S-A-S: Sibling After Suicide

Today is my Graduation Day … for the PhD I completed in memory of my brother, Martin … whose birthday will fall exactly one month hence … he would’ve been 40 years old this year. I am somewhat without words to explain the messy mixture of emotions that such details cumulatively provoke - I think I still fail to fully comprehend the totality of what has happened since 15 th December 2011. I am not able to see my brother’s face in mind without photographic aids, and many memories I reach for I cannot grasp as I’d like - they are stuck or lost or both. Yet, with certain songs and sounds, I am permitted moments of reconnection, permission to linger in a good memory.   So, I’ve made a playlist. I used to make playlists all the time. It is not over-egging things to say that across my 20s, I couldn’t/wouldn’t leave the house without my music catalogue. The arrival of the iPod Classic provided a life-altering and indispensable treasure - my entire musical life in my pocket, a...

"I am, at this ten-year mark, now beginning to recognise each of these little grief stories as actually together forming a bigger narrative that is ultimately about learning to unite my life with my brother before and my life with my brother after" Marking the anniversary of a death, I think, is never about a single day of pain - knowing the day is coming, anticipating it, can be as difficult as the day itself. This being the tenth time I’ve experienced the approach of Martin’s death-versary, you’d think I’d know by now what to emotionally expect. I do now *kinda* already anticipate that late-September up to the 15th December will be ‘just hard’, the tone of life identifying very much with words from Huxley’s poem ‘ Anniversaries ’… ‘And there were sudden gusts that blew Our dreaming banners into storm; We wore the uncertain crumbling form Of a brown swirl of windy leaves, A phantom shape that stirs and heaves Shuddering from earth, to fall again With a dry whisper of withe...

The Ninth-Year Reflection 15 th December 2020 -  At 9 years since Martin died, I do find myself making memories out of the experience of living after his physical departure. I am no longer confined, restricted to the still arduous task of trying to locate past moments (fond or otherwise) from the times we were physically in the same world - I have raked and raked over the history at this point, and whilst there are still some blockages, inaccessible stories, (something that is certainly a painful, frustrating truth to reckon with), I now can welcome the fact that he sometimes pops-up in new life-moment recordings (albeit in a differently-toned form). I may no longer be able to make or share new memories with my brother, but he can still appear in ‘present moments of significance’ nonetheless, like the one I wrote below (about my daughter, then aged 4 years, drawing a picture of us all for the 6th anniversary of Martin's death). And these new moments in themselves, firstly, are imp...

Between June and September this year (2019), I had 10 sessions of EMDR. I have written previously on why I opted to try EMDR specifically (to address the persisting vividness of my brother’s death by suicide) - what follows here is a little of what I learned from the actual experience of having this still-relatively-niche form of therapy. Firstly , it’s quite something to have someone look directly into your eyes and say without a shred of exaggeration, “you’re traumatised”. Not gonna lie, it made me uncomfortable. My face, I believe, revealed no real reaction to the therapist’s comment, but in my mind I pictured another me, head tilted, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, sarcastically responding “Am I, though?” Middle class, white woman, good home, family, job etc. etc. “Am I really ?” My first feeling was fraudulence, a lacking of justification to ‘own PTSD’ - I’m no veteran recovering from horrific conflict zone experiences or victim rebuilding after living through natural disaste...

[Originally posted 15th December 2017] Mrs Higson was a fearsome woman to behold. At least to me. With Margaret-Thatcher hair, heels and handbag (and a personal vendetta against the word ‘nice’ because “it is a word that means absolutely nothing”), she was an English teacher and a half. I don’t remember the specifics of the task set, but when I was fourteen or so, for homework I had pilfered the characters of Pride and Prejudice to write ‘a next chapter’. I also don’t remember the specifics of the text I produced; but I do recall that after hearing the work of others in my class, during an unexpected ‘read your work aloud’ session, I panicked. I subsequently didn’t read mine out as written because, basically, it to me sounded nothing short of diabolical. Consequently, I stumbled all over my words and all I really remember is mumbling something about Mr Darcy getting run over by a horse-and-cart, and standing isolated as my classmates, leaning back in their chairs behind their individ...

At the beginning of August 2017, I came across an article by Poorna Bell (author of the brilliant Chase the Rainbow ). In it she discussed the issue of ‘name’, specifically surnames, their meaning and the circumstances under which they are or can be changed. Name-changing is not necessarily an unusual topic for discussion, especially for women, given the still-relatively-normal-for-many action of changing surname to indicate marriage (see Finch, 2008: 712). But Bell’s piece was particularly interesting because it raised the issue of name changing after the loss of a spouse to suicide: “It’s a question I was asked a lot in the first year after Rob died. Was I changing my name? Vehemently I said no, but it was also complicated. It was my married name, and I was no longer married…but my maiden name was like a stranger’s house and the locks were changed. I am no longer that person anymore. And I felt by changing my name, I was erasing him from my life, when the absence of him was already...

The  15th December 2018 marks 7 years since my brother, Martin, died by taking his own life. 7  years is a weird space of time - short yet long, not recent enough for grief to be thought of as fresh, but not so long ago in my life to feel far in the past.  I’ve taken some time to think about what I’ve learned about being bereaved by suicide over these years. I speak for no one but myself - these are my own thoughts and experiences.  1. If a person dies, they are lost to many, to a community, but the individual experiences of the loss are so important. One person does not have to, indeed can’t, feel the effect of a person’s death in exactly the same way as others (others who have their own memories and thoughts). On the Christmas Eve after Martin’s death,  his  friends invited my Mum and Dad and I down to his favourite pub, to join in reminiscing. There were so many people there, the majority of whom I did not know very well ( some not  at...