by Poorna Bell
In some ways, although we grew up on different continents and had a five-year age gap, parts of his adolescence were not that different to mine, or other people who were into alternative music.
We tapped into it because we felt like we didn’t quite belong in cookie-cutter suburbia. We romanticised death because our rock and roll idols did, we sought to emulate their pain in our safe, sanitised world of sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
Like him, I was also part of a social galaxy that constantly shifted and turned, friends making connections at parties, chance introductions that opened up worlds filled with other exciting people, music that blew our minds. All of us barely-there adults walking shakily on newly formed legs that tried to run before they could walk, intense friendships that blew hot at the centre of it all, people without whom we couldn’t imagine an existence.
Louise spoke of the letters Rob wrote to her and other people, multiple pages of how he felt and what was going on in their universe. In Kent, 11,671 miles away, my friends and I did the same, sackfuls of letters filled with our darkest thoughts, scribbles of cocks and our intentions to shag/marry/kill whatever hapless male had walked into our orbit that month.
But here is where the similarities end. Plenty of kids get bullied. Lots mess around with drugs and alcohol. For some, there are pivotal traumas. But not all of them go on to become addicts.
For a person to go on to develop a lifelong problem with substance abuse, it isn’t just about one story, one moment in time, any one person or the nuances of parenting, as long as the general environment was safe. Depression, when it occurs in teenagers, starts to manifest as an adult illness with adult symptoms. So anger, acting out (especially in boys) and behavioural problems.
Was this what Rob was going through?
For a person to never grow up beyond a certain point, and to always have one method of dealing with hardship, that hints at layer upon layer of personal struggle.
I remember John once saying to me: ‘You know what I couldn’t get over? That whenever I tried to have a conversation with Rob, he just couldn’t move past being sixteen. He seemed permanently stuck at that age.’
Having witnessed Rob about to walk out on his mother during a conversation that wasn’t a fight, when Prue had done nothing to warrant such an over-the-top, dramatic reaction, I knew what he meant, although, significantly, he had never been like that with me.
When I spoke to Mr B, my mental health source, about this, he said: ‘So what happened to Rob at sixteen, which means when shit happened, he turned back into a stroppy teenager? Was it that when he was sixteen he wasn’t heard or something he was feeling couldn’t be expressed, so when he was feeling pressure, it was really difficult?
‘And now, there are all sorts of things coming out about perfectionism and rumination. Do we want perfectionism from our kids, do we want perfect kids? Perfectionism layers so much stress and anxiety on young people, no wonder some explode or rebel, or use food as a means of control.
‘So what did he not feel in control of, potentially, and what did he use as a means of gaining control? Was it drugs? Did they free him or give him control in the choices he made because no one was listening to him? Was he trying to say something? Did someone close to him die? Or did he just never learn to have a sense of social maturity?’
It is undeniable that he was going through more than just being a teenager. The self-harm is the symptom of that struggle, even though we will never truly know what was in his head or how he processed things. All I know is that he found it very difficult to ask for help and, sometimes, he was in complete denial about his own reality and, without insight, could never properly get help.
Out of the friendship group Louise spoke about, most went on to have perfectly boring, normal lives with partners and kids. The only person who didn’t – apart from Rob – was Brendan. Wesley referred to Brendan, Rob and himself as the three musketeers. They were part of that huge group of friends Rob met at Rosmini.
After Rob died, Wes looked broken, the last man standing, the other two having burned up like meteors entering the atmosphere too fast.
Rob told me about Brendan very early on in our relationship. He described him as a soulmate, the kind of relationship where you don’t have to communicate with the other person verbally to know what they are thinking. He was still in love with him, years later, a friendship that affected him so deeply, a death he never totally recovered from.
They became friends at primary school, when Rob was in the Cub Scouts and Brendan’s mother was their Cub Scout leader. I wish I could have met Brendan because, like Rob, he had that rare quality of not caring about a person’s race or gender – if you were a good human that was more than enough. By all accounts, like Rob, he would also do anything for you; they’d both give you the shirt off their back – and I wonder who influenced who. There’s no denying that Brendan helped Rob through some of his more difficult moments while growing up.
Perhaps at one point they were almost the same being, in the way that intense friendships have a way of melting and reforming you into one person who thinks, acts and talks the same way.
Brendan was into punk and ska, and so was Rob. They both dressed as skinheads, but the movement was not the same as it was elsewhere – at the end of the world, in New Zealand, it was more about the fashion and music, and not about politics and fascism.
They grew up together, in each other’s pockets, but around the time they turned twenty the picture becomes unclear. Brendan went to Scotland, where he passed away. At this juncture, Rob was still on ‘softer’ drugs like alcohol and weed, although some people say that he was abusing alcohol quite heavily. Anecdotally, from certain things Rob told me, I know this to be the case. But he always framed it in a joke, or the swagger of an ex-smoker who was able to brag about how much they’d smoked because they didn’t do that any more.
