S-A-S: Sibling After Suicide

I wrote the following words a little while back. They were for an anthology on ‘loneliness’ that was originally intended for publication later this year. Unfortunately, not enough submissions were received (possibly due to the general unwillingness of people to talk about feeling/being lonely) so the publication was cancelled, and I was asked if it was OK to delete my entry. I thought about this, but rather than wipe it, I decided to just put it out here…: “The thing about feeling alone is that we assume that this is the same as  being  alone. We tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel lonely because ‘ look at all the people, friends and family, we have around us in the world’ . But the number of loved ones around you doesn’t mean you are guarded against loneliness. Loneliness is also not of one form. It is not a single feeling – we can feel lonely in several ways. When my brother died by suicide, I was surprised to learn how lonely I could feel when so many people were aro...

How often it is that the unexpected triggers a return to memories. My daughter finishes school for the summer holidays in a week, her first year done and dusted. In the end-of term run up, though, she won’t be told to gather with the ‘other summer birthdays’ in front of a whole school assembly for a communal well-wishing. My brother and I, with August birthdays 3 days apart, were always given that dubious honour during our primary years together. It was never so much the 3-year part of our age gap that bothered me; rather the 3-day element, Martin’s birthday inconveniently (I often perceived) following mine. I do, for instance, recall one occasion when, such was the level of my annoyance at seeing him playing with my birthday presents, coupled with being armed with knowledge of what exactly he was due to receive in 2-days-time, that I was unable to curb the jealousy and revealed the secret to him to get him to just buzz off. It worked – he was ecstatic, and I regained control over m...

At the foot of the Penglais Road hill in the Welsh town of Aberystwyth, there is a small, almost shack-looking, one-storey beige building that is the West Coast tattoo parlour. I passed it almost daily, during my commute to the lectures and seminars and Union Bar nights-out of my undergraduate-student days, each time tempted to investigate more. A friend of mine had had a large red rose with green splayed-out thorns and leaves printed into her lower back and I thought it was lovely, graceful. At the age of 19/20-ish, though I never voiced the thought, I really wanted my own tattoo, something ‘little and pretty’ was my thinking. Then I heard a rumour story about another friend who’d fainted and fallen off a chair due to the pain whilst having one done – I never found out the truth basis of the tale, but nonetheless even the slightest idea that such a needle response could happen kind of put me off. I moved on to other desires. Now, however, almost 7 years on from my little brother and...

On the 8th April 2011, my little brother, Martin, wrote the following to me: “I haven’t moved a step forward in seven years. TIME for a CHANGE. What do you think?” I replied saying that was a brilliant idea, and I would support him however needed. But later the same year, on 24th November, unbeknown to me at the time, he wrote this one and only blog post: ‘I don’t think I can live any longer in a vacuum; nor can I live with the unwavering paradox of desperately craving company and isolation at one and the same time. … I have come to the point now whereby incessant commentary, self-criticism and constant fear have effectively annihilated whatever prior persona there may have been. I would renounce everything – everything – just to ‘be myself’ for 5 seconds. Just ‘to do’, not ‘think to do’. I go to meet people as if they were the gallows. I have tried everything I can think of but cannot conceive of it being otherwise. My only passions were music and history. But this whatev...

The run-up to the festive season can provoke anxiety for many who have lost, especially if they've been bereaved by suicide. Here I'm re-posting a short piece I wrote in 2016 about my views on Christmas:  "Christmas 2011 involved a visit to the funeral home to see my brother’s body in the casket and an evening where my parents and I, separately and silently but together, ignored the “Dr Who” Christmas Special blaring out of the TV in favour of drinking wine while looking through photos of Martin’s life, choosing our individual favourite moments as well as deciding what should be collated together for inclusion in the funeral image projection. It wouldn’t be unreasonable, given these circumstances, for any person to think that Christmas could never be marked by us “properly” again. But it would also be an incorrect assumption to say automatically “you must find Christmas so very hard” or suggest “well I just couldn’t do Christmas if that had happened to me” – it’s just n...