by Tara J Lal
At the launch of this book on the 16th September 2015, which would have been my brother’s forty-seventh birthday, perhaps fifteen or twenty of my brother’s old school friends attended, many of whom I had not seen since the day of his funeral almost twenty-seven years before. Yet the grief was tangible: the immense sense of shared loss; the struggle to make sense of their much loved, much admired, friend’s death. The reality of the true ripple effect of suicide was never more evident than in that moment – not only the numbers of people affected, but the depth and longevity of those wounds in individuals and how they play out as young lives unfold. We will never know how the trajectory of those lives changed from that one pivotal death. What does it do to our sense of safety and trust in the world and our inherent beliefs about what it means to live?
Research tells us that people exposed to suicide – whether friends, relatives, colleagues or first responders – are subsequently at greater risk of mental illness, social isolation and suicide themselves. Hence suicide postvention, which is the timely and appropriate support offered to those impacted, is also a vital part of suicide prevention. We are currently failing in our efforts to reduce the number of people who take their own lives. Postvention may well form part of the missing link in our suicide prevention efforts. This now forms the basis of my life’s work.
My overarching aim for this book and my supporting research is to change the individual and public narrative around suicide. We need to better support people to lean into, and not away from, the deeper questioning, fear and conversation that suicide elicits in a way that facilitates a re-connection to life. By doing so, my hope is to empower people to find their truth and meaning in life – both individually and collectively.
As my brother wrote…
Goodness, a word of precious beauty.
Kindness, a thought of ecstatic purity.
Peace, the banner to which our natures should and could abide.
If only these were so; If only we could pursue them with unselfishness.
Our spirits pass by their meanings, so often too preoccupied with heartless self-concern.
If we could overcome our piteous cowardice and recognize the righteousness that stands so agonizingly near but which we choose to mask in pretend ignorance, then we would achieve nature’s ultimate divinity – peace.
Peace of mind, peace of thought and peace of community – from there flourishes good and justice.
May truth lead me by example and give me the strength to adhere to words alone.
1 Canetto, S.S., & Sakinofsky, I. (1998). The gender paradox in suicide. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 28(1), 1–23
2 Cerel, J., Brown, M. M., Maple, M., Singleton, M., Venne, J., Moore, M., & Flaherty, C. (2018). How many people are exposed to suicide? Not six. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior
3 Pitman, A., Osborn, D., King, M., & Erlangsen, A. (2014). Effects of suicide bereavement on mental health and suicide risk. The Lancet Psychiatry, 1(1), 86–94. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(14)70224-X3[URL inactive]
PROLOGUE
Darlinghurst Fire Station, Sydney, 2009
‘Hey, Bear. What’s the ETE?’
‘Estimated Time of Eating is about seven.’
I am peeling potatoes at the sink. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not doing the cooking because I’m the only girl on shift. It just happens to be my turn. We go in rank, you see, which puts me about halfway down the list. Our boss, the station officer, goes first, then the old fella, better known as the Spy because his surname is Schmidt. He’s been in the job forty years and he’s been the Spy for about that long too.
I’m ‘the Bear’.
I was given the name one night when the boys on my shift were doing door duty. In case you didn’t know, that’s the serious business of standing at the fire station entrance in front of the truck and watching the world go by, or, more precisely, assessing the female talent that streams past on Friday and Saturday nights in Kings Cross. As a woman, this particular hobby holds about as much interest as watching a kettle boil, but it provides many hours of entertainment for the others, all of whom are male.
So, that particular evening, about a year after I’d started at the station, a hen party came past. (Girls always love firemen; I have always lamented that the same cannot be said for men and female firefighters.) It was about one in the morning and I’d gone to my room to try and get some rest between fire calls; Saturday nights are always busy. I’d been lying down for an hour or so with my eyes closed, trying to endure the painful sound of the girls’ shrill laughter and the men on the door flirting with them. When I couldn’t stand it a moment longer, I got up and asked them, very politely, if they could be quiet. According to the boys, I gave them a death stare that was frightening enough to stop everything: the flirting, the fun. They said I was grizzly. Then Big Gez pointed out that I got pretty scary when hungry or tired, and from then on I became known as the Bear.
