In the same newspaper there was the account of a man who'd gone missing from his home. He was later found on top of a very high bridge. The police were able to talk the man down. This done, he was promptly arrested, charged and fined eighty something pounds for trespassing on railway property.

The Long Goodbye: Taken from The TIMES MAGAZINE dated 12 Nov 2005

 

Every year in Britain around 6000 people commit suicide. But what happens to the loved ones they leave behind? Here, three women talk about how they struggled to come to terms with their bereavement, and how they coped with the stigma, the bureaucracy-and the never ending questions.

 

It was the silence that did it. It so often is. Eve Sweeney had not heard from her 18 year old daughter, Vicky, over the weekend and by the Monday, maternal intuition was prickling her. Perhaps Vicky had gone away? She had booked a holiday with her boyfriend just before their split: Maybe she had decided to use her ticket? It seemed sensible to go around the house of bedsits in Reading after work, meet the landlady check if any clothes were missing from Vicky’s room.

            In the event, the landlady inspected the room first. Eve was met by the timid platitudes of someone bearing bad news. “You’d better sit down”. A mug of hot sweet tea in a shabby kitchen.

            “I didn’t have Vicky long enough” Eve says today . “I missed out on all the fun. We used to go shopping and she’d pick up outrageous items and say ‘this is really you mum’ and we’d fall about laughing”. “I always tell friends to always take pictures of your children, even after they’ve grown”. “Mine got to a certain age and I stopped taking pictures somehow, I never had a picture of Vicky older than 16”.

            Eve Sweeney is currently researching a PHD on bereavement, with special emphasis on bereavement by suicide, so she knows her reactions are typical: the anaesthetised disbelief, the anger, the animal pain, the endless questioning. Even now 18 years later, Eve Sweeney replays the events leading up to her daughters death, searching for the why, hunting the moment when the impetus might have been deflected, had she but realised. Was it- she knows this is illogical –but was it the years struggling as a single mother after her divorce from the children’ father? Or was it Vicky’s underachievement at school and her useless interim job at a Reading supermarket while she wondered what to train for next? Was it the split  from her boyfriend and the trauma of an abortion? Her brother, Michael, meanwhile, relived a last row in the pub on the Friday night. Nineteen months older, he had preffered fraternal advice which was received  with alcohol-fueled resentment. She stormed off. It was the last time the family heard from her, although both Michael and Eve called and left messages over the weekend.

            Michael and Eve made a pact. “We agreed we would not do this to each other. I have to admit I could have easily killed myself, the pain was so bad”.  “And I was worried about him because I felt responsible. To be honest if any one had said to me           ‘one of your children is going to take their own life’ I would have said Michael, Vicky was a feisty thing”.

            Until that afternoon it had not been grasped by Eve that Vicky had hoarded the anti depressants, which had been prescribed in text-book small doses by her GP. Eve remembers the jagged details of the unnatural  death: the paramedics shouting at her when she got Vicky’s GPs details wrong. She remembers the invasion of her grief by the bureaucratic legion. “Im sure their were eight policemen in the room when I identified her body: eight strangers looking at my poor daughters naked body on the floor of her room. They didn’t even wrap her up”.

            The funeral seemed to be the one event within their power, the one family ritual offering a connection every other death. Even so, its date was delayed for a month while waiting for the coroners authorisation. “Suddenly your loved ones seem to belong to the coroner”. Eve found the system “cruelty itself”, and cites her experience at Vicky’s inquest.

            “I felt I was on trial. You stand in a box, you swear an oath, you are asked ‘so you hadn’t seen your daughter since the previous Tuesday?’” “No, and you can’t explain”. “But I spoke to her twice a day”. The coroner produced a statement from one of the girls in the flat which ended with the words ‘I felt she needed her mum’. “That sticks with you forever,  I wanted to say, Im guilty, whatever it is, Im guilty, just don’t put me through anymore”.

            It wasn’t until the local newspapers were published –‘girl commits suicide over boyfriend’-that Eve appreciated the coroners court was open. “I assumed the two gossiping young ladies taking notes in front of me were stenographers” she says. What angered her was that someone had passed details to them that had not been disclosed in court, including the note Vicky left, which consisted of a list of names- her friends, her ex boyfriend, the word ‘mum’ alongside the simple apology ‘sorry’.

            Nor did the verdict help, “She received an open verdict, I knew what she had done, I can’t go round for the rest of my life saying ‘oh my daughter died of an open verdict’ “.

