Suicide - 11 years on

Every year, around this sort of time, I start to get jittery. When I take in the date, it all starts to become clear as to what the cause is. The 2nd of March is the day my former lover, Brian, killed himself.

It was a gruesome business. And his death was as dramatic as his life. At the time, we were, curiously, living apart. Me in East London, acting as Land Claim’s Commissioner for a while; he in Pietermaritzurg. We would meet, every now and again, as schedules allowed, at our home in Johannesburg.

Previously Brian had worked for Rentokil, but now he had grand designs of running his own business. I subsequently found that this business wasn’t working at all. But despite this, he had delusions of grandeur. He lived in a dreary little garden flatlet near the university in Pietermaritzburg, and to pay for his staff and his own lifestyle, he started pimping himself out through adverts in the newspapers, going under the name “Steve”.

This shocked me, a little, when I found out about it after his death, but it didn’t surprise me. I was a bit concerned about the HIV factor and when I heard about rumours to that effect after his death, I went around to all the local pharmacies, to try to discover whether or not he had been on anti-retrovirals or not. It was a fruitless task, which led me nowhere.

Brian, in a fit of madness really, had set up the suicide event, so that I would be the first person to find him. He was hanging from one of the gum tree rafters of our thatch, on a dog lead. And I suppose it is as he would have wanted it - that I would never get that image out of my head.

I went into immediate therapy, firmly resolved that I was not going to give up my house because of the spectre which his death presented. It was his choice, I rationalised, not mine. So I refused to leave my house, where we had lived for the past 7 years and where he had chosen to hang himself. His last message to me, which out of some kind of embarrassment, or projectile judgement on my part, I hid from the police for a while. It read something like this: “Now you can have all the things you have always wanted - the house, the car etc”. and that was that! No “And I really love you” or “I’m sorry it has to end like this’. But there it was.

These are the raw memories to the event. As I said, I went into trauma therapy immediately. My therapist was an Afrikaner woman, who was married to a Chinese man. In the days when she must have married him, when Apartheid was rampant, this must have been an extremely radical thing to do. She was mild mannered, but extremely clear and forthright. She was also a person who could show a genuine sense of understanding and compassion.

Her major work was with perpetrators of violence. With the people who had tortured and killed people during the apartheid era, in particular. I once asked her how she managed to cope psychologically with this. How did she deal, day after day with these most vile criminals, who had, through their actions, inflicted the most terrible pain on others. Her answer was startling. She said, “I just keep on thinking, that person could be me”.

For a long time, from that moment on, that thought haunted me. I wondered if it was possible for me to also be a perpetrator of violence. I felt myself, in my partner’s death, to be a victim of the violence of his death. I felt angry with him, shocked by what he had done to me. Could it possibly be that I too could be capable of the same thing?

Over the months of counselling which I had, I came to realise that it was certainly possible. Not because I am a particularly violent person, or a vengeful one, or a bad one. But simply because I am an ordinary one, who does, on occasion, make bad decisions.

One of the most interesting things which I discovered on my journey to calm, after the storm that was his death was that many suicides think that they will somehow “live” to extract the vengeance they seek. “I will kill myself, and then…”. They are incapable of seeing that there is no “…and then”.

Then I started with serious, uncontrollable and surprising flashbacks. The therapist started the fairly new and as yet untested EMDR (Eye Movement Desentsitization and Reprocessing therapy). It was a very strange process, involving you thinking about the things you were troubled by. And while you were doing that, she would wave her finger, or hand slowly backwards and forwards in front of your face.

I wept, I howled, I railed, I sat silently bubbling. But, my heavens, did it work! The terror had its sting drawn from it. I could face it again. I could walk away from it, momentarily. (It would be back, but some of the terror would be gone). And so it would lessen and grow weak. It would never disappear completely, but it would grow weaker.

It certainly worked. Within three months, I had no more terror attacks. Brian had closed all the curtains in the house and consequently,I could not allow curtains to b e closed, under any circumstances – for many months. But eventually, this too faded.All of the strange effects that violence and that shock had on me, have passed. What is left behind is a whisper and a trace. And fond memories of the man.

So, if you have had a trauma, of some kind – don’t get spooked by the idea of EMDR. It really works. Even for those with a serious attempt to keep their minds operating, without resort to what could so easily look like hocus-pocus. Because, as we all know, "There are more things on heaven and earth than you have ever dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio”. This is one of them.

Suicide, assisted and otherwise - 2. Learning how to grieve

This is another of the articles I wrote, soon after the suicide of my partner, 10 years ago. The issue is, of course, not the people who kill themselves. That is a decision they have made, and they are dead. The issue is how do the people who are left behind cope with that decision.

Obviously there is a huge difference between coping with the death of someone who is terminally ill, or elderly, or who has at least discussed the matter with those whom s/he loved, (or are likely to find the body) - and that of the sudden shock of discovery of someone who gave no sign that they were planning to kill themselves.

This piece was written really about the journey I found myself on - of coming to terms with my partner's shocking, and to me, completely unexpected decision - and learning how to grieve properly.

Learning how to Grieve

There was a time, not so very long ago, before urban sprawl and megacities and afforestation, when it was expected, without very much qualification, for people who had lost someone close to them, to mourn for a fairly extended period of time. When I lived for a time in rural Lesotho, I was extremely interested to see how traditional Basotho dealt with death. If the man in the family had died, for instance, the woman would be placed on a mattress in a room. She would have two or three supporters, who would be with her constantly. She would be required to say nothing and to do nothing at all. She would just sit on the mattress and weep, or not weep, as she felt fit. Wave after wave of sympathisers would be ushered into the room. The story of how the man died, what had happened; who said what; when; how - all the questions would be dealt with and answered in the telling of the story. And the story would be told over and over and over and over gain - for a week!

This is not my culture, of course, but in many ways I wish it were. One of the things I found necessary, when my partner died by hanging himself was this constant re-telling of the story. People who knew Brian needed to hear it. And somehow, the re-telling of it over and over again dis seem to have something of a healing effect. But it was extremely emotionally exhausting and it would have been very nice if there was someone else to do it for me and I could just sit on a mattress somewhere listening or weeping as the case may be.

Then there is the business of how we actually deal with the dead. The woman who worked for me then wanted badly to come to the funeral. She was originally from Malawi. She eventually plucked up enough courage to ask me why I had simply left Brian lying in the crematorium. She found this to be the strangest thing in the world. I explained to her the whole business about cremation and scattering the ashes, but she still looked at me more than a little incredulously. I could see us peering at each other across a very wide cultural gorge. It is not that she didn’t accept what I had done, it was simply that it didn’t in any way comply with the steps she understood to be necessary for the grieving process. “You have to see the person buried”, she said. Who knows, maybe she is right. I hadn’t really given the matter much thought before then.

When I was working as a priest in Manchester many years ago, one of the real difficulties of the job was the extraordinary amount of funerals I was required to do. It verged, sometimes, on 8 or 10 a week! The difficulty was that I very often had no idea of who it was that I was burying. Frequently, it was me, the undertaker and the coffin at the funeral. I often was left to ponder the tragedy of a long life, now over, with no-one to mourn its passing. I was often left to wonder about a society so compartmentalised, so lacking in community, that here could be the lonely sight of a body, a priest and an undertaker with not a single interested soul beyond them. That must be the saddest thing.

But I also frequently had no idea of what the person looked like that I was burying. In Britain, there was never any filing past the open coffin, as is frequently the case here in Africa. I once found myself in a very strange situation. I was informed by the undertaker that a woman, some way up the street where I lived, had died. Now, I lived in a street which was just two very long rows of front doors with windows on either side. It was difficult enough to get onto speaking terms with the next door neighbour, let alone someone down the road. Anyway, this woman had died and she didn’t have any relatives living with her, so it would have been useless to go to the house. I tried to picture where she lived and who she was. Ah yes! I remembered her. I often used to wave at her and sometimes used to exchange pleasantries on my way to work. She was an old lady with callipers who walked with some difficulty and she liked sitting in the sun outside her front door.

So I spoke at the funeral about the difficulties she had faced so bravely. I spoke about her lovely little garden that she seemed to be so proud of - and then rambled on in a very general sort of way about conversations we had had and that sort of thing. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I saw her sitting the next day outside her front door, soaking up the sun! I had buried the wrong person. I have no idea what the family made of what I had to say. In a strange, very British sort of way, it didn’t seem to make very much difference.