When I’ve had enough of them all I always go to my room. After the hen night incident, it became known as my cave, and the boys would all warn each other with a smirk that it was only safe to enter if they brought honey and berries with them. Soon, I started finding little bear-related items all around the station: on my ID tag, in my locker and anywhere else they could think of.
Pretty much every firefighter has a nickname; some more flattering than others. All in all, Bear wasn’t too bad.
That was the thing about station life. Whatever you did, any minuscule misdemeanour or mildly eccentric habit you had the misfortune to display, someone would pick up on it. And that would be it. It would follow you around everywhere you went.
There was the time I made myself a cup of tea and forgot to offer one to the lads. I returned from a fire call to find that a picture of a bush fire danger-rating scale had appeared on the whiteboard in the mess room, an arrow pointing to ‘Extreme’. Underneath was written: ‘Tara: Selfometer’. And from then on, whenever I did anything the slightest bit selfish, the scale would pop up again, arrow inevitably slanted to the right.
So here I am, peeling potatoes at the sink, when the Spy with his silver hair and rugged war-torn face comes up to me.
‘It’d better not be another salmon patty night, Bear.’
I’ll never live that one down. On my first ever cook-up at the station I created some masterful salmon fishcakes, designed to impress, only I made the rookie error of not cooking nearly enough of them so that one of the guys had to go to the takeaway for a chicken burger afterwards.
‘I’m still having therapy for that, three years later,’ I laugh.
Then the bells at the fire station start to ring, ascending in volume as they always do.
Expecting it to be another false alarm, I turn everything off on the stove and put down my peeler. The automated voice that follows the bells breaks in: ‘Pump 4, assist police.’
I walk into the watch-room of the station to get the printout.
‘We’ve got a jumper,’ the boss says to me.
It doesn’t register at first. Then I realize it’s a suicide. The police often call the fire brigade to help clean up the blood.
I take a breath. ‘Where is it?’
‘The back of the Cross, Springfield Avenue.’
I walk to the turn-out bay, put on my yellow pants, jacket and helmet; and then on to the truck, pull out of the station, lights and sirens on. I’ve done it a million times before, but this time feels different. There is a tension across my chest. Swallowing is difficult.
We pull up behind the police vehicle. I see the blood.
‘Grab the hose, T. Wash it down,’ the boss calls.
I walk to the back of the truck, pulling out the hose reel. As I turn, I see a pair of broken glasses on the ground. Then I look up at the window. In my head I see the figure climbing out of it; the body plummeting to the ground; I feel it all, even the instant of regret. Then the impact as it hits the pavement washes through my body.
I stand there
frozen, holding the hose. I am taken back to another time, another country, another body …
Adam.
PART ONE
From Five to Three
Everything finds its place, just as the colour and the beauty do, so does the pain.
Adam Lal
CHAPTER 1
England, 1976
‘Shev … SHEV …’
Grunt.
‘Shev, which way now?’
‘Uh … uh … just a minute …’
Dad reached below his seat and retrieved the map. We were on our way to Suffolk for a family holiday.
‘Why didn’t you just keep the map out, Shev?’
‘Uh … uh … well … um … let me see …’
‘For God’s sake, Shev. Here, let me look!’
Mum leant over, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching for the map. The three of us were quiet in the back, anxious. I was in the middle, being the youngest, in the duff seat where you were in danger of receiving the wrath of Mum. We’d worked out long ago that that was the one place she could get to with her free hand.
I watched the verge of the road draw closer, a corner looming, Mum looking at the map, Dad dithering, and I said nothing.
