‘In some ways it feels like an age away – in others, only yesterday’
SOMETIMES, IT’S EASIER TO TEXT…
his father recalls. ‘I don’t think we could have prevented it. Anyway, the idea we could have prevented it – it’s just too much to bear. I don’t want to go there.’ ‘Fifteen years ago, my beautiful brother took his own life. It’s left a void that just never healed,’ he explains, looking obviously uncomfortable. Now 39 and a successful documentary film-maker, he adds: ‘Apart from conversations where it has been almost forced on me, I don’t talk about him at all.’
Gweneth, now 34, remembers bursting into tears when her older brother Orlando called her. The words ‘I’m really struggling with the memory of Evelyn,’ hung in the air between them.
She had not said her brother’s name for 10 years.
‘The walk through places we walked with Evelyn provided us with such a rare opportunity to talk. To remember him and to – perhaps – make sense of what we all went through, and what Evelyn went through,’ she says poignantly. ‘In some ways, it feels like an age away – in others only yesterday. But we all absolutely need to talk about mental illness.’
‘How do you not think about him?’ he confronts the successful documentary maker. Recalling trying to talk to Orlando in the early days of his friend E’s death, he says, talking to his brother was ‘ like the reaction you get when you ask a parent something that you know you shouldn’t have said’.
He shows footage of the pair skateboarding with their friend, Jack, and asks again why Orlando refused to open up.
‘I guess it’s just part of a “Man up, stiff upper lip, just get on with it”, but is an outdated view of masculinity. If you could open up – it might help someone who fears being seen as weak when the burden is shared…’
is on Netflix now
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