Three dads who found solace in the club no one wants to join
LOOKING back, Mike Palmer thinks that his daughter’s refusal to change the strