Members of a secret society no one wants to belong to
Years after his brother’s suicide, Mark Dowd has found affinity with others who were left behind
‘Here are all his belongings: a suitcase, his laptop… and we also found this under his bed.” The police officer who had accompanied me to the morgue now handed me a large plastic Tesco bag. In it were more than 400 pound coins, a most extraordinary parting shot from my elder brother. At 46, Christopher had taken his own life in a hotel bedroom in Edinburgh. Two days earlier, my parents had the news broken to them by Manchester police, and it had fallen to me to head north and identify him.
No one in our family had seen this coming. It transpired that Chris had been clinically depressed for months and had already made one unsuccessful attempt on his life. Just half an hour before he took an overdose, he had spoken with my mother on the phone. “OK, talk to you next week” had been his final words. No wonder my parents were bewildered and numb with grief. My father decided we should tell anyone who asked that Chris had had a heart attack, as “nobody needed to know”.
This was 18 years ago, but still today, when I recall how my mother, on the day of Chris’s funeral, reached out her hand to touch his body in the coffin, whispering the barely audible words “Goodbye, son…”,
I am overcome and engulfed in tears. Foolishly, I thought I was “over it”. But it is a wound that never really goes away.
When the BBC asked me to make a documentary about suicide and the lasting effect it can have on families, the people I met echoed so many of my own experiences.
Al Hsu, based in Chicago and author of Grieving a Suicide, described it as “belonging to the secret society that no one wants to be a member of ”. His father ended his own life aged only 58, after a stroke severely compromised his independence.
“When someone dies of cancer, you can rail against the cancer cells,
‘When someone ends their own life, they are both the victim and the murderer’
or even if they are brutally murdered you can rage against the attacker. But when someone ends their own life, they are both the victim and the murderer,” he told me. “The conflicting emotions … can go on for years.” Angela Samata was mother to 13-yearold Alexi and three-year-old Benjamin when she found her 32-yearold partner Mark dead in their home on Merseyside. It took years for the anger to subside.
“I recall being at a school play and the seat next to me was empty. And there was this little boy performing his heart out, probably for his dad, and at that moment I was just overcome with rage that Mark wasn’t there with us to watch him on the stage,” she said.
My own regret now is more that I did not do enough to ease my mother’s pain. One huge missed opportunity remains lodged in my mind. Three years after my father’s death, my mother had seen a documentary about young soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan whose bodies were being repatriated. Thousands lined the streets of Royal Wootton Bassett to pay their respects.
This evocative scene, featuring young lives cut short, had really touched a nerve with her. When she alluded to the programme in a telephone chat, her voice broke constantly. But instead of giving her the space to talk, I moved the subject on. From that point on, we never discussed it again. Two years later, she died.
When I mentioned this tale to a family friend recently, I confessed remorse that she had never had the chance to express her grief about Chris. “Well, you’re wrong there,” came back the reply. “She talked to me about him – and on more than one occasion.”
This revelation echoed an insight I encountered time and again during the making of After Suicide. Such are the fraught and tender feelings of guilt and anger in families that it is often preferable to seek opportunities for unburdening outside. Within the immediate clan, too easily the discussion can descend into accusations of blame and fingerpointing, which solve nothing.
Letting go is hard. Very hard. Those who survive can, for years, have the same questions thundering away: “Why did you do this to us? Didn’t you realise the hurt and havoc you would leave behind?”
The fact is these questions are, most likely, the least uppermost in the minds of those who take their own lives. And accepting that is key to living with the lifelong membership of the secret society no one wants to belong to.