When they gathered for Brendan’s funeral in New Zealand, Rob was a wreck. The other half of him had been torn away. There was some behaviour on his part that people didn’t feel comfortable talking to me about, but I can imagine that in the most painful moment of his life, losing his closest friend at twenty-one probably prompted a severe bout of self-harm and alcohol abuse.
Shortly afterwards, Rob left New Zealand for good.
We all want to piece together the point at which we could have saved him. To find the thing or the person responsible so that it might make sense of his death or make our anger righteous. But there isn’t such a thing.
Did Rob ever reach his own judgement? I remember overhearing a conversation with his parents on Skype, in which he said: ‘But I just want to be normal.’ The tone was a child’s tone. Not childish, but child-like. Upset, small, frightened.
And I heard Prue try to talk him through it, to make him see that he wasn’t less of a person because he needed to take medication. ‘You have to see it as a diabetic views insulin; this is just what you need to manage it.’
How can we ever really know what created Rob’s problems, when he himself couldn’t articulate the depth of them, or didn’t want to acknowledge their existence to others? When admitting his depression, his self-harm – to his parents or teachers – would mean he was that little kid again, forced to sit at the front of the class because he was different?
There is a word that explains what I think Rob struggled with all of his life, despite the hundreds of friends and his ability to be loved by so many people. It is the thing that Jane Powell from CALM alludes to when she is talking about the type of man who is most at risk of suicide.
It is a word we don’t think of when it comes to these men because they are so busy creating noise and colour, distracting us with their confidence, so that we don’t notice it. It is a word we didn’t associate with Rob, who sometimes seemed so arrogant that he could fix it all himself, who belittled our concern for him.
I have no doubt that everything began and ended with this word.
‘There’s this poem that I
memorised when I was a little kid,’ Jesse told me when we were talking about Rob. ‘It starts: “I never knew your loneliness, and knowing now, I die”.’
Loneliness.
I’m not talking about going to the cinema on your own or buying meals for one. This is the kind of loneliness that kills – especially men, who cannot tap into their social networks in the same way women can. This is the kind of loneliness that comes about as a result of experiences that make you feel small and worthless, that you cannot articulate to anyone. That, as you grow older, becomes a way of living, a way of surviving. But it isn’t, not even close.
Asking for help, kindness and human connection is one of the hardest things you can do, because not only does it mean opening yourself up, exposing your vulnerabilities, it also means putting your faith in other people. And sometimes people can be shitty, small-minded and let you down.
But in the end, not being able to ask for help is what killed Rob. It’s killing so many of our young men.
Truly, among those of us who shared the closest moments with him, from giving birth to him to gifting him Daisy as a puppy, from his first kiss to his last one, none of us ever really knew Rob’s loneliness.
When someone you love dies, they are a supernova.
For so long, they shone brightly in your world. When they self-destruct, the shockwaves shatter everything you know.
This person is now made of a million memories and atoms that float in the cosmos; everything they ever were is transforming into something altogether different.
You cannot see what is happening. The blast has rendered you dumb. You can only see the pieces of your life, the brightness that person used to be, and the blackness that now surrounds the space where they once existed.
The smoke clinging to their jacket. The sound of their voice alive only in data on your phone. Their favourite book that will never again be touched by their hands. These things will break your heart over and over again, until it feels like you will never get up.
But get up: because this is what is happening.
You aren’t just saying goodbye to them, you are saying goodbye to yourself. The star was so powerful and beautiful, your love for them burned up the person you were.
This is how it is meant to be. And as they explode into stardust, when all we can see is their death, they are already once again becoming a part of life, from the first breath in a baby’s mouth to the rain watering the ground.
You are already changing, dear one. It is painful, and you don’t want it. You want the fading light of your ghost and you can’t bear their absence. But if you are lucky, the world won’t let you go. It isn’t your time yet.
So you slowly turn into something stronger. You realise what you have a choice over, and what you don’t. You turn what you know into strength, you help others find theirs, and you are gifted a compassion that is so deep and limitless, at times it is the only thing that gives you peace.
You watch people scurry about in their lives. You see them worry about futures they arrogantly assume they have. They furrow their brows about getting older when you know each year is a gift.
They forget your loss, often, even though for you it is always the first thing you wake up with, and the last thing you hold close when you go to bed. You cannot go where they are going. But that’s all right.
They aren’t supposed to know what this feels like. Yet.
And, although for a while it feels like this is all there will ever be, you look down and see you are different. Your beloved is a part of you and always will be, and you finally see that leaving this earth will not reunite you or bring you peace.
The hope that each day will bring new strength, however tiny, and that a day or a week may come where you can carry your loss and your new life in your heart at the same time, is what keeps you going.
Chapter Thirteen
There is a big conversation gathering pace, about the problem with masculinity and how it is putting men in prison, pushing them towards substance abuse and killing them off.
In his documentary All Man, the artist Grayson Perry talks about why men are in jail, which I think can be applied to why they are in trouble in general: ‘For the reasons that are classically male. They are proud, they are strong, they want to DO STUFF; they have to be the top dog. They don’t want to change, they don’t want to ask for help. They are young, and forever young in arrested development.’
Rob had depression and struggled with addiction, but I am in no doubt that the sense of masculinity he ascribed to also prevented him from properly acknowledging his problems and, most importantly, from being able to ask for help. The armour he created to become a man, in the end, shattered.
Although suicide is the biggest killer of men under forty-five in the UK, and in the US men are four times more likely to complete suicide than women, there has never been a gendered study to find out why suicide rates are rising. Jane from CALM has been banging this drum for years, saying it ‘beggars belief’.
‘It is about guys and what we expect from guys. Slightly more women than men consider suicide, and yet they don’t complete. The difference, as far as I can see, is that women feel able to say: “I’m suicidal, I need help.” They have that door where they can ring for a friend.
‘Men don’t have that door because to say, “I need help, I’m vulnerable and I am hurting” would be to emasculate themselves. To not be a proper man. So what they feel is that they don’t have that option. Rather than slitting their wrists and deciding at what point to call for help, they go for the quickest and most effective option because what could be worse than failing to kill myself? How pathetic would I be?’
If the things mostly likely to kill a man (and specifically not women) were road accidents, cancer or heart disease, could we honestly say there wouldn’t be a massive push to find out why this was happening and then for every public body to show us how they are working towards prevention?
But there isn’t. And although we can launch crisis centres and pump more money into mental health, we need to go a bit further back. Some hard questions need to be asked around what we expect from men, and, consequently, what they expect from themselves.
I mean, really, what did I expect from Rob?
As a feminist who fights daily for gender equality, I still expected him to take out the bins and pick up dog crap because it was a man’s job. I expected him to do most of the grunt work when it came to moving house, and around bigger things I almost certainly (despite not wanting to admit it) expected him to be the breadwinner, and that he would be able to swoop in and take care of things when I needed him to.
Does this mean I was one of many people who trapped Rob in this narrow vision of what masculinity is? Undoubtedly. I may never have said ‘man up’, I may have given him love, support and a judgement-free space to conduct his recovery, but I was never going to push him to be different because I had learned what a man is from my dad, who learned it from his dad and his dad before him.
But maybe the more important question is what did Rob expect from himself as a man?
He believed it was the man’s responsibility to look after things. To sort things out and be economically valuable. To be a good husband, which required providing safety and a house. There wasn’t much room for softness or failure.
There were also so many contradictions. He was so self-assured in not giving a shit about what people thought. He said what he wanted, he wore what he wanted, and he wouldn’t care if it made him look silly. Or if he hurt someone’s feelings with his bluntness.
As an adult he went into raptures about water voles, delighted at spotting bitterns and doted over his colony of newts – the same interests he probably got bullied about as a kid in school. So that experience didn’t turn him away from the things he loved, but it was almost as if the process of surviving the ordeal created something incredibly hard and inflexible around other aspects of his life.
In creating his armour he became this wild man, someone
who didn’t play by the rules, whip-smart, unpredictable yet gentle, kind and thoughtful towards people, but, in an instant, caught in the spiral of his own destruction.
When I asked him why he found it so hard to talk about his feelings, he blamed it on a long-ago ex-girlfriend of his who broke his heart and cheated on him. ‘I wore my heart on my sleeve until then,’ he said. But I don’t know that I believe it, even though she did look like an asshole in the pictures I saw of her tucked away in a shoebox. I think it was an excuse.
So much of what he learned about the expectations of being a man would have begun long before this woman. And so much of his inability to open up wasn’t the fear of getting hurt – it was the fear that, by doing so, he wouldn’t measure up.
For someone to consistently not be able to ask for help, even when the stakes were so high – our marriage and our future – that to me speaks of entrenched, dysfunctional behaviour.
Jesse said: ‘His bravado, strength of character and tough “harden the fuck up” (to quote Rob himself) attitude wasn’t something I had, or could have. But I think that might have been why he chose me to be friends with.
‘Even how I was falling apart when I first met him, I think this vulnerability spoke to the vulnerability in him.
‘When I asked Rob how he was feeling about this or that, he’d dodge me, he’d joke, he’d avoid answering or feeling exactly what was really happening. But he didn’t expect the same of me – he was the best listener, the best comforter, the best advice giver.’
I think it was possible to be both ‘fuck what the world thinks’ and still be shackled to this rigid template of masculinity. However much of an anarchist he liked to think he was, Rob wasn’t immune to it. In fact, if the toxic prison of modern-day masculinity is a virus, then he died of it.
