by Poorna Bell
Looking back now, there were flashes of what lay beneath the bravado. When he was yet again thousands of pounds in debt to creditors who knew he’d had problems paying it back before but didn’t mind loaning it anyway, he felt pinned by shame and fear. First, that he’d got himself into that situation and, second, that he was relying on his wife to sort things out.
When we moved house for the second time, he was worrying about getting the cash together for the deposit.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘we’ll use the deposit we get from the first place to pay for it.’
‘And who paid that? Was it me?’
I nodded. ‘Good,’ he grunted. ‘I managed to do that at least.’
The first time I tried to get him to come with me to the gym (it took three attempts until it stuck), I was so disappointed that his attendance tapered off.
After the third month of him paying for the membership but not using it, I lost it.
‘WHY?’ I asked.
For once he didn’t say he was busy with work or that he hadn’t slept well. He replied quietly: ‘I just feel really intimidated in there. I don’t feel comfortable asking anyone to help either.’
I didn’t really know what to say, so I didn’t say anything – but I realised how big a deal it was that he’d actually told me the truth about how he’d been feeling.
Perhaps the most revealing moment, however, was when we took Daisy to a kennel two weeks into our separation. With Rob in hospital and me out of the house for twelve hours of the day, she wasn’t coping well home alone and needed proper care.
He cried most of the journey there, and most of the journey back. We were miserable sending our dog away even if it was just for a week, and miserable with each other. We wanted to be together but we couldn’t be there for each other because we were separating.
Finally, I said: ‘Rob, I just don’t understand, honey. I know how much you love me. I know how much you want me in your life. Why, why couldn’t you ask for help?’
He took his time replying but when he did, he said: ‘Every time I reach that moment, I’m just a boy. I’m scared and I’m frightened and I feel really small. I know what I need to do, but . . . I can’t. I just can’t.’
Trying to grasp the real Rob is like looking at the edge of the shoreline and endeavouring to make sense of the waves. They shift all the time, making it impossible to sense the pattern and meaning in why and how they exist.
Suicide always brings it back to responsibility. Whose responsibility was he? Who was in charge of his life? And when you’re feeling guilty, like you didn’t do enough or say the right things, these questions are critical to restoring a sense of perspective.
Rob was an incredibly proud man. It’s impossible to extricate the things he valued as a man, and the things he felt trapped by. His most admirable quality was doing things his own way. It was also his most frustrating quality because he thought he knew best and had everything in hand when he didn’t.
You cannot impose your own will on someone like that – especially if you love them – and then expect them to retain their sense of honour and self-esteem.
But I know he had a problem with the silence that gagged men, even if, paradoxically, he felt bound by it too. ‘We’re expected to man up, suffer in silence and get on with it,’ he once said. ‘How did it ever work for our father’s generation?’ Well, it didn’t – which explains why suicide rates among men are high in the over sixty-fives, and the terrible legacy of their masculinity is still affecting younger men.
Jane thinks that this idea that men can’t communicate or say how they feel because that’s how their gender is wired is balls.
‘When you look at art, literature, music and poetry for the last few thousand years, and how much of that was produced by men, then it’s complete nonsense.
‘Guys will talk about stuff – they will never buy a tub of ice cream and talk for hours on the phone – but they will have conversations.’
In the search for answers about changing the conversation around mental health, Mr B told me that it wasn’t just a question of de-stigmatising mental illness, or making it easier for guys to talk. It was about changing the entire approach to mental health.
He said we needed a three-pronged strategy. First, to promote good mental health – and, crucially, to encourage society to value this. Second, to tackle mental distress, in order to catch someone before it tips over into illness. Third, to amend how we treat mental illness, which needs better understanding and care.
‘What if our view of mental health was different?’ he said. ‘Where we viewed good mental health as an asset, we encouraged people from the very point of preconception, to conception, having kids, school, work; where we become robust about dealing with mental health?’
Mr B said we have a whole profession dedicated to categorising different behaviours, and it’s built on observing, defining and treating these behaviours. He raises a very good point, which is that the main treatment involves altering chemicals in the brain, but that this only addresses the symptoms, not the root cause. So for some people it works, for others – for instance, those who have PTSD after childhood abuse – it doesn’t, because it doesn’t tackle recovery in terms of dealing with the abuse itself.
His view – one that I agree with – is that we perceive mental illness as something to be fixed, and once someone is ‘fixed’ we expect them to be recovered. There is a much bigger picture than that, he argues, which is that if, culturally, we understood mental health and illness properly, then we would be better at treating it. This means appreciating the complexities of the brain and how that links to someone’s background, who they are and what shaped them, and understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all remedy.
There’s a charity in the UK called Place2Be, of which the Duchess of Cambridge is a patron. They do an incredibly important job, which is to address the problem of mental health in children, to teach parents and educators to recognise and support these children with the overall goal of preventing them from going on to develop a mental illness when they are adults.
