My View

You died on a Friday, five years ago today, a week before your sixteenth birthday.

Your mum called me. It was six o’clock. The evening Spring sun was still bright.

‘I have some bad news. I think that you had better sit down.

C is dead, and we think she may have killed herself.’

Your death has coloured every day since, and irrevocably changed the course of my life.

After I put the phone down, I told my girls, your cousins. You were close, having spent so much time together growing up. I spoke aloud the dreadful whispers that they had overheard while I was talking to your mum, gave them their aunts words in the kindest way I could. We spent the evening bundled together on the sofa mute with shock, reeling from the silent, cataclysmic implosion, gasping as the crack opened up in our lives. You were gone. Every fibre of me screamed.

During that surreal, long distance conversation, your mum asked me to tell your Gran, and I promised that I would do it in the gentlest way I possibly could, on her behalf, because I loved her like a sister. So, early the following morning I drove to Gran’s house.

I told your uncle first.

Then I knelt at your Gran’s feet as she sat in her chair, and as I held her hands, I told her that I had the most terrible news imaginable. The most terrible, terrible news. I told her that you had died, and while I heard your aunt whimper with shock, I watched Gran grapple with my words with absolute, despairing incomprehension.  Her fragility and grief remain etched in my memory. ‘Why?’, she kept on sobbing. ‘Why?’.

Your uncle flew thousands of miles away from us to be with your mum, and I stayed to look after my girls. I carried on. I went to work. I looked after Gran. Five days after you died, I drove to work and parked my car. As I turned the engine off, a tidal wave of confusion hit me, pain deafened me, and I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the car. I sat there, alone, terrified. I couldn’t get out of the car, didn’t know how to, all knowledge gone. I phoned a friend and tried to explain, asked her to come and help me open the car door. She told me to drive to her house, which I did, and there my crushing grief for you spewed out of me.

Oh my darling girl, how I love you still. I have changed your nappies, nursed you when you were sick, rocked you to sleep on my lap. Together we have built sand castles, caught crabs and draped sheets and duvet covers into wigwams. We have baked cakes, decorated Christmas trees, sailed high on swings and carved snow angels. We have together read books and sung songs and imagined the rug was a flying carpet whisking us to goodness knows where. I have watched you unwrap your presents through a quarter of your Christmases. I have looked after you, and you, in your sweet way, have looked after me.

I am so, so sorry that I couldn’t be at your funeral. I really wanted to. I was there in spirit. When your uncle returned home a few weeks later, he told me that you looked like Snow White, peacefully asleep with your beautiful long dark hair laid down by your sides. To give me that visual photo memory was inadvertently one of the kindest things he ever did.

We all blamed ourselves, in our own way, for your suicide. I had been speaking with you just a few days before you died – you were bright and bubbly and mad with your cheeky (he would say ‘awesome’) brother – I wonder how I could have misread your face, misheard your voice, not seen a sign? The simple answer may be that there were no signs to be read, but I cannot go back to that FaceTime chat, cannot rewind it, cannot pore over it to check.

Cannot change what happened.

Cannot stop you from ending your life.

None of us know whether another day would have made a difference for you, whether another week may have been enough time to lift the cloud from your beautiful mind and allowed you to see the light that shone from you. Whether celebrating your sixteenth birthday, and being surrounded by love, would have eased the pain you felt and carried some of the tremendous burden of bleakness away.

None of us know.

We will never know.

I will never know.

I want you to know this, my darling girl: that you are loved fiercely, that I remember you every day, that the thought of your smile brings a smile to my face. When Gran was dying, I visited her every day that I could, sometimes more than once a day. I showed her the videos that were on my phone, to break her long days up and divert her thoughts. She always asked to see the same one, where we are crab lining at Looe on your last holiday at our home, where you are bent over the quay, squealing, trying to pull a crab laden line to the salt water bucket. It made her smile. It made her chuckle.

It made her day.

I like to think that, somewhere out in the cosmos, your spirits have found each other.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it

e.e. cummings