Seventeen minutes. This is the time it took for my life to change beyond recognition. 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.
In April 2022 my partner of nearly three years, J, took his own life and I found him. This is my blog about how I am navigating my bereavement after his suicide. How I am slowly learning to turn his loss into something positive, for me and my kids.
Every time he saw a magpie, J would salute it. I thought it was silly, funny even. Since his suicide, I notice magpies everywhere. They remind me of his salute and the saying our parents teach us. “One for sorrow, two for joy.” I’m on my own now and step by step I’m trying to change that narrative, so that it truly becomes: “One for joy.”
On the day it happened we had been arguing, ironically, about the fact that I wanted him to get professional help and consider medication. “Why is different to me taking HRT for the menopause?” I asked him, desperate, exhausted, depleted. He never gave me an explanation, just kept repeating: “I’d rather kill myself, I’d rather kill myself.” Never for a split second did I think he actually would. We had been arguing for nearly three hours, I was fresh off a flight from California, jet-lagged, no sleep on the plane, still hadn’t seen the kids, who were at their dad’s.
The argument unresolved, I went upstairs to have a shower before going to pick the kids up. Seventeen minutes elapsed between me messaging their dad to say: “I’ll be over in a bit,” having a quick shower, and going downstairs and outside to the garage to tell J I was going to get them. And that’s when I found him.
I called the kids’ dad and called for an ambulance. C came almost instantly and started CPR. Thanks to him, when the paramedics arrived they found a heart-beat. They took J to hospital and I was left behind, unsure of what I should do. I asked one of the paramedics if I should go to the hospital and was told: “It’s up to you.” As if I was in a fit state to make any kind of decision, let alone that one. In the end I asked C to take me to the hospital, I had a thought that if J suddenly came to, he would be on his own and confused so I needed to be there. He didn’t come to.
Just over three days after he was taken to hospital they turned off his life support. 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. I needed somewhere to dump my thoughts, now that the person I’d normally share then with was gone. From one day to the next: he was there, living and breathing and arguing with me, and then seventeen minutes later he wasn’t.
I didn’t start writing to J to dissect his past, or neatly pass the blame onto someone else. Nor did I write in order to absolve myself, justify my actions or even beat myself up. I wrote to him because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, where else to channel the jumbled thoughts and feelings in my head. Despite what people say, grief isn’t a process. It has no stages or steps to it – at least not in the tidy linear way we are programmed to believe in.
I’ve kept J’s full name out of this out of respect to his family, we have grieved very differently. Same with the kids’ dad C. He’s quite a private person and also I’m too shy to tell him I’m writing this. I’ve tried to avoid digging into why J was ill. None of what I have written is intended to try and crack the code of his mental illness. I am finally in a really good place. I have learned so much during this time, I just want to share some of what helped me get here. Simple as that.
Oh, and I like drawing. But I’m not very good at drawing just for the sake of it. So having a theme for each blog to create a drawing for, suits me.
I am in my fifties and live in a small village in Cambridgeshire. My two sons Dylan and Nathan are fourteen and twelve respectively. They spend just over half of the time with me. We also have two high-maintenance dogs, Optimus and Larry.