‘All right, Bridget. I can do it!’ Dad was still trying to get the map round the right way and Mum was grabbing at it.
‘Mum … Mum!’
I leant forward and yanked the steering wheel. A look of horror on Mum’s face, then she grasped hold of the wheel once more and slammed her foot on the brakes. Silence. Then my dad’s voice, soft and calm: ‘Oh, Bridget, I do wish you wouldn’t do that.’
I felt like saying, ‘What? You mean kill us all, Dad?’ but of course I didn’t. I was too scared to. That was the thing: Mum was scary.
Dad used to drive when he first met Mum, if you could call it that, but after two years of driving her car, he still hadn’t been able to change the gears. Then, shortly after my elder sister Jo was born, he had an accident while the baby was in the car. That was when Mum put her foot down and stopped him from driving.
Mum and Dad had met in April 1966 at a mutual friend’s party full of television producers, academics and writers in a trendy part of North London. They’d seen each other across the room, Dad immediately attracted to the tall, statuesque blonde with blue eyes and a crop of short curly hair. She was wearing a white dress and leant casually on the fireplace. According to Dad, Mum had bowed her head in such a way that indicated she wouldn’t be averse to his ‘amorous advances’, as he put it. He then proceeded to engage her in a conversation about the latest book he was reading, The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. He threw in talk of psychoanalysis and psychology as a means of impressing her, somehow managing to extract her phone number. Mum had gushed the next morning to her colleague at the BBC, where she worked as a documentary researcher, about how she’d met this incredibly handsome young Indian academic. She had a thirst for travel and a fascination for India, having been there herself just the year before. She was excited, talking quickly, infected already by the drug of attraction. She was thirty-three years old with a string of relationships behind her and a sense of adventure and curiosity, much to her staid English parents’ dismay.
At the time, Mum shared a flat with her best friend, on Gayton Crescent in Hampstead, which was then a fashionable part of London, although not quite as exclusive as it became in later years. When Dad arrived at the flat for their first date, he immediately noticed a copy of The Assistant displayed on the mantlepiece. He smiled to himself before whisking my mother off for dinner and a screening of The Palm Beach Story at the National Film Theatre. Dad did his best to persuade Mum he should stay the night. My mother giggled as she gently sent him on his way.
From there my mother and father’s romance moved quickly. Dad fascinated her with his quirky sense of humour, his intelligent, animated talk and his Indian heritage. He, on the other hand, was drawn to her for her beauty, her energy and her passion for India. They made an attractive couple. Within months Mum was pregnant. My father smiles as he recounts how they became engaged in June of that year at a ball in Oxford. My mother’s conservative parents were horrified at the thought of their daughter marrying an Indian man, but that was never going to stop my mother. They married on her thirty-fourth birthday, 6 August 1966, at a small church in Hampstead, the very same church in which our family was to shed an ocean of tears in the years to come.
On the first morning of their honeymoon in Yugoslavia, barely four months after they had met, Dad appeared at the beach wearing a full suit, tie and dress shoes, as well as the hat he’d worn on his wedding day, much to my mother’s amused concern. Perhaps it was at this point that she received her first inkling of what she was in for.
We grew up in a terraced house in North London, just down the road from the Royal Free Hospital: my parents, my elder sister Jo, my brother Adam and me, the youngest sibling – just a normal family.
‘Mum! Mum …’
‘What is it, Tara?’
‘Jo stuck a peanut up Adam’s nose. Now she can’t get it down.’
‘Ask your father, please. I’m doing the washing.’
Mum had her hands in a tub in the kitchen sink, wringing out an endless line of clothes. According to Mum, we couldn’t afford a washing machine. Dad was in the living room in his customary position: sunk deep into his armchair, nose in a book.
‘Dad!’
No answer
‘Daaaaad!’
Still no answer
‘Daaaaaaad!’ I screamed at the top of my voice.