Their work draws fuel from a powerful statistic – 50 per cent of adult mental illness could have been prevented if people had been given the right support and treatment when they were a child.
They have a heavy task on their hands. Considering Rob would have struggled with depression when he was around ten or twelve, not much has changed in the last thirty years in terms of addressing mental health at a young age; parents still feel helpless and lost. They don’t have the words or understanding to navigate this little-known territory and the worst part is that they aren’t given any help to realise when things are going wrong.
‘There’s lots of research into how people treat boy and girl babies,’ said Prof. Williams. ‘So if you give someone a baby and tell them it’s a girl, they speak to them differently than if it’s a boy.
‘What emerges is that with boys, conversation is much more instrumental than emotional. It’s problem-solving rather than speaking about emotions. It may well be there are basic differences but, in a sense, children don’t have a chance if even the way we relate to them is using different vocabularies.
‘If men are better at being instrumental, they won’t be talking about emotions. They will then be spared some of the more mild mental health issues [that young women have]. But given that they will have the same pressures as other people do, when they do break down, it will be a more catastrophic breakdown. Because there hasn’t been the willingness to express what has been going on with their life.’
When I think about the expectations Rob had of himself – to be able to work full time, have children, be in a marriage, be the breadwinner, be the perfect son/son-in-law, be responsible and law-abiding, never cry, never show weakness, never be the one who could say: ‘I can’t do this’ – no wonder he was exhausted.
‘The expectations they have of themselves can’t be fulfilled,’ said Jane, ‘they are impossible. And it�
��s actually a large element of society that is totally unreasonable.’
When faced with only two narrow choices – either never really taking responsibility, or assuming the heavy, grotesque burden that male adulthood seems to entail – can we blame men for being fearful of growing up?
A month after Rob’s funeral in Auckland, we held a memorial service for him in London, in his cousin Karen’s house. Karen put together a slideshow of Rob’s photos: him laughing, cuddling Daisy, sharing a beer, posing with nothing but strategically placed banana leaves (cut from his banana plant, of course). There were a lot of tears. A lot of laughter. A lot of beautiful things said.
But the thing that will stay with me was something his friend Jon Hess said. Jon is a wonderful musician, and I wanted him to sing at the memorial.
Before Jon sang that day, he spoke a few words. He said he’d always talked to Rob about his problems, and wished Rob had been able to talk to him. He also described how, the night before the memorial, he’d had a dream in which Rob was standing beside him and talking to him. ‘But he didn’t look like Rob as a man,’ said Jon, ‘he was just a boy. And I held his hand.’
Jon was on the verge of tears and apologised for this stream of consciousness that he’d just shared with the group, but he didn’t need to say sorry.
We all knew what he was trying to say. That Rob had so much bravado, he was so cocky and fun. But, when you took away the jokes and the swagger and looked at him, I mean really looked at him, you finally saw how fragile he was. He may have looked like a man and talked like a man. But he never learned how to move past the fears and vulnerabilities he had as a boy.
After Rob died, lots of people said, like Jon, that they dreamed about him. I was so jealous. I didn’t dream about Rob, except rarely, and, when I did, it always revolved around him being an addict and I always knew he was dead in the dream. Even now.
I found out about these dreams because people posted them on Facebook. They wrote about their feelings, letters to Rob, recalled stories that were wonderful – things we, family and friends, didn’t know about and brought our man back to life briefly. Some of it was great, some of it wasn’t. Some of it was way too personal and inappropriate.
Never in my wildest imaginings did I think I’d have to factor in social media while grieving. When the great author Joan Didion penned a book about losing her husband, she didn’t write: ‘And then I wondered whether or not to cancel John’s Facebook account.’
But a lot of grief is not pragmatic. It’s emotional, and Facebook is one of those tools people use to communicate that emotion, which often feels out of control, messy and dramatic.
Perhaps I was tetchy about Facebook for other reasons. Shortly before Rob died, he deleted his account, or so we thought. After a suicide, you search for any level of detail that might indicate how serious the person was about taking their own life. Rob left no will, never spoke to me about the type of funeral he would want, and didn’t leave any of his affairs in order.
But he deleted his Facebook account before he died. And he killed himself by hanging, which is a method people choose if they really mean to go through with it. So that must have meant some element of planning went into his death, right?
Imagine our shock, our fright, when for some unknown reason the Facebook account resurrected itself four months after his death like a digital Jesus.
I looked on his account and saw that two weeks before his death, he had chosen a photo of us as his profile picture. In the last two months before his death he posted selfies in which he looked very, very ill. There is one photo that is extremely hard to look at – he’s facing the camera but looking down with his head in his hands, tired, fed up. Everything about it says, I want peace.
When the account came back up, people immediately started posting messages to him, which I found ridiculous. I was tempted to take down the account. Wherever Rob was, he wasn’t on Facebook.