To get back to my point, I don’t think we white western types know how to grieve very well at all. It all seems to be tied up with nonsense about stiff upper lips and “just getting on with things” and “pulling oneself together” and “putting the past behind us”. Of course, all of this is true. And it is certainly not that people don’t care or that there is a lack of support. It is just that there is a sense in which we often tend to deal with grief as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. What I have come to see, which I did not see before as clearly as I do now, is that the only grief which does not end, is the grief which has not been fully faced. That can happen in a number of ways: By idealising the deceased person; or by suppressing one’s grief; or, conversely, by hanging onto feelings of sorrow and failing to resume one’s life fully at some point after the death. There will be some who see perpetual sorrow as a testimony to their love. Consequently it is easy to get stuck in time, believing that by holding onto the pain, you are holding onto the memories. What is true, though, is that sadness is a natural part of life, but self-pity immobilises.
The psychological boffins tell us that there are basically three stages to the grieving process and it doesn’t really matter what cultural persuasion one comes from. The first stage is basically shock. The second is a period of suffering and disorganisation. The third is a period of reorganisation. It does not really matter how long it takes to move from the first to the last, but it is critically important that there is movement. After the trauma of the second stage, with its sense of numbness; its preoccupations with last encounters and unfinished business; its feelings of abandonment and guilt and anger and blame, it is important to move on. Or even if one cannot do that immediately, at least it is important to know that this is the direction in which one should be moving.

What I learnt over the few months after the death was that it is crucial to experience all the feelings which the death has brought about for me, but it is equally crucial to say goodbye and to resume my life. That does not mean the end of the love or the memories. It does mean that I did learn to accept the death and in time, the pain and the sorrow lessened as well. And eventually (and this I do believe), in the words of Mother Julian of Norwich, “All things will be well, and all manner of thing will be well”.

Suicide, assisted and otherwise - 1. Not waving, but drowning

I read with interest a piece in the local newspapers about British maestro, Sir Edward Downes, who in his career conducted both the BBC Philharmonic and the Royal Opera. At the age of 85, he and his wife Joan (74) decided to terminate their lives. He had become increasingly deaf nand his sight was failing badly. She, a former dancer, choreographer and television producer, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

After 54 years of living together, they could not imagine living apart and so they decided to die together in an assisted suicide clinic in a Zurich clinic, run by the group Dignitas. The couple's son and daughter (named Caractacus and Boudicea!) issued a statement, saying that they had decided to end their own lives "rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems".

Personally, I have always believed in the right to end one's own life. The right to a dignified death is as much a right, I believe, as the right to life. It has always struck me as odd, that we are often more than willing to allow our pets to be "put to sleep", but when it comes to human beings, suddenly we have qualms. And this is not denying that there are massive ethical issues involved - of course there are - but why would one insist that a person must suffer, when they do not need to?

I have, in my own life, experienced first hand that choice being made, though in a much more violent form. My then life partner, 10 years ago now, hanged himself. I found him hanging and to some extent, to this day, I am still haunted by the sheer violence of the act. It is a very different decision that he made to that of Edward Downes and his wife, but it was still a choice for death rather than for life.

I know that I am still haunted by it, because the terror of it hits me when I least expect it sometimes - even at this distance from the event. The other day we took the kids to a thing called a "Pirates experience" - basically a circus dressed up in Pirate's gear - all very Arrr Arrr and Yo Ho Ho - but at the end, there was a hanging - and I reacted immediately, the old wounds refusing to be ignored.

Violent my partner Brian's choice might have been, but I have never questioned his right to do it. I just wish he hadn't done it quite like that. Here is something I wrote at the time. I think it is one of my best pieces and part of a trio of articles I wrote fairly soon after the death. Re-reading it 10 years after the event still evokes some of that terrible anguish I felt then. I called it

“Not waving, but drowning”.

I have always felt, always, that everyone has a right to suicide. I have pondered the conditions under which I might do it myself. They are few, for me anyway. I could, I suppose, imagine myself terminally ill; in extreme pain; or sick and old and incapacitated and needing to just give up and let go and get out.

But it needs to be said that contemplation of suicide for me has always been rather abstract and rather removed from reality, because I have never, not even in my darkest hours, considered it for myself. Perhaps I have never been in extremis. Perhaps I am not really the suicidal type. Perhaps I am a coward. Who knows? But for whatever reason, suicide has not ever presented itself to me, in any of the difficulties which I have faced, as an option.

The thing which stands behind it, of course, is death. And death is final. It doesn’t matter how much one might believe, or not believe in the life hereafter – death by one’s own hand, remains a dark and final choice. A kind of absolute rejection of any of the options or possibilities which life might present us with. To embrace death in this way can only mean that life has become so terrible, so horrific, so utterly destructive to oneself, that the natural repulsion and fear which all of us have of death is not enough to turn us from it. This is a valley in which I have never walked.

