Losing a child to Suicide

Anniversaries creep up on you like a stalker slowly closing in. I always think it’s just another day but then as the days pass, getting closer and closer to the 10^th July I find myself on a downward spiral and start doing strange things.

I started digging around at old memories picking at old wounds – I won’t give details here as this is a public blog but suffice it to say it was not helpful or healing.

So what to write on this 13^th Anniversary. At the moment I’m in a dark place. But that is OK – I have to be transparent here as that was the point of this blog when I set it up. However, this time I reached out to my support network of parents who have all lost their beautiful children and boy did they come through for me. No judgement – just understanding and empathy. They heard me.

I am wise enough to know this is another ‘cleansing’ phase, picking at the old wound will, in this case, promote healing. It’s like going into the loft and throwing away all the crap you put up there because you thought you might need it one day. It’s painful raking through boxes of memories but then when it’s done you feel better.

I was digging through files on the computer and came across the eulogy I delivered at Toby’s funeral. I must have read it 100 times so I could read it at the funeral without crying. People probably thought I was cold hearted as I didn’t wear black and danced around to the Friends theme tune which we played at the end. I made jokes, but I still wouldn’t change what I did. I wanted to sum him up – so if anyone wants to know more about my sensitive, intelligent, fiercely determined, stubborn and reserved son – please read.

The other songs were Beautiful Boy – John Lennon, It’s a Mother f***er The Eels (chosen by his friends) and Good Riddance (I hope you had the time of your life) Green Day

Here it is……

What can you say about a 23 year old young man who died? That he loved computer games, Magic the gathering, House, Pizza, his friends and me.

He was one of a kind, a one off, unique.  He didn’t follow the crowd and he chose his friends carefully. He had a good soul and when it counted it shone through. He could drive me to distraction by sleeping til 3 pm and leaving a trail of dirty dishes and clothes through the house, but what I would give today to pick up his dirty clothes off the floor.

He was so intelligent and could debate all manner of subjects til the cows came home. Sometimes he dispensed such wisdom to me it was astonishing.

Everyone said he had so much potential and some may say he wasted his life but how can a life filled with so much love ever be a waste.

I bought him a computer when he was 3 and he was more or less glued to a computer screen for most of his short life.  Sometimes I beat myself up because I thought I should have banned it when if affected his studies but it was the only activity that made him really happy and he had a whole world of cyber friends.

In the last 3 years he made many real friends and these friends gave him much happiness over the last 3 years of his life and I thank them with all my heart for loving my beautiful son and giving him companionship and friendship. Don’t mourn him but remember all the times you laughed together.

I also want to thank my family, especially Michael, Sue, Paul, David and Matt who gave him so much love, help and support throughout his life.

He will never marry and have a child, go on an exotic holiday, grow old or get a mortgage but who dictates that that is a tragedy.

He lived life on his terms and left this life on his terms. He was Toby and he was loved and touched many lives and will live on in all our hearts ‘for infinity and beyond’ as Buzz Lightyear would say

We went to see Toy Story about 6 weeks in a row when it first came out.  When he was little we read a book called ‘ I’ll always love you ‘ about a little boy and his dog called Elfie.  It made me bawl and from that day on we always told each other IALY at each parting.

We watched Friends together for 8 years and laughed and laughed. We fought, we hugged, we argued, we talked. I tried to be mother, father, counsellor, mentor, friend and protector.  I could not protect him from the harsh world out there and in the end he chose his own destiny. To think I worried about him smoking!

I loved him more than I can ever express in words but he knows how much. I was a cool Mum and I hope he was proud of me. He wasn’t very good at sending Mother’s day cards but when he did send a card he always told me how much he appreciated how much I loved and supported him.

Toby I will miss your voice, your smile, your giggle, your presence and your wisdom and who is going to help me now with my computer problems.

I will never see you again but you will be by my side every day and I will talk to you all the time forever. I am still a mother.

Toby had his own style and I can picture him in his check shirt, orange shoes and his bag slung across his chest.

I always embarrassed him and he thought I wasn’t proud of him but he was so wrong.

I am the proudest mother in the world of you my special son Toby. I gave you life and you saved mine and gave me a reason for living. Even now you are not physically present you give me a reason to value life even more now and your legacy will live on.

I’ll always love you my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy. I hope you had the time of your life!

Every time I think I was a complete failure as a parent, I bat away that thought by recalling times when I think I was quite a special mum.

It’s a rainy day today in Cornwall and I’m binge watching TV with the dogs snoring on the sofa next to me and a memory came flooding in.

I was a single mum which at times had many benefits as I could indulge in lots of special times with Toby with no one to interfere or judge. It was TV shows that bonded us on rainy weekends and Friday evenings. I can’t remember exactly how old he was but it was before high school so he must have been 9 or 10.

On Fridays I used to finish work early so I could pick him up from school, something I mostly missed out on being a single working mum. We went swimming then on the way home we’d pick up snacks at the newsagents (bacon wheat crunchies were a favourite), then make a camp on the living room floor with cushions and bedding and watch American sitcoms. Our favourites were Cybill, starring Cybill Shepherd, Ellen (before she became a chat show host and had come out), and of course Friends.

Toby particularly loved the Nickelodeon channel and loved Sarbrina the teenage witch (don’t tell his mates). One weekend they had a marathon showing back to back episodes and we spent a whole day in PJs camping on the floor, watching episode after episode and probably eating junk food.

When Toy Story came out we went to see it about 5 weeks in a row, over and over again. Weekends were ‘our time’ as during the week I was working full time.

When Toby went off to University I sent him a Toy Story sticker book and a set of miniature Toy Story figures as a little joke to cheer him up. The little figures were returned to me with his belongings after I lost him.

Most weekends when he was little were spent visiting steam railways as he was obsessed with Thomas the tank engine. I have so many photos to treasure of these times. My mum and dad took him out on lots of trips, he went to the Thames Barrier, the zoo, Duxford aircraft museum.  

Even when he was older we did spontaneous things like deciding to drive down to Torquay the night before the total eclipse in 1999 or going up to London to see David Blaine hanging in a box over the Thames.

Sure I made lots of mistakes and I may not have been ‘mom of the year’ but memories of happy times help me on days like these. I was rubbish at discipline, saying no and getting him to do his homework but having all these memories to treasure reminds me he had a happy childhood, despite not having his dad around or any siblings.

I gave him the best life I knew how and that’s all we can do as parents. In my book a good parent is someone who loves their children beyond anything else and would go to the ends of the earth to make them feel happy, safe and loved, even if they broke every rule in the ‘good parenting handbook’.

I haven’t written this blog for ages but I sometimes I just feel I should share part of my journey as even though it has been 12 years this year, I experience something nearly every day that relates to Toby and that he died and how he died.

I don’t think many people realise this about grief – even after years it lives within you, every day of the rest of your life.

A few experiences I’ve had recently relate to telling people I have just met that my son has died and them ignoring me – this happens a lot. I don’t believe I should not talk about Toby just to avoid having an uncomfortable conversation.

In my job I am constantly meeting new people. I work for the National Trust as a welcome assistant and I don’t just talk to people about mining history, we share stories about our dogs, our lives and of course our children.

When a person dies they cease to exist in the physical world but their lives up to that point still matter and their memory shouldn’t have to be erased to prevent conversations about death and dying and in my case, suicide.

If I’m with my friends and they are all talking about their adult children and grandchildren – should I not join in and share memories of my child?

I really appreciated a friend who recently was willing to engage in a proper grown up conversation about Toby and his death. We were just chatting over coffee and she asked me something interesting which most people never ask, ‘It must be very hard not knowing why he did it’.

I’m quite comfortable responding to these kind of questions as I really encourage more people to have open and honest conversations about suicide rather than shying away from it as if it is a huge taboo or contagious. It shows empathy and a willingness to try and understand more about suicide.

So that has prompted me today to write this blog, hopefully to help others that struggle with accepting they will never fully know why a loved one chose to end their own life.

It is hard to get your head around the fact that a person would choose to take actions to end their life. I still find it hard to comprehend even after doing extensive research for my dissertation. There is no simple answer as to why someone not just thinks about it, but who makes a plan, then carries it out.

How often do we hear ‘They couldn’t possibly be suicidal, they seemed so happy and were making plans’. The recent case of the missing woman demonstrates this. We don’t know if she took her own life or if it was an accident but so many friends and relatives were insistent that she couldn’t possibly have been suicidal as she loved her children, had a lovely life, had sent a text making plans for the next day…etc etc. When I hear those statements I just think, if only you knew how many people die from suicide who you could say those same things about.

All Toby’s friends thought he was carefree and happy-go-lucky. He didn’t demonstrate any signs of being severely depressed or suicidal. I would have given him money, and gone to the ends of the earth to help him but for some reason he decided he no longer wanted to live in this world. Even though he didn’t leave a note he had written some notes in a notebook the day before saying ‘today is the most satisfying day of my life’. That hit me hard.

Everyone wants reasons as that would make it easier to accept. ‘His wife left him, he was made redundant, in debt, in poor health etc etc but millions of people go through hard times but don’t take their own lives. There is no one reason. I do believe that any one of those events can be a catalyst – the straw that broke the camel’s back, but that it is much more complicated than just having a shit thing happen then deciding to end it all.

Suicide is complex and every case is different. I believe it is an intense desire to end the pain of a current situation and dying seems the only way out. I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling of not wanting to go on, I feel that frequently – but then something else must happen to go from that feeling to actually deciding on a method, obtaining anything needed then going ahead. I can’t imagine being that brave – I would chicken out. So I believe the suicidal mindset is just focusing on bringing the current intolerable situation to an end – it doesn’t mean they don’t love you or their children.

Quite early on in my journey I recognised that they were 2 critical things I had to address and make peace with if I was going to survive and not drive myself crazy and go down a destructive path.

The first thing was to realise that I was not responsible for my child deciding to kill himself. It wasn’t anything I did or didn’t do or should have done. It wasn’t my fault. When I truly acknowledged this it was life-changing.

The second thing was making peace with knowing I would never truly know why Toby killed himself or what was going through his mind that weekend. I can speculate based on what I knew about him and his life at the time – but I had to accept I would never know why.

I went to a spiritual retreat 3 months after Toby passed away – searching for some comfort and healing. It was run by a guy known as The Barefoot Doctor (he has since passed away). In one session I wailed that I just wanted to know why he did it. I was taken aback when he said ‘why don’t you try asking him’. At first it seemed like a strange question – but then it made perfect sense. I closed my eyes and reached out and really tried to connect with Toby, and a very clear answer came back – ‘I don’t know mum’.

This made perfect sense to me and in that moment I was healed from the pain of not knowing why. Toby wouldn’t have been able to articulate in words why he did it…it was exactly what Toby would say. It wouldn’t have been authentic for him to write me a neat little ‘I’m sorry mum I love you’ note.

Toby was an esoteric being, a free spirit, mega-sensitive and intelligent – maybe on the spectrum – If I ever asked him how he felt about anything he could never tell me. I have a few notes and musings he wrote a few months before his death and it seems he was lost and confused, and couldn’t find a place in this world.Death is complicated, suicide is even more complicated and for those of us left behind, a survivor of bereavement by suicide, our grief is very complicated, and even more so if it is our child.

So if you are in this situation, recently bereaved and struggling with trying to understand why – perhaps see if you can sit with this and get to a place of peace and acceptance – it will aid in your healing.

34 years ago today I was in the Good Samaritan hospital in Phoenix where you had just been born. We never talked much about your dad, but I want you to know you were born with love and very much wanted. I was convinced I was having a girl and when they told me you were a boy I said ‘it can’t be’ but then I was probably delirious. I was just delighted I had a healthy baby as I was really sick when I was carrying you. You had a nearly perfect agpar score – all the tests they run – and were 7.5 lb and 20“ long. I still have the little card they gave me at the hospital, sometimes it’s hard to look at it but I will treasure it forever, I also have the tiny woollen hat they put on your head, a few precious memories of your birth.

I’m not sure where the name ‘Toby’ came from – we wound up my mum by telling her we were going to call you Spike which would have made you Spike Thorn. The name Toby fitted your perfectly.

We were on our own for 2 weeks until my mum arrived from England but we muddled through, your dad was only 26 but he was a natural – he was so calm whereas I was overwhelmed with the responsibility. At the beginning the urge to protect this tiny helpless baby is overwhelming and goes on forever no matter how old your child is.

I still struggle with the fact that I could not protect you in the end. Everyone says to me ‘I can’t imagine how you cope’, but I don’t want them to. No one, other than another bereaved parent’ can imagine what it is like to lose your child. People think I’m so strong and that I am coping well just because I show up every day with my make up on and don’t look like I’m broken, but of course I am.

The daily reality of living with the loss of a child is that at any given moment there will be a memory, a stab of pain; destructive thoughts. One morning last week I was walking round the field with the dogs like I do every morning and out of the blue I started talking to you and I was telling you how sorry I was that I failed you and that it was all my fault. This was just an ordinary day, nothing that I was aware of prompted this thought – but this is my reality. This is the reality of the life of a parent who has lost a child to suicide.

Saying that I wouldn’t change my life to not have had you in it. I always go back to the Wordsworth quote, something he said in a letter after losing his young son.

I loved the Boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable, and he is taken from me – yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it. 

I did the best I could and I couldn’t have loved you any more, you were a unique spirit and lived life on you terms, you never followed the crowd. You were introverted, mega intelligent and I do believe that you had a good life, even though it was cut short I gave you the best life I could and I know at the end you had many friends who loved you, I met most of them for the first time at your funeral.

I wonder what they thought of me as I didn’t look like a grieving mum, I delivered your eulogy without crying and even did a little dance at the end when we played the Friends theme song. I can’t explain but I don’t think it had really sunk in that you had gone. I just wanted to celebrate your life and acknowledge the caring, unique, intelligent person that you were.

I like to believe you were just too special for this world and I have to believe you loved me, even though you never scribbled a last note. We shared so many memories of special times, we laughed so much – one thing I can still hear is the sound of your giggles. So much love and so many memories to treasure. I don’t have anyone to talk to about these memories but I do share memories of you often with people. I know it makes them uncomfortable, but I won’t stop doing it.

As usual on your birthday, I wonder what you would be doing now in a parallel universe where you were still here, but I think 23 years was your time. I have found peace and acceptance but part of me that misses you grows a bit bigger each year.

I’ll always love you Toby, happy heavenly birthday x