But then I realised that many of these people had not been able to visit his grave because it was in Auckland. So, as far-fetched as it sounds, and perhaps I am giving Mark Zuckerberg’s creation far too much importance, for some people this was the grave. This was the altar at which they could lay their thoughts and pictures and feel that, somehow, they were touching a part of Rob through one of the last remnants of himself he had left behind.
So much of what makes a person who they were is intangible, but this was the wisp of smoke frozen in a moment. Now, when someone posts something I don’t like, I just view it as them bringing flowers I don’t like to his grave. (Calla lilies, FYI.)
A rare dream about Rob, a year after his death. We’re in bed and he’s so sleepy.
He’s at the stage where his body is physically withdrawing from drug use; there are lines around his eyes, which hang heavy in his head, as if he’s been through a long journey across a desert.
But although he’s lying prone and half-awake, I throw my arms over him and hold him tight. I know what is going to happen. Someone has already told me the end of this story.
‘Please don’t go,’ I say. ‘Please don’t go. Please don’t go.’
‘Hmm?’ Rob replies, sleepily. ‘I’m not going anywhere, honey.’
But I know that he is. I know that, soon, he will fall into an inky blackness so deep he will not be able to find his way back. Soon, he will reach the point where he won’t have the choice of turning back, and slowly he will move to a place where we can’t reach him, where he is lost to us forever.
‘Please, Rob. Please don’t go.’ The sharpness of the wish, the desperation streaming from my eyes, is like a knife sliding from my throat to my stomach.
It lays everything bare, and there is never a moment when I feel as powerless as when I am trying to call my husband back from the land of the dead. I have to find peace in all of this; I must, or I am afraid I will join him.
At night, when I look at the sky, I wonder what frequency our grief resonates at.
All those people, around the world, who spend those quiet moments silently calling the dead back to them.
There comes a point when I realise the dead cannot come back, ever.
It doesn’t matter that I sleep in our old bed. Or that I refuse to move any of the paintings he hung up. Or that I can’t move out of the flat we lived in together.
What am I holding on to? None of that is going to bring him back.
I close my eyes and I think of the twelve men who will die that day by their own hand. And the next day. I know this number will tick on and on, unless we stop calling to the dead and instead decide to turn our gaze towards the living.
Chapter Fourteen
I watch a programme called Suicide and Me, by the musician Professor Green, aka Stephen Manderson, who lost his father to suicide at a young age.
It features a tiny place in north London, a sanctuary that has an exceptionally high success rate at helping people who are on the verge of suicide. A person can stay there for five days, and once they leave, they can’t return. But for many people, once is enough. It has saved over a thousand lives, and it currently is the only one of its kind in Britain.
I found Maytree. Its director, Natalie, and I are sitting in a restaurant near my office. I stir my coffee, and I ask her about prevention.
Like Mr B, she’s of the firm belief that unless we start teaching children about emotional intelligence, we are simply firefighting.
Maytree have done something very clever: they have put content on their website that means when someone Googles ‘want to kill myself’, their site comes up at the top of the search, which is literally a lifeline to someone at the end of their road.
Although there are people who have come to Natalie’s door because they’ve suffered horrific childhood abuse or have severe mental illness, there are also those with ‘perfectly normal upbringings’ who have found themselves in a perfect storm. One such person, who came to them after searching for ways to kill himself, was an ex-serviceman who’d been in Afghanistan
.
‘He had seen things that you shouldn’t see,’ Natalie said. ‘He came back and was discharged, so he’d lost his sense of purpose, but also structure. And that obviously impacted on his mental wellbeing and relationship with his wife. His wife went and had an affair, they got divorced, that was ugly and there were children involved.
‘So there was this knock-on effect and he just couldn’t cope any more. He didn’t want to die; he just couldn’t see how he could continue with his life.’
The structure of Maytree is remarkably simple. Its job is to provide a safe, calm space where people won’t be judged. It is built utterly on trust, from the moment they call to the moment they leave.
‘It’s also a model delivered by volunteers,’ said Natalie. ‘So let’s say within the NHS you are depressed and you get assigned a psychiatrist. What if you don’t connect with that psychiatrist, what if there is no trust? How do you expect that relationship to evolve into something supportive and fruitful?
‘So in Maytree, a guest will see, in one day, about twelve different volunteers. Out of those, that individual will connect with at least one or two of them. And the feedback we get from guests is that the fact that someone they’ve never met before is willing to give up their time for nothing and spend it with [them] reinstates that they are worth it. Because a lot of the time, that individual’s self-esteem, by the time they come to us, is flat on the floor.
‘That a complete stranger is willing to sit with them, and not judge or try to change or fix their darkest thoughts and feelings – it plants the seeds of what was maybe there before. Which is: I am worth the time, I am worth fighting for. I am worth spending time with. And that is the seed of hope.’
Natalie can’t read my mind. But I am overcome at the work she does, and I think of all of those families who still have their loved ones because of her and Maytree.
Here is a model that works. And so I pledge that I will do whatever I can to help her.