The suicide of my partner, Brian, made me ponder all these things anew, because beyond the horror and the shock of being confronted by the person one loves most in the world hanging on the end of a dog leash; beyond the pain and the agony which the living must cope with, one needs to – or at least I need to – come to terms with that terrible decision. Everyone tells me (indeed I frequently tell myself) that I must not blame myself. That, of course, is the most difficult thing to do, because there is no-one there to argue the case with anymore. There is no-one there to win the case with. There is no-one there any more and you are just left with you. And the arguments and the case quickly seem to wear very thin indeed. Everything starts to melt and dissipate.

Of course, suicide is the ultimate checkmate in life’s game of chess – because there is no answer beyond it. Of course it is cruel. Of course it is meant to hurt. But still, how does one avoid the voice in the back of one’s head which breathes “if only”?

And so I have tried to unpack his mind and stare into the pond of his life and try to make sense of this awful thing which he did. Naturally, I will never succeed, because it can’t be done. But that doesn’t stop me trying. I find myself trying to imagine what his last moments were like – why he plugged in his cellphone for charging. Why he closed all the curtains. Whether he said goodbye to the dogs. I try to imagine how, or whether he struggled as he jumped from the low pine stool on which he finally stood. I wonder how long it took for him to die and what it was like. I know he was playing his favourite piece of music from Handel’s “Watermusic”, but I wonder what the other terrible sounds were. And what the thoughts were in his head.

What I saw, when I found him, as I was meant to, was grotesque. A manikin, entirely still. What he had done, by forcing me to find him, was to drag every childhood fear from under the bed; from inside the cupboard; from behind the door and said “Here!” “Here it is!” “Look at it!” “Boo!” “Got Ya!”

No-one hangs themself on the spur of the moment. They decide a long time before that this is what they will do. And they plan how they will do it. Which beam in the ceiling? Which stool? How? Perhaps not when – but certainly how.

What comes to me now, over and over again is that poem by Stevie Smith “Not waving, but drowning”. The image is of a dead man, but still moaning. And the people around him speculating on why. “Perhaps it was too cold for him?” “Perhaps his heart gave way?” they wonder. “Oh no, no, no”, moans the dead man. “ I was much too far out all my life. And not waving, but drowning”.

Throughout his life Brian waved – or appeared to be waving. The impression he gave was of contentment and energy and movement. And this is the most shocking part. That we who knew him and loved him were all wrong and that the frantic waving was not what we thought it was. And the real tragedy was that he didn’t seem to be calling for help. He seemed to be calling for attention. And we all gave him attention – lots of it, but not help.

I have had letters of sympathy from people who have also experienced the suicide of someone close to them. They all say the same thing. They know exactly the depth of the pain I feel, because they have felt it themselves. They know it is a different pain to other kinds of death and other kinds of loss. They know it is one thing for someone to die in a car accident or from an illness and quite another to deliberately take one’s own life. This is not to demean or belittle other forms of dying. It is just to say that there is a very profound difference between them. The difference is that he had a choice, and he chose death. And that is what is so terribly difficult for we, the living, to cope with.

The way some people cope is to lean on God – and somehow God helps them. Many people have told me that they are holding me in their prayers and I am very grateful to them. Some time ago, before all this, I was listening to Radio phone-in programme late one night, while driving home. The topic was life after death and they had some guy on the programme who sounded like a mixture of some sort of psychic and New Age chrystals and oils type specialist . Lots of people were phoning in with experiences of loved ones who had come back to them in one form or another. Grandad was spotted sitting on the verandah in the hat he always wore. Husband appeared at the foot of the bed in his running shorts and vest.

There was almost complete unanimity about the fact that there was life after death and dead people seemed to want to come back and make the people whom they had left behind feel better about things. I felt the need to phone in with a somewhat different perspective. I have never experienced anything of the sort – nor do I really expect to. I said that although I recognised that by far the majority human experience is a religious one, that it would be unscientific to ignore the experience of many – which is this – of nothingness. I immediately elicited sympathy from the chat show host and her guest. I was quick to counter. The contemplation of this nothingness does not alarm me.

Nor does it make me a pessimist. I am totally happy with it and I have no expectations of it. But it is sad as well, because I know, inasmuch as I am ever able to know, that I will never see him again. He is gone from my life forever. It was always, during our 7 year relationship, “till death us do part”. And death has.