to the doctor or have any treatment.
An engineer came to fit a new double-glazing pane for me quite soon after J died. It had broken when J was mowing the lawn and the mower kicked up a pebble. He’d ordered a new pane and was going to fit it himself.
After the engineer fitted it, I explained (unnecessarily to be fair) that my partner had intended to fit the pane. That he had passed away and I couldn’t do it myself. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, do you mind me asking what happened?” “He took his own life,” I replied. The man went into a stammered panic: “Oh! I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have asked, I wish I hadn’t asked…” Needless to say I’d asked him to quote me for repairing some other windows, and I never heard from him again. In truth I felt sorry for him, so I didn’t chase him up on it either.
My urge to talk about it all the time was so strong that when I went to the hairdresser’s I had to promise myself beforehand that I wouldn’t bring it up. Even the most innocuous questions too-easily linked back to my circumstances. “So, what have you been up to?” “Doing anything nice for the rest of the day?” “Got any holidays booked?” At one point she said she was travelling back to Australia for her grandmother’s funeral, and how difficult she found funerals. I had to really focus on not blurting everything out. But I managed it, just.
3. Revisiting where it happened.
Similarly to talking about what happened, I didn’t want the garage (where J died) to become a place I couldn’t enter. I made myself go in there every single day after he died. I needed the space to become normalised, for it not to become a closed-off, no-go area. Even while there was still detritus from the incident – empty packaging from the needles the paramedics used, discarded face masks (thankfully the paramedics removed the blue nylon rope he’d used) – I went in there.
Slowly but surely I started to tidy it up. To get rid of mess and paperwork and evidence of J’s unhappiness. A “FUCK YOU” scrawled onto the work bench, jars full of cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, files full of Tesco receipts. My friend Neil finished clearing it out for me. Eventually he converted it into a usable room for the kids to game in. I am happy that we have reclaimed the space. It’s not about erasing J, it’s about turning something negative around, making something positive out of it.
4. Research
In the first few weeks after J died the Samaritans website was permanently at the top of my search results, asking if I needed help. I was Googling about suicide constantly, wanting to find out everything I could about it. More specifically: suicide by hanging. I wanted to know if it hurt, how long it took, what it felt like, if people regretted it as soon as they’d done it, if anyone survived it.
There are two things that make me think that J didn’t intend it to be a cry for help. That he intended to go through with it. Firstly, the consultant at the hospital told me that J knew exactly what he was doing. The second thing is that the garage ceiling is so low. Couldn’t he have stopped himself just by putting his legs on the ground? So I can only assume the noose he made was specifically designed not to slacken. To be honest, I still don’t really understand how he managed it. But I do understand that he intended for it to be the end.
I watched every documentary I could find, read blogs and first-person accounts from people who had tried and failed, and from the people who had been left behind. I scoured through all J’s diaries (where I could decipher his writing). Read all his emails to both his previous girlfriends. I had long phone calls with them both. Reading it all didn’t scare me, I just wanted to understand. And while of course there will always be guilt and regret, I also didn’t want to let it destroy me.
The research helped me, if not understand (I could never truly do that), then at least accept that ultimately it had nothing to do with me. That’s not to say that I feel completely blameless, far from it. Having dissected as much as I can remember on that day, if I could replay it I would behave differently. I would show more warmth and compassion rather than slowly closing down emotionally.
But while that might have changed the course of events on that particular day, I’m pretty sure it would have just been putting it off for another day. We were hurtling towards that end, one way or another. J was getting worse, I was getting more out of my depth. The consultant at the hospital confirmed it. So in some awful, perverse way, it was almost better now than further down the line when the kids were even more invested. Isn’t that just an awful thing to admit?
5. Therapy
I’m putting this in here even though it wasn’t something that worked for me. Quite early on after J died, lots of people insisted that I should have some therapy. I think it might have been a knee-jerk reaction for people to suggest it. They wanted to help, but felt utterly helpless, so this was the obvious thing: a pragmatic, actionable suggestion. But ‘therapy’ is a very broad term. I am by nature a problem-solver. So I’m not sure open-ended therapy, with no specific goal, was the right thing for me.
I had a few sessions, with someone recommended by a friend who had also suffered a bereavement. The therapist was perfectly lovely and perfectly competent. But she repeatedly told me how well I was doing, and strangely this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I was already talking so openly with my closest friends and family (and anyone else who’d listen, see above). So perhaps I didn’t feel the need to unburden myself in therapy. My friends and family really should invoice me, they saved me thousands of pounds. And because I didn’t want to be defined by what happened, I felt that the reassurances about how well I was doing might tip me into feeling sorry for myself. And that was something I was determined not to do.
Where therapy did come into its own was with my sons. My youngest, understandably, started suffering from separation anxiety, especially at bedtime. “What if it happens to someone else?” “How did J get ill, what if you get ill too?” He was sleeping in with me most nights, but developed a strange association with only feeling safe at bedtime if I was still downstairs. This sounds completely bonkers, and not that big of a deal. But he couldn’t explain it to me. And during this time there were nights that I just wanted to curl up in bed the minute the boys went up. It was exhausting. On some days functioning on a very basic level took all my strength. If I tried to go to bed early he would get so worked up that I would lose my temper and mirror his tantrum.