            Eve Sweeney has had a lot of practice at bravery, she knows when to interject a note of irony to leaven her story. She laughs with the rich timbre of a nicotine addict. In the aftermath, she changed jobs twice, from one secretarial post to another, she and her second husband, Phil, rushed to move house. Viewing properties, “women in particular ask if you have children, sometimes I would say ‘yes two’ or sometimes ‘yes one’ but either way it added to my guilt”.

            The haunted nights were controlled with sleeping pills , self rationed to provide one night in sevens relief from an insomniac’s exhaustion” I would wake in the small hours with a desparate need to visit the cemetery. I rang the Samaritans at one point,”Four years down the line “ I thought I was coping pretty well until I has a hysterical outburst at workI couldn’t speak for sobbing,”

 

August 1956                                                       

 

Barbara hind recently found her fathers gravestone in a Liverpool cemetery but sh has yet to look at the inscription with its date of death “ Its as though I cant bring myself to ,” she says, although she realises it would provide a hard fact among muddled  memories among a tapestry of scenes stitched to a childs bewilderment.

    She knows that t was shortly before her 11^th birthday that her father disappeared from the familys narrative. One of the nine children she was the fourth eldest of the sevem remaining at home. Her father , a regimental sargent who has been honorable discharged from the army band had turned , in peacetime , to the docks for employment, ran a “”terrifically strict home, like the barracks but loving,”

  That summer , most of the family went for a weeks holiday on the Ilkse of man. Barbaras father stayed behind to wallpaper their council house “He took us to the Mersey ferry and I remembered saying goodbye to him but realising that he hadn’t waited on the pier to see us off. It was out of character for him. My mother had to prise my fingers off the rial,”

On the Monday morning, her mother left the bed and breakfast unexpectedly and in tears. The children stayed on returning a week later in the care of the older ones. Barbara was climbing the stairs when her mother’s voice called out fro the front room. The others filed in to see her but Barbara did not follow” I went into the kitchen and started drying the dishes. I could hear my sisters crying. My older sister came in and said “Whats the matter? Haven’t you got any feelings?” I didn’t know what she was talking about and it was as if I didn’t want to know,”

    It was only as an adult in her fifties that Barbara confronted the fact that her father had gassed himself. By then she had maintained a long happy marriage to Bob, a rail executive, and her only son had left for University; there was suddenly time to enrol on an art foundation course to complete an MA in photography, which would eventually lead her to create an exhibition which explored the past. Deeply buried memories surfaced in the process.

            Ambivalence and silence had governed her child hood. She was never told her father was dead. His shaving brush remained on the shelf in the kitchen for the next two years, as if, at any moment, he would stroll down the stairs and lather his chin for the day ahead. Yet photographs were destroyed and he was never discussed. “He was obliterated from our lives and you were left to make sense of it the best you could”. The bullies at school taunted her “your fathers dead and we know how he died”. On some levels so did Barbara. She has since heard that he was receiving treatment for “what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder but was then called shell shock”. In the fifties this consisted of electro shock therapy. That is her only clue.

            His absence transformed the patterns of family life. Where once she held open house, with emphasis on music, books and games of chess, Barbaras mother now had to field 3 jobs. “Our family effectively broke up, with older ones moving away. We went from a strict routine to being left to our own devices. From lunch at home to the humiliation of free school meals”. Regularly late for assembly because of her new chores, Barbara was singled out for public punishment, even though the school new of her circumstances. She left school at 14 and went to work for an estate agent, and left home 2 years later.

            She is eager to emphasise that hers is not an unrelenting sob story. She was a lively teenager, a country standard athlete and long before she found her award winning talent for photography she was entitled to feel satisfaction for her personal accomplishments. Yet the longer the family silence continued, the longer the impenetrable it became. “None of us were even aware we avoided the subject. When I was younger people used to ask what my father did and I would reply that he was dead. So they’d say something like ‘oh, was it cancer?’ And I would answer ‘I don’t know, I was only a child’, that was my way out”. His memory had faded so completely that in 1991 when Barbara developed negatives she found following her mothers death, she was shocked to see her fathers face again. “My image of him did not concur with his features, I had forgotten him”.

            Those photographs became the basis of a university project to construct a self portrait which, several years later evolved into an exhibition, ‘Tears: Childhood loss and memory”, which has travelled to several countries in the course of its compilation.  It returned in 1996 to the council house where she had grown up, Barbara finally cried “40 years worth of tears”. She walked up the stairs, back down to the kitchen. She was shown photographs by the current occupants of the yellow and brown paint on the walls which they had uncovered during renovation., and which Barbara’s father had papered over as his final spousal task.

            Barbara’s exhibition aroused strong reactions from some of her siblings, with an older brother and an older sister proving especially hostile (although neither viewed it) “I felt I was being silenced once more, I am an adult in my later years, and his death was so long ago and yet we still feel unable to discus it. That is the legacy of my fathers death. It has made us a family who cannot communicate. I don’t blame my family” She continues “what is it in our society that still makes people so ashamed of suicide? It was only three or four years ago that I replied honestly to the question ‘how did your father die?’ but after that I determined it would not be an issue for me anymore, that I would not be made to feel shame for something that happened in my childhood”.

 

Thursday, December 16, 1999

 

Five hours after Karen Van Nijkerk had quarrelled with her husband, Pieter, she spotted headlights on her quiet Surrey road: A police car with her mothers car proceeding it. This unusual convoy brought with it a shiver of dread and Karen  surmised that something must have happened to her father. As it turned out, the police, by mistake had gone first to her parents house to find Karen in order to break bad news: Pieter had thrown himself under a train.

            Throughout there six year marriage, Pieter had often threatened suicide. A gifted, intelligent and complex man, he suffered from depression which he self treated with alcohol. Karen had stood by him through overdoses, through violent and erratic outbursts, for better and more frequently, for worse. Finally, she had decided she could take no more. “I was going to try tough love, I had no doubt we would get back together because we always had”.

            Pieter moved out, returning to his mother in Holland for a few days, before appearing in England again. A former high flying management consultant, he had been reduced to working in a call centre but resigned after being disciplined for sending Karen height-ened emails from work. He told Karen he wished he to stop drinking .It was a goal she had heard him voice many times before. On the16th, when she went home at lunchtime to feed her dogs, he was waiting for her. An unpleasant scene ensued. At 4 oclock he rang her at work. “He was demanding to see me, almost begging to see me, I told him to go to hell. Those were the last words I said to him”. A CCTV camera caught him pacing the local station platform for hours before he finally disappeared from its silent impassive tape.

            The frequency of Pieters suicide threats made his final act as shocking as if he had never expressed his desolation. “It was Pieter crying wolf, you never expected it to come true”. His death pitched Karen into depression herself “I don’t understand how love survived 7 years of what he put me through” she says quietly. “You can label people with whatever you like, that he was depressive or alcoholic, but he had compassion, he would talk about all sorts of things, he was interesting. He was a good man with bad problems”. His suicide felt like a forcible divorce.

            She had met Pieter, who was 17 years older than her and widely travelled in 1984, when she was just 22. He was her first grand romance. “He asked me to marry him within 6 days, I should have read the warning signs then” she says with a puff of breath too short to be a laugh. They split up after a year but he resurfaced in 1992  and they married a year later. “I don’t regret marrying him, I am proud my name is Karen Van Nijerk” she says.

            Like a third of suicide victims, Pieter had been receiving treatment for his mental health problems, but the system provided no continuity of care: Just weeks before his death , when he was in crisis, it churned him in and out of a ward within 24 hours. Ten days after Pieters suicide Karen was seeking professional help after 2 attempts of her own. “I know the pain suicide causes and yet I almost perpetuated it by taking an overdose”. Luckily for her, she was covered by private health care. If not for her psychiatrist, and her supportive family, she doubts she would be giving this interview.

            She was, of course, haunted by guilt because of her final words to him. “For so long I thought it was the phrase that did it to him. It wasn’t. His life was what did it”. The experience has made her determinedly non-judgemental . She would dearly like his adult children to get in touch with her- both were estranged from him by the time of his death-so that she could explain how much he loved them. Her mother-in-law, who hugged Karen at the funeral, cut off all contact two days later. “I called her on Christmas eve to tell her I was thinking of her and she said ‘thank you for calling, but don’t ever call me again’”.

            Some of the blows were unexpected. Pieters possessions were returned to her by the police, including a 20 pound note covered in blood. A colleague at work delayed  by “an incident” on the line, postured about the selfishness of those who top themselves in the rush hour. Karen said she was helped by an American website established by and for those bereaved by suicide. However, because it seemed unrelenting in its focus on death, she eventually started her own. “I believe to grieve properly you have to have a balance. Everyday life is not about death, you have to have some interests. So what I wanted was a site where people come and their grief be acknowledged, but find a distraction from their grief too”. One sentence left on the message board helped her immeasurably ‘they didn’t leave us, they left life’.

            Five years after Pieters death her equilibrium remains low and is dependent upon medication. This year she suffered a pre Christmas  crisis. “Suicide is a different kind of bereavement, and unless you’ve been through it, you don’t understand it. It tears your heart out. I fight suicidal thoughts everyday of my life, but I don’t want to go down the road Pieter did. I don’t want to cause that sort of pain”. .Having accepted  the extent of her depression, today she has downshifted to part time secretarial work, at the shareplan company Mourant-which has been exemplary in its concern for her-and has also begun to sell her own photographic compositions.

            “I have to find a way to live with my problems and have a happy and productive life”, she says. “I want to have a normal life because Im 42 years old and it would be sad if I am unable to grab something back. I want to be happy”.

 

Monday, September 7, 1992

 

A routine afternoon at work for Eve Sweeney was interrupted by a phone call. It was her son Michael, “Id never heard him so angry. He was saying ‘why did you do it?’ ‘why did you make me agree to that pact?’. Then he hung up and I redialled and redialled but he was lifting the phone and putting it down. Eventually, much calmer he spoke to me. I said ‘Im coming down’ and he said ‘ok’.”

            So she drove to his flat in Portsmouth, where he had moved after his sisters death, arriving at the door sandwiched between 2 shops at about a quarter to six. She knocked and knocked without luck, telling herself he was playing his music too loudly, didn’t he always? Before long alarm rising, she rang the police and explained his sister had taken an over dose five years previously. All the while doing sums in her head; if it had taken her an hour and a half to get there, there would still be time to get him to the hospital for his stomach pumped.

            She had to persuade the young constable who arrived to break the door down “I followed him into the flat., down the corridor and then he stopped just where you go round the corner and up the stairs and he said ‘no you cant follow me’. I knew then Michael was hanging there. He took me to the yard and told me to stay there. I didn’t even turn my head, but I could hear him calling an ambulance and mentioning the code for a body”.

            This time she knew the procedure she would have to negotiate, this time, the system was kinder, providing a paradigm in best practice. There were 2 police officers present  atthe scene, the other more experienced.  He cut Michael down and asked her to identify his body. An inquest within a week of the death. A coroner who gave his condolences in court and the suicide verdict she wanted. “I know some people don’t like it, but it helps you face facts you cant avoid. Eve buried Michael within 2 weeks of his death, sending him off o the raucous strains of The Stranglers and burying him next to Vicky, as he had wished. And then she re-entered counselling .

“ knew the symptoms of grief, the black clouds that would descend. I knew I would get panic attacks and they would pass. These things were normal. That the fear was normal. The wanting to die was normal. So they didn’t frighten me as much as when Vicky died”. Within 2 years she had begun research into her part time PHD on bereavement knowing as she did so that she was following a pattern : Many of those bereaved by suicide choose a strategy involving helping others through the experience.

She has inside knowledge and expert knowledge. So much so that the Home Office consulted her for its post-shipman review of coroners courts, which she fears will gather dust in a drawer like several previous reviews of the past 30 years. Eve Sweeny doesn’t mince words. She has more experience in the field than any human being  should have to bear and yet, ironically, she will always be brimful of questions.

“Michael called me once when he was upset. He said ‘she was my sister you know?’ And my reply-I will never forgive myself-Of course I know she was my daughter. But I didn’t know . That was the only time he showed his pain. He always claimed he was dealing with it. And what I would do-even if I was deeply distressed-I would pull myself together for Michael. I should have shown him raw emotion. It might have helped him show his”.

“A week before he died Michael came up to see me and Phill, I realise now he was saying goodbye. What had changed? I don’t think anything had changed. I think suicide had always been an option for him. What had stopped him doing it sooner was our pact. He was 25 when he died, and when I saw him in the mortuary in the same Portsmouth hospital he was born in, I realised, as I hadn’t before, that he was a man, it was his life and he had the right to do with it what he pleased.”

“You shouldn’t ask people why “ she adds gently.   “It is the question I am asked by people the most, but I have to accept I’ll never know the answer. Everyday those bereaved by suicide wake up with a different reason”.