On Suicide

When news of a suicide hits the national press, there are untold stories of extreme pain and suffering among the relatives and friends of the person who has died. It is beyond tragic. It is a heartbreaking sadness that nobody deserves to have visited upon them.

But there are other untold stories too.

There are countless people for whom news of a suicide brings back memories with the immediacy of a train wreck. People who never knew the person whose death is being reported, but who know something of the territory. People who have sat beside someone they love while that person contemplated ending their life.

And so it was for me this week.

I found myself back in the place I least want to be.

For most of the time now, all these years later, what happened is a vague background feature of my life. I know it is there. I am always aware of it. But it is distant enough that it cannot usually touch me.

This week that distance disappeared.

Suddenly I was going over conversations again. Every touch. Every look. Things said in the middle of the night. Things I said. Things I did not say. Decisions made. Moments when perhaps I should have done something differently.

And the question that has never entirely gone away: Was there something more I could have done?

Some suicides are sudden and come as an unimaginable shock. I do not have experience there.

Other suicides are preceded by weeks, months or years in which the people closest to the person know that something terrible is happening.

Those periods are their own particular horror.

When you know that someone you love is contemplating taking their own life, there begins a desperate scramble to protect them. Round-the-clock vigilance. Through-the-night conversations. Pleading. Reassuring. Watching. Trying to reason with someone when reason is becoming increasingly inaccessible to them.

Trying, above everything else, to keep them alive.

It is exhausting. It is frightening. And it is extraordinarily lonely.

There are sentences I wish I had never heard. “The world would be a better place without me.” “The pain I feel is too much.” What do you say to that?

You say anything. Everything. You search desperately for the sequence of words that might unlock a door. You remind them of people who love them. You remind them of things they have done and places they have been. You talk about tomorrow, next week, next year. You try reason, emotion, hope, anger, tenderness.

You keep talking because silence is terrifying.

And, if I am going to write about this at all, I should be truthful about something I have carried with me ever since.

I remember asking: Why is my love not enough for you to want to live?

It is a question that has haunted me for years.

I look back at it now and see the selfishness in it. Here was someone I loved becoming increasingly unreachable, suffering so profoundly that continuing to exist had become unbearable, and somehow I made part of that moment about me.

What about my love? What about what you mean to me? Surely I should be enough to keep you here?

I understand now what I could not understand then. Love does not work like that.

Someone's desire to die is not a judgement on the adequacy of the love surrounding them. A person can be loved completely and still become so unwell, so overwhelmed by pain, that the love cannot reach the place in which the decision to continue living is being made.

I know that.

I can write it.

I can believe it.

And still, somewhere inside me, the question remains.

Why wasn't my love enough?

There is another part of this experience about which I have almost never spoken. It is perhaps the greatest taboo within the great taboo of suicide. Sometimes the person you are desperately trying to keep alive asks you for permission to let them die.

They tell you that the pain is too much. They tell you that they cannot continue. And then they turn to you, the person who loves them and who has spent weeks or months desperately trying to keep them here, and ask you to understand.

Perhaps even to give them your blessing.

There is something impossible about that conversation.

Love has been the argument you have deployed for life. Now love itself is invoked in the other direction. If you really love me, they seem to be asking, can you understand why I cannot bear this any longer?

I am not going to write about everything that was said. Some things remain ours.

But I will say that being asked that question changed me.

I suspect there are more people who have had that conversation than we realise. We do not talk about it. Perhaps because it feels disloyal. Perhaps because we are frightened of what others might think. Perhaps because saying the words aloud makes the memory too vivid.

Perhaps because there simply are no good words for it.

Over the years, I have encountered others who know this territory. One thing I have noticed is how extraordinarily generous they tend to be when somebody else finds themselves there.

People who have been through those nights will willingly return to them for a stranger.

They will listen. They will sit up. They will answer the telephone. They will share things they would rather not remember because there is a kind of unspoken duty among those who know.

Perhaps I can help you save yours, even though I could not save mine.

This is a club none of us chose to join.

Most of the time we do not recognise one another. We go to work. We have dinner. We laugh. We get irritated by trivial things. We live perfectly ordinary lives.

The past recedes.

But it never entirely disappears.

And then a suicide makes the news.

A person we did not know dies, and our first thoughts are rightly with those who loved them and whose lives have just been torn apart.

But elsewhere, other people are being transported backwards.

Back to a bedroom. A telephone call. A hospital. A conversation at three in the morning. Back to a sentence. Back to a face. Back to the unbearable effort of trying to persuade someone you love that tomorrow is worth seeing.

That happened to me again this week.

I do not know that I have any great wisdom to offer as a consequence. I certainly have no expertise to claim. I cannot give anybody the right sequence of words because I learned, painfully, that sometimes there is no sequence of words powerful enough.

Perhaps that is not the purpose of writing this. Perhaps recognition is enough. If you have lived through this, I know something of the place you have been. If you have spent nights trying to keep someone alive, I know how frightening that is.

If someone you loved died and you have spent years replaying conversations, wondering whether a different word, a different touch, a different decision might somehow have produced a different ending, I know that too.

And if, years later, something apparently distant suddenly tears open that wound, there are others who understand why.

Most days now, what happened is distant from me.

This week it was not.

And perhaps all I really wanted to say is that, for some of us, grief does not disappear, it sits somewhere in the background while life grows around it.

Until, occasionally, something calls it forward.

And suddenly, after all these years, I am there again.