Let’s all do our bit to stop this tragic waste of lives
LAST Sunday, with a heavy heart, I attended a screening of a documentary about a beautiful young man named Calum Barnes, who tragically took his own life in 2017.
Calum, a 21-year-old hip-hop artist, left behind a devastated family and a close circle of heartbroken friends, as well as a music community in which he was greatly admired, united in total disbelief.
Calum was regarded by all who knew him as an aspirational and gifted figure who was endowed with unique and infectious qualities.
His seemingly soft exterior, complete with porcelain-pale skin and a curling quiff that occasionally cameoed on his fiery red head, acting as a clever decoy from the tougher stuff that lay underneath.
Calum possessed a steely determination to succeed at whatever enterprise to which he turned his formidable focus.
This was as true in the recording studios, where he spent much of his time, as it was in the call centres he worked in.
This refusal to complain or deviate even slightly from the path that he set for himself is what made his death all the more tragic. That in what must have been an excruciating moment of emotional turmoil, the flame of Calum’s potential was so irrevocably extinguished.
The short film, We Are All Here, is showing at the Glasgow Short Film Festival on March 15, and is narrated by Calum himself, using video logs he recorded privately in the months and weeks prior to his death.
The cast of contributors includes his mother and older sister, as well as his closest friends, each offering their matter-of-fact and poignant reflections.
I was moved quickly to tears, not by my own sadness but the unusual yet strangely comforting sound of a room full of young men gently sobbing.
In death, Calum had somehow released them from the shackles of their self-imposed masculinity that can become a mental prison.
After the film, one friend even shared the fact that he had sought medical support for his own mental health problems, something he would previously have found difficult to admit.
Still, this was not simply a story about someone who took their own life. This was a beautiful and frank portrait of those left behind in the aftermath of a suicide – the grief-stricken family and friends, searching for answers, to whom the emotional wreckage of an untimely death will inevitably fall.
We Are All Here captures vividly their dignity, bravery and even their unfounded guilt as they trawl through the debris in a desperate struggle to piece it all together.
Despite the sense of grief in every frame of We Are All Here, directed by Hannah Currie, somehow courses with an unapologetic and boundless optimism.
In the closing moments, Calum’s sister and friends return, with brightly coloured balloons, to the location where Calum lived out his final moments. Each makes a solemn commitment to do whatever it takes to banish the potentially fatal stigma surrounding mental health problems once and for all.
Given that another body was fished out of the Clyde this week, no doubt leaving another family heartbroken, perhaps it’s time we made a similar commitment, as a society, to stand alongside them.