by Poorna Bell
Faced with the prospect of living the rest of my life, the option of suicide is an attractive one. I generally feel that if it is going to be the case because of my depression that I face spending a significant amount of my time feeling the way I do, regardless of whether things are going well or badly, and regardless of, for example, my absolutely amazing and wonderful wife, suicide seems a viable alternative to being that down.
As has always been the case with my experience of depression, feeling low comes regardless of whether things are good or bad. It must be the case that ordinary people don’t generally experience feeling the way I feel, I know it’s not right to feel so incredibly bad, but it appears inescapable.
I could go on but you get the picture. I don’t feel the meds are currently effectively impacting on depressive feelings occurring in my brain regardless of external situations.
I would say I have on the three or four occasions I’ve described not gone so far as to make suicide attempts per se, but that said if I do go through with it – which I don’t want to, for my wife and family’s sakes apart from anything else – then I won’t fail in the attempt. It is carefully planned.
I would hope, however, that they would understand that even a day or two of feeling the way I have been feeling for every single second of that day is unbearable.
We call suicide weakness. We say it is selfish. We say it’s the easy way out.
But people who have reached that point have been fighting the hardest of fights for a long time. They have often been doing it on their own, because we don’t respect or value people who are struggling inside their own heads. They are lost in their own battlefield and perhaps suicide is when it has become terminal. They cannot see the day when they won’t be fighting. They are so very tired of fighting.
Whatever the outcome, we should be in awe of their life. We should get on our knees and honour the bravery and courage they had to stay in the world as long as they did, feeling as they did. We should remember their strength, not view them through a permanent prism of despair and sadness because of the manner in which they left it.
Immediately after Rob died, we barely had the energy to nod our heads at the tiny white cross that bore his name, a temporary marker until we chose a headstone. I ran my hands on the gold engraving, feeling the letters beneath my fingertips, closing my eyes against the new reality we had found ourselves in.
Nine months later, Prue, David and I decide to pick the headstone together.
Steve, the headstone guy who operates from a small industrial estate near Schnapper Rock, the cemetery where Rob is buried, is a mine of information. First, the stone comes not from local quarries, but from China. Steve even goes to a Stone Fair, which throws up a mind-boggling array of questions. I mean, in the hotel bar after a long day ogling quartz and dolomite, what would the conversation be like?
‘Oh, the other day, I handled a really interesting hunk of granite,’ someone would say, waggling their eyebrows.
Steve is extremely patient as we ask him many questions.
We consider engravings of kōwhai, a native New Zealand tree that takes over the landscape with brilliant yellow blossom in spring, after the pohutukawa’s red blooms have finished.
My concerns are mainly centred around lettering, something Rob would have found hilarious, having mocked my interest in fonts yet still buying me books on typography. And then I think, This is so wrong. He wouldn’t have found it hilarious because he’s dead. And his parents should not be here picking their son’s headstone.
I look at them moving up and down the aisles filled with stone where a son should be. They seem so small with this weight of grief upon their shoulders. I think of how much they have gone through, what they continue to go through. And there is such rage. I have never been angry at Rob for taking his own life because I understand, insofar as I can, how much pain he was in.
But I am angry at the collateral damage that has become our lives. I am angry when I think of the things we had to do, and continue to do. I am angry that his parents, whom I love, have to endure this when they should be on a cruise or starting a road trip to somewhere new and exciting.
Maybe it’s the smell of granite in the morning, but after about an hour of fairly emotionless headstone talk, my fists clench and I realise the full implication of what we are doing and why we are there.
Rob is dead. And he is never coming back.
When Mal and I were in the airport on our way to Rob’s funeral, I surreptitiously Googled ‘how to cope with grief when you lose a spouse’.
I came across an account from a woman who said: ‘At the beginning, I focused on trying to get through the next six months, and my goal would be to make it alive at the end of that time.’
I remember thinking, Wow, what a drama queen. I mean, ‘staying alive’ was her goal? As if it’s that hard.
What I didn’t realise then was that I was in the pink cloud of shock. I was on autopilot, trying to get things done. A week after the funeral, I managed to cancel Rob’s phone accounts, sort out the paperwork for his pension; I told his creditors to go fuck themselves and tied up all the loose ends around his invoices in half a day.
When the pink cloud wore off, it took me six months to cancel his Twitter account. It took fourteen months before I was able to go through his things and sort out what I’d keep and what would go to charity.
The irony of grief caused by suicide is finding the will to stay alive.
Two months after Rob died, I watched a film about the apocalypse and I realised, with a bit of a shock, that I would be relieved if I was wiped off the planet. I recognised I had turned a corner ten months later, when I knew I would actually be mildly concerned about surviving.
But I still have days where I could take living, or leave it.
Hoping to survive to the end of the week/month/year sounds incredibly self-indulgent and dramatic, but the exhaustion of grief is based on not knowing how you will feel from one moment to the next, feeling every spectrum of emotion at the same time, and believing this will never end.
You are in this world, but you don’t belong to it. I was very lucky in that all of my friends got it – how to talk to me, what to say. But they couldn’t protect me from everyone, from the hairdresser who told me I’d find someone else to the colleague who compared my loss to her cat dying. (FYI, pet death comparisons happen to widows and widowers a lot. I don’t give a fuck if you’re Noah and your entire ark died from foot and mouth, IT’S NOT THE SAME.)
Although people don’t mean to, sometimes they make things worse. Some – including close family – didn’t actually talk to me about Rob’s death, or say they were sorry to hear about him to my face. When I vented to my mother about it – who had uncomplainingly absorbed a lot of the anger around my grief – she tried to calm me down by saying sometimes people weren’t good with stuff like this.
‘You know what, Mum, if someone’s husband or wife died and I couldn’t get over my own awkwardness to say: “I’m really sorry, are you okay?” then you should reconsider how you raised me.’
Not talking about Rob made him and my grief feel invisible. Those people who made things better were the ones who listened, told stories about him, made me laugh, and didn’t say things like ‘Stay positive’ and ‘You have to move on’.
That’s not to say I was a dream when people did ask me how I was. Rob’s addiction, and the lies I had to tell around it, removed any last bit of artifice I had left. So the answers sometimes weren’t what people expected, or wanted, to hear.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m fucking shit.’
‘Oh.’
There were a lot of contradictions. I was so full of love for Rob, compassionate that he was no longer suffering. But I was also resentful that I had spent so long dealing with his addiction and depression, and I was now a widow trapped in further hell indefinitely. I appreciated the support my loved ones gave me, but I punished them for their concern.
I want
ed to be left alone, I wanted to be smothered. I wanted everyone to suffer when they stopped posting updates about Rob on Facebook and got on with their lives, but I wanted good things to happen for them. I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else but I was scared of being lonely for the rest of my life.
‘I’m worried,’ I said to my friend Has, who had moved in with me after Rob died, ‘that I will never again love like that, or be loved like that.’
‘Poo,’ she replied, ‘some people will never know what it’s like to have a big love like that. And maybe you won’t ever feel like that about anyone again. But you got to know what that kind of love feels like at least once in your life, and maybe that will have to be enough.’
At any rate, there was no space for anyone apart from Rob. I was in love with a ghost, which suited me because I felt like I didn’t belong with the living anyway.
Apart from those unavoidable moments before I went to sleep and immediately after I woke up, I flung myself into exercise. I signed up to a 10K to raise money for CALM, which meant training about three times a week. I found running so peaceful. I felt the wind braid my hair into knots, and once my lungs and heart adjusted and stopped screaming, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO US!’ everything took on slow, careful importance.
I knew the river’s winding curves, the point where trees created a canopy across her edges, the bridges she sloshed against. And, when I made it into town, the London Eye, St Paul’s and the Houses of Parliament framed in silhouette along her body.
My favourite route was near where I lived, and by the time I warmed up jogging from my house, I’d reach the bridge that took me into Richmond on the side of the river I liked running along. During my run I passed people enjoying pints in the sun, teenagers with bowed heads making a fumbling, foal-like entry into love, families stuffing ice creams into their mouths, and when I made my way back, I paused at the top of the bridge.
I could have had the best run of my life. The sun could be warming my face – a small pleasure I loved because it made me feel glad to be alive. I could have had a smile from a stranger that made me smile back.
But for a long time, I would always have a moment when I looked at the water below and thought about jumping in. Just to give me peace, just to end feeling like this, this relentless grief, this pain stitched into my chest. And for a second, I felt like I was speaking the language Rob wrote his last few moments in.
I saw the despair. I saw the hope it might end. I saw an endless sleep. And for a moment, I wanted it. Not the actual dying part, but the abnegation of self, the lack of existing, because if I didn’t exist, I wouldn’t feel like that.
And then I’d look away, and keep jogging. I’d look up at the sky and see how beautiful it was, a blue egg blown through with puffs of white clouds.
I’d jog all the way home. I’d stretch my calves while holding on to the crumbling brick wall. I’d notice how pretty my street was in summer, the magnolias dropping fat pink petals, the tenacious ivy eating my house.
I’d wipe the sweat off my nose, dig out keys from a back pocket.
I’d take a shower and smell that fresh goodness from my favourite soap.
These things, tiny as they may be, were enough to pull me back into the land of the living. But imagine that moment on the bridge stretched into an entire lifetime.
I couldn’t bear it.
When I was back in the present, I knew time had passed. The light and warmth crept back in. I put my hand over my heart and felt it thump, and remembered the moment in hospital when I heard it talking to me through the echo, and how hard it had fought to keep me alive.
So even though I didn’t understand how I was going to make it to a week, let alone a month, something told me that I was made of strong stuff.
And I knew that somewhere inside, despite the moment on the bridge that promised the gift of oblivion, I wanted to live.
Felicity’s house, where I am staying during my trip to New Zealand nine months after Rob’s death, is near a beach called Narrow Neck, a small but pristine stretch of golden sand that presses out towards a clear horizon.
We have a routine. Early in the morning, regardless of how much wine we’ve had the night before, Felicity walks her dog Finbar along the beach during the short window when dogs are allowed on there. They return with Finbar freckling her wooden deck with drops of seawater and, shortly afterwards, I head out for a run.
The best time to run along Narrow Neck is first thing in the morning, before the tourists descend from the Devonport ferry. The beach is framed by a hill, along which cars zip up and down, making their way to the city, and I start my descent from the top, taking in the view of the beach.
Narrow Neck and I have a history. The day after Rob’s funeral, I laced up my trainers and went for a run. I think people were surprised, but I felt that in times when nothing made sense, when the order of life as I knew it was chaos, I needed to keep doing the things that were simple and true.
It was the first time I’d run near Felicity’s house, and I wasn’t going in any particular direction when I came across the beach. Empty, quiet, no dogs; just the sea and the light pressing its fingers against the surface of the water.
I stopped. I looked at the waves summoning themselves into beautiful shapes flickering in the foam. I imagined him in the shift and turn of water, and I spoke to Rob for the first time since he died, without anyone else around. It was a poem of grief; it was a call to the skies for him to return.
In Hinduism, the practice of sati derives from the goddess Sati, who was so overcome with sadness because her father would not accept her husband, the god Shiva, that she burst into flames. And although the grief Shiva felt afterwards was colossal, and with him being one of the three most powerful gods there were terrible consequences, Sati was already being reborn into Parvati, the goddess of love and divine strength.
As I spoke to Rob’s soul, I felt the oldness of the earth pass through me. Grief that arises from death is fire, and in this fire you will be remade into something different, something that feels and sees much deeper than other people around you. I was everything, and I was nothing.
When I return nine months later, one of the first things I do is to go for a run and stand where I stood before, to feel Rob on the horizon. I search the skies and the waves, but he isn’t there.
I go back again and again, but I can’t find him. He has dissolved into the ether, and like those beautiful shapes in the foam, he will never again take form. The sensation of loss is so sharp, it almost knocks me over.
I take my trainers off. I roll up my leggings. There is no one on the beach.
I walk towards the water, and I feel it swirl around my calves.
I am a girl, a woman, a wife. I am bones, I am blood, I am a soul. I am caught between two places – one lit in flames and the other radiating strength.
And just when I think I can’t bear it any longer, when I feel like I am going to ignite from sadness, there is a voice that speaks. It struggles to cut through the tears and the hopelessness but it speaks.
I am so sorry this happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.
I am sorry life let you down.
I will try to keep you up.
Remember I am here.
Always.
I will hold you up.
I will be strong.
Even when it seems like I’m not there,
I am.
I’m just tiny.
But I can grow. And I can
Carry both of us.
Remember.
And it’s not Rob. And it’s not God. That voice is mine.
Chapter Twelve
Here is what I knew about Rob before I went to New Zealand.
I knew he had left home when he was a teenager to live with his aunt Gabrielle after falling out with his parents. The picture that was painted was one of a child pushing the boundaries of what he could get away with, gradually spiralling out of control against a backdrop of strict parenting, until h
e left for Australia.
When he was twenty-one, his best friend Brendan Arnold passed away. It devastated him – they were like brothers – and he soon left for England, where he remained until shortly before his death. During his time in England, he had a large number of friends, he was well liked and well loved, and in the midst of this he lost a very close friend to a heroin overdose, Ben.
That gives you a certain chronological framework for who Rob was, but it doesn’t tell you who he actually was.
The man I knew was complex, so complicated in fact that trying to unpick what was good, bad, beyond his control and downright shitty behaviour is impossible.
The man I fell in love with was gruff. He was kind. He could be aloof.
He went from having no degree to becoming a respected journalist. He built his garden with his own two hands, he bought his house with his own labour. He liked buying me flowers. He helped my friends when they needed manual labour done around the house. He cooked dinners for his friends when their loved ones died.
He had a unique sense of humour, mostly dry, observant and intelligent; goofy when he was trying to cheer me up. Our ability to bring levity to even the most horrendous shit got us through the dark times. This never waned even when he was in withdrawal, at the hospital or when we were stuck in a car park for eight hours trying to escape a festival.
When I told my parents we wanted to get married after about six months of dating, they asked me: ‘What is it about him?’
‘He makes me laugh and he’s super-clever,’ I said simply.
If you ask Jesse, the picture is the same but it’s also less blinkered. He describes Rob as a wild man. ‘You felt like you were on a ride going at one hundred miles per hour.’
I always believed the thing I loved about Rob was the stability he offered, but I think I was in complete denial. Of course, I loved his wildness; this man of earth and sea, who drew us all in with his intense contradictions.
