by Poorna Bell
Mal was there despite my protestations that I didn’t want anyone to come with me to New Zealand for the funeral. My parents offered and I shouted them down. They looked at me with fear and love, so out of their depth that they didn’t push me.
‘It doesn’t matter what she said,’ I heard my sister arguing with them downstairs. ‘She needs someone with her even if she doesn’t know it. She needs family. If I have to strap Leela to me and breastfeed her on the plane so I can go, I’ll do it.’
I was upstairs, pacing around on the landing, and wanted to say: ‘First, I’m not incapacitated, I know my own mind. Rob’s family is my family. I don’t need you guys there. You’re just going to get in the way.’
But I lost that battle and when Mal dropped everything – the business trip she was due to leave on the next day – I was so glad to have her with me. To drink wine with, to laugh at the awful, weighty Oscar-worthy films Singapore Airlines had on offer. I also needed a witness to all of it, so that when I came back to England, I wasn’t alone in my grief; that I could talk to someone about it.
The few days before leaving for New Zealand held so many terrible realisations. One was that I didn’t have anything to wear to my own husband’s funeral. Priya and I drove to Bluewater shopping centre and we ran from shop to shop in desperation. We stopped after the third shop and realised what we were doing and why we were doing it. We held each other outside Zara and just cried.
‘Oh God, Poo,’ she said.
‘People are going to think we’re lesbians breaking up with each other.’
‘I don’t care,’ she snuffled.
At the airport, I received a long email from Prue. I was so worried that my mother-in-law would be angry at me, and I didn’t know where my place was. His parents knew that I had told Rob I didn’t think we could work things out.
But Prue said very firmly that I was his wife. ‘We know he loved you with all his heart and spirit and mind and body and he never stopped loving you,’ she wrote in a letter to me.
Everything to do with him and the funeral arrangements was my choice. Although I didn’t know what the right answers were to all of the questions, I knew I had to do what was best for us.
Did I want him to have an autopsy? Absolutely not. (My mind screamed that we were discussing autopsies.)
Did I want Rob to come home the night before the funeral so people could pay their respects? Although I was unsure, I said yes, because I wanted people to be able to say goodbye and he was our boy, our beloved.
Did I want a burial or a cremation? Burial, absolutely burial. My mind couldn’t cope with the thought of him turning to ash.
I thought of Daisy, how much she was a part of Rob, and how she would ever survive without him. Prue handled the whole thing; the lady who was fostering her said she would be happy to adopt her, and was I all right with that? I knew I couldn’t look after Daisy and it would be kinder to her to be looked after by someone who had nothing to do with her old life.
I answered these on autopilot while clutching a green juice from Leon, and then tried to wrap my head around the reality of the situation. But none of it would be really real until I saw Rob.
Two days later, Mal and I were in the funeral home with Prue, David and Rob’s brother John.
Ryan, the polite funeral director, greeted me with hushed tones. He was practical yet considerate, never fawning, and answered our questions patiently. He must see the looks of grief and horror on people’s faces every day. How did he keep up the appropriate level of concern and interest? I wondered if this is something they learned at funeral school.
We were there to discuss details such as the burial plot, order of the funeral service. We had a choice of two plots, and when we visited the first, I wondered – having never picked a plot before – what the criteria were. Was it like renting a flat, where you had to check for certain things like damp, the suitability of your neighbours, whether it was south-facing?
The neighbours in this instance had big, black, shiny headstones. They had photographs of the deceased, pillars, fountains. I swear one had a turret.
Then things became more surreal when it came to choosing the coffin.
‘Was Robert an eco-friendly man?’ enquired Ryan.
I remembered Rob bollocking me for being lazy with the recycling, to which I replied: ‘But you, as an environmental expert, said the planet was screwed no matter how much recycling we did!’
He just pointed at the bin, sternly.
‘Well, Ryan,’ I replied, ‘he was certainly an environmentally aware man.’
We chose a rimu coffin, a wood native only to New Zealand. I didn’t know what rimu looked like in the wild, but this was different to all the others in appearance and texture. When I finally did see one in its natural habitat, it was so very Rob-like in its unusual appearance. It was a conifer but instead of stiff needles pointing towards the sky, it had what looked like fronds of seaweed swaying towards the ground.
I held the handle on the side and felt it curve under my palm.
‘The handles need to be comfortable,’ said David, and I thought of the loved ones he must have carried, and now we were discussing his son.
Two days later I felt that handle slide against my palm as I carried Rob into the church with Felicity on the other side, to James Taylor and Carole King singing ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’.
We also visited the funeral home so I could see Rob. The room was called ‘Rangitoto’, named after one of Auckland’s dormant volcanoes. I knew he was in there before they told me.
The name reminded me of the Maurice Gee books Rob bought for me, including Under the Mountain, which was set in Auckland. In it, the world is going to be consumed by subterranean alien monsters, and to get rid of them, two heroes, a boy and a girl, must throw special stones into the mouth of Rangitoto and Mount Eden. It was very Rob – aliens, apocalypse, and he was pretty proud old Maurice was a Kiwi.
When throwing the stone, the boy Theo has to recite: ‘We bring you the gift of oblivion.’
Oblivion is such a very specific word used in the context of death by suicide. The person who has killed him or herself isn’t doing so to get to paradise or to a better place – what they seek is a cessation of the self.
Mal held my hand. ‘Do you want me to go in with you?’
I shook my head. Till death do us part, and I closed the door behind me.
Afterwards, she told me that she would never forget the sound of my cry when I saw Rob lying there. It began in my belly and shot up to the sky like a flare. It was him and it wasn’t him. He was asleep, I told myself, but I saw the edges of blue blossoming around his mouth.
‘How could you?’ I cried. ‘How could you? Why wasn’t our love enough for you? How could you do this if you loved me? If you loved all of us?’ And then it distilled into, ‘My God, Rob, I wish we could have saved you. My love, my darling, my friend, the pain you must have been in, that this is where things ended.’
Who cut him down? Who washed his body? Did he have his wedding ring on? Did anyone cry when they found him? Who found him? Where did he die? What exact time did his light go out in the world?
I should have known. I should have been there.
The grief after a suicide is built on a thousand wishes, a million regrets. Divining the course of every word and gesture, every cancelled appointment and the phone call you didn’t take. The last I love you that stayed in my mouth.
I looked at his face and I bartered everything to see the breath fill his cheeks and colour return to his skin. Anything, anything, please, anything but this. In that room, I believed his life could have been so easily saved and I had let him down.
In the months that followed, I knew better, but it still didn’t ease the guilt and regret.
I needed to know why. I desperately needed to know why. I found myself in a world where loved ones were strangers, where I didn’t know how to explain to people what had happened, where I was engulfed in the enormity of it all.<
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When I came back to London, it was very apparent that a death by suicide was viewed as shameful; that even talking about it was not acceptable.
A colleague said: ‘You don’t have to tell them what happened.’ I think they thought they were being supportive but it gagged my grief; it made me feel like it was something I shouldn’t reveal to people.
Not only did I have to deal with the grief that now flooded my life, but I discovered that the means of Rob’s death made the legitimacy of my grief questionable, exposed his life to judgement from an invisible court, and that was if I even felt confident enough to talk about it.
In his book Notes on Suicide, Simon Critchley wrote:
Suicide, then, finds us both strangely reticent and unusually loquacious: lost for words and full of them. What we are facing here is an inhibition, a massive social, psychical and existential blockage that hems us in and stops us thinking.
We are either desperately curious about the nasty, intimate, dirty details of the last seconds of a suicide and seek out salacious stories whenever we can. Or we can’t look at all because the prospect is too frightening.
On my side, there was rage, but not towards Rob.
Thinking back to that statistic – the biggest cause of death in men under forty-five – and considering the most recent one from the Ministry of Justice – that suicides among women in Britain have risen – it dawned on me how big this is and how deep this wall of silence goes.
The worst thing ever to happen to me was now something I couldn’t talk about? I had to navigate other people’s awkwardness and sanitise my grief?
I felt sick to my stomach at what happened to Rob.
So I wrote a blog, an open letter to Rob, telling the world what had happened to me, or rather telling the people in my world what happened to me. The colleagues who thought ‘someone close to me had died’ but were too polite to ask further; the friends who didn’t know how I was feeling; my parents who needed to know that, regardless of how he died, I was going to honour him.
It went crazy – I mean, it was read by hundreds of thousands of people. I couldn’t believe it. I got many emails privately that kept me going through some of my darkest days – letters from people who said it saved them to know someone else knew how they felt, those who reached out in compassion and had good advice because they had already walked the same path as me, and those who were on the same path as Rob.
One letter that resonated with me strongly was one in which the author described their own journey towards and away from suicide.
I had few emotions left besides despair. That’s the part that many people don’t understand: It’s not sadness. Calling it sadness is a FUCKING insult. It’s DESPAIR. Nothing left. ‘Nowhere left to go but up’? Bullshit. Nowhere left to go – period.
. . . Your coming to understand your loved-one’s painful situation is completely on the right track. To those in that place, it is the only relief. They are at their end. They have no more resources left with which to battle, to ‘maintain’ . . . And so they give themselves the only relief left. They know how painful it will be for all those left behind, but they are powerless to do otherwise. They simply cannot suffer through it for one more day . . . one more hour . . . one more minute.
The emails kept me going for a while because they helped make sense of Rob’s death at a time when nothing made sense. I felt like I was lying at the bottom of the ocean, looking up at the surface awash in gold but unable to reach it, cut off from everything, remote and dark, trying to fathom out everything that had happened.
Why? Why did he do this?
Rob didn’t leave a note; I pieced together his last words from a patchwork of the conversations he had with those he called and texted as he was fleeing the earth.
Only 30 per cent of people who die by suicide leave notes, and, even then, the note doesn’t provide absolution or truly explain what can never be explained: what was it that compelled the person to carry out an act that every part of our biology is created to fight against?
What I realised fairly quickly was that there were parts of Rob that made me feel like I didn’t know him: the addiction, the lying, and how he handled his illness.
But I also knew Rob, I mean really knew him – better than anyone. And I knew that for this person, who loved so many people, who was loved by so many people, to finally not find any hope or happiness in the days to come, and to have struggled so long to stay alive, it must have been a state unimaginable.
When I called Prof. Williams about his book Cry of Pain, he said: ‘When you get an inkling of the desperation of somebody, the emotional pain is as bad as a physical pain and coupled with the idea that this is going to go on forever, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and my life has been irreversibly damaged by it and there’s nothing left for me. And in that state, suicide seems like a blissful freedom. A real sense of freedom.
‘In that book I talk about someone who meant to kill himself and was only saved by a complete accident, and he described to me graphically how, in those last few hours and minutes, he felt so at peace. When he suddenly realised he had the courage now, to take this step.’
Courage is a word people don’t tend to use when it comes to suicide. Instead, the word they use is selfish. And the worst phrase of all: ‘Easy way out’.
Living is bloody hard, but making the choice to die is harder. Maybe the people who say it is easy are the lucky ones, because clearly they have never struggled so badly that they’d consider death. I mean, that Rob felt like that so much of the time, even on a sunny day when he was walking Daisy? How did he even survive as long as he did? That’s not weakness, that’s courage, no matter the outcome.
I spoke to Jonny Benjamin, who tried to jump off Waterloo Bridge in 2008. At the time he was struggling with being gay, and he has schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of schizophrenia and depression. As he stood on the bridge, he was talked down by a man named Neil Laybourn, who convinced him to go for a coffee. Before they could actually do that, the police intercepted them and Jonny was sectioned. He didn’t know Neil’s name or how to get hold of him.
Six years later, he launched a campaign called ‘Find Mike’ – which he thought Neil’s name was – to thank him for that act of kindness. It led to Jonny becoming a mental health campaigner and speaking widely about suicide prevention.
Jonny said: ‘Throughout the whole journey on that bridge, I prayed for my family. “I don’t want them to feel guilty,” I kept on pleading to God. I had come to feel like a burden on them after becoming mentally ill and ending up in hospital. I believed it was better for all our sakes if I ended my life. The mental torture was too much to continuously bear and I truly thought I could never recover.’
People never get to choose how the ones they love die, but suicide will fool you into thinking that you could have done. And when someone you love takes their own life, every possibility held in the future torments you.
A number is attributed to everything. The number of kisses you had. The times you had dinner together on a Tuesday night. The times they held you when you cried, when you screamed at each other, laughed together. All of the firsts bookended by all of the lasts. Somewhere there is an inventory of your lives together and a number set against it, and the fact that the other person chose to end it can be the hardest thing to reconcile.
Much of the anger surrounding someone who killed themselves stems from the paradox that we believe the person had a choice, and made the choice to fuck over everyone they love on the way out. Prof. Williams echoed that. ‘A lot of people are very angry . . . It’s like a soldier leaving their post, which is a very ancient idea from some of the Greek philosophers. Feeling let down. It’s a short step from believing, “This is the ultimate step that any of us can take” to thinking, “It’s a selfish step, it’s self-serving, and not thinking of others.” ’ The reality, of course, is that by the time a person has reached the point where they fully intend to go through wit
h suicide, they are doing so because they believe there are no other choices. And that everyone left behind will be better off without them.
He continues: ‘I try to explain that in this sort of state you lose the sense of belief, the intentions and desires of other people. It’s such a tunnel vision state in that what tends to go is what impact you might have on other people.
‘It’s just not in your cognitive state any more. It does not compute. It’s like a module has been turned off. And we don’t know because the research can’t get at those last few moments, but it is . . . part of the condition that you lose the sense of the impact on other people. So I think society needs to try to find a way of being more forgiving about it.’
Forgiveness is an apt word. How do you even start to find out the why, when you feel like no one else wants to know, or worse, pretends like suicide doesn’t exist?
In my search for more answers, I went on Rob’s computer. I found solace in the most normal things, the completely mundane, such as his to-do lists.
Get quote about light fitting in office
Bloodworms for axys!
Move Poo’s stuff out of the loft
Clean aquarium
But then I came across this, and realised it was the closest we would ever get to a suicide note.
[To Dr _______, February 2014]
I feel all right today, but I’ve had periods of several days in a row where I think about suicide absolutely constantly, and I certainly have suicidal thoughts every day. It sometimes feels like a safety net, something I can rely on when I need it.
I have terrible insomnia, but I want to be asleep all the time because being unconscious is so much more attractive than being awake.