A subdued grunt emanated from somewhere far away in the armchair where my father resided.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Mum muttered in exasperation, grabbing a tea towel to dry her hands and following me into the backyard, only to find my sister attempting to prod a bamboo rod up my brother’s nose in a vain attempt to remove said peanut – clearly the best implement for this delicate operation.
‘Joanna! What in hell’s name are you doing?’ Mum grabbed the bamboo stick from my sister’s hand and firmly whacked her on the bottom.
‘Ouch!’ My sister squealed. ‘How come he never gets hit?’ she snarled at my brother as my mother attended to the peanut lodged firmly up Adam’s nose. I merely stood chewing my bottom lip anxiously.
Mum was the law enforcer and the backbone of our family. She did everything at speed. As a young child I had to run to keep up with her purposeful strides down the road. Her hands were strong, tough and hard-working. Hands that you wouldn’t want to mess with. My father’s, on the other hand, were clumsy but exquisitely soft and malleable and made you want to hold them. They said a lot about his slow-moving, pacifist nature. Of course these dichotomies made for interesting one-sided arguments, which generally involved my mum screaming and shouting and my father muttering quietly in his most perfect English accent, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t shout, Bridget’, which only fuelled my mother’s fury.
Mum insisted we went on family camping holidays. Unfortunately, my father hated camping, particularly after a trip that involved us arriving at a deserted campsite in the north of Scotland during a wild storm. Mum and we three kids battled with the tent as it billowed in the gale-force winds, each of us clinging on to a tent pole to ensure the whole contraption didn’t end up in the Irish Sea. I was petrified. Dad, meanwhile, walked off to find the nearest shop, disappearing for what seemed like hours, only to return bearing a packet of Penguin biscuits. His answer to all discontent was chocolate, which we all thought was fantastic and a perfectly valid reason to love him more. Needless to say this habit drove my mother crazy.
So it would seem we were just a normal, marginally angst-ridden family, except for one thing that I have no recollection of: my father suffered a nervous breakdown when I was two. In fact, Dad had suffered some form of mental illness for most of his life, the impact of which I had no idea of at the time.
‘Daddy …’ Dad was sitting quietly in his armchair, eyes open but vacant.
‘Yes, lovey,’ he said quietly.
‘Daddy, can I have a cuddle?’ I said, looking up at him and placing my hands on his lap.
‘Not now, lovey, Daddy’s resting,’ he said with a gentle fatigue in his voice.
I kept looking at him, wide-eyed, craving his love and affection. Why wouldn’t Daddy cuddle me? I chewed my lip, unsure what to do, eventually deciding to scramble onto his lap in the hope of finding comfort for us both. Still my father sat motionless, entombed in a glass case which I could not penetrate. I nestled my head into his chest, desperate to get close, but my father remained lost in his own world. Finally I used all my strength to awkwardly lift his arm up so that I could place it around me in a kind of makeshift half-cuddle.
It seemed unsatisfying for us both, so after a short time I clambered down off my father’s lap, running into the kitchen in search of my mother.
Mum, as always was busy. She appeared to be cleaning while also wallpapering the house single-handed.
‘Oh shit!’ I heard her mutter as she hung a piece of wallpaper up the wrong way.
It didn’t seem like the right time to ask for a cuddle, so I decided I would help Mum instead by drying the dishes. I liked being Mum’s little helper, only I had a habit of being clumsy. Just when I most wanted to avoid Mum’s wrath a plate seemed to jump out of my hands, and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor. I stared at it, horrified, before scarpering into the living room and taking refuge behind the nearest chair. I knew Mum would have heard the crash. I could hear her footsteps getting closer.
‘What on earth was that?’ she huffed. I cowered.
Eventually she located me curled up behind the chair. Her anger dissolved, replaced by a look of horror as the realization dawned on her that her six-year-old daughter was terrified of her. She cocooned me in her arms, rocking and stroking me. I basked in the safety. At last – a golden moment of affection.