My eldest started talking about wanting to hurt himself and punch himself in the head. He told one of his Teaching Assistants that he was stabbing his hand with a pencil. I’m close enough with him to know that there were no marks on his hands. Dylan doesn’t do lying, so maybe he was pushing a pencil into his hand rather than stabbing it.
Similarly, when he told me about punching himself in the head, once I’d climbed back down from the ceiling, I started tapping his leg with my hand and asked him to show me how hard he was doing it. It turns out it was more of a light tap than a punch. We had a conversation about being very careful about the words he uses to describe what he is doing. But whether he was actually inflicting pain on himself was almost irrelevant. The feelings of wanting to do it were genuine, even if he wasn’t acting on it. So after Nathan was happy to finish his block of therapy sessions, Dylan went.
I told them it was confidential and that they didn’t have to share it with me if they didn’t want to. On those car journeys home afterwards, it took all my strength not to quiz them about what they had talked about. Or what activities they had done. Nathan shared openly afterwards, Dylan less so. By the time we got into the car he went back to wanting to talk about cars or car games.
What was evident from piecing it all together was that the therapist used art, colours and physical objects to help them categorise their feelings and make sense of them. They made crazy paintings of imaginary islands with all their emotions depicted. They brought home painted rocks to remind themselves of their biggest feelings. But the thing I loved the most was that it truly helped them. Nathan stopped worrying about someone else dying, Dylan stopped talking about hurting himself.
I was so proud of both of them, and I told them so. When I first started researching suicide, I received regular reminders that it can cause a chain reaction within families. It terrified me, that I’d brought this into our family. That the boys would be at a higher risk because of it. When they both agreed to go to therapy, I instilled in them that they had now seen first-hand that it could help. That it was something they could go back to at any stage in their life if they needed to. I also told them they were braver than a lot of adults. That it was something J had been too scared to do, which contributed to his death.
6. Gardening
I’m really bad at gardening. I can’t remember who, but someone said to me: “There’s no such thing as being bad at gardening.” I beg to differ.
In my work life I stay organised, work methodically, and pay meticulous attention to detail. In my garden I am impatient, slapdash and disorganised. I shove stuff in the ground to see what happens. I can’t be bothered to grow from seed and buy young vegetable plants from the garden centre. Spending £100 at random on plants I think look pretty. Adding them to a border just because there’s a space. I don’t know how big they will get or how far they will spread, or whether they will even return the following year.
I scatter seeds across patches of grass with no preparation at all, hoping it will magically transform into a wildflower meadow (spoiler: it doesn’t). Weeding seems so pointless, they just come back. And while the wildflowers stubbornly refuse to take seed when liberally scattered, weeds seem to be able to grow anywhere – in the tiniest cracks between paving stones, through the industrial-grade weed barrier, in the exact bit between the fence and the ground that my trowel can’t get to.
And yet, with the first glimpse of a light spring evening, around the same time that we perform the ceremonial Putting Away of the Hot Water Bottles, I start itching to get out there.
Tiny tips of asparagus start to push through, three wild rocket plants survived, plus one lonely chard, reddish spears emerge where I cut back the dead peony stalks. Of course, the weeds are also back, like the persistent bullies that they are – there is no uncertainty as to whether they survived the winter or not – but even weeding feels like a satisfying transformation. I’ve weeded a patch, now there’s a gap, that must mean it’s time for an expensive trip to the garden centre. I google things at random (yes I should put compost down for the established raspberry canes, no I shouldn’t hard prune lavender in spring), I flit from task to task, never fully completing any of them, I follow lots of inspiring Instagram accounts only to look across my tangled mess of a garden in despair.
But I’ve come to realise that I just don’t care. I do it because it’s physical, meditative and it’s joyous to watch things – despite my best efforts – grow.
7. Jigsaw Puzzles
My friends find my obsession with jigsaw puzzles hilarous. I should probably try and count how many I’ve done since J died (and tot up the cost, it’s likely eye-watering). There’s always a puzzle on the dining room table and I line up the next one to start as soon as I finish the first. I start getting antsy if I haven’t got at least one in the ‘to do’ queue. “That’s so sad,” my best friend said in a WhatsApp message recently. “I know. Put me in a home now, I’m ready,” I replied. His response: “To be fair, would probably be too lively for you.” Hilarious.
With all the replaying, researching and talking to everyone and anyone about what happened, in the first few months my brain was a continuous fizzy, buzzing hive of processing. Sleep was the only respite. Even on my daily dog walks I was still running through all the emotions associated with loss through suicide. Doing jigsaw puzzles was a way of giving my brain a proper rest. Films and TV were risky – I tried watching light comedies or frothy period dramas (hello, Bridgerton) so I wouldn’t link anything back to what happened, but they still caught me out. A scene in Sex Education where Gillian Anderson nearly dies during childbirth caught me completely off guard and turned me into a sobbing mess.
So – jigsaws. Always 1000 pieces, complicated and preferably beautiful or interesting designs, my brain has to concentrate on sorting and matching and placing – colours, patterns, shapes, sizes. And while it is engrossed in this activity, there is a stillness and calm that is hard to find elsewhere. I know doing a jigsaw isn’t exactly being productive, but it feels like ‘self-care’ so I don’t begrudge myself an hour or so with my morning coffee. Bliss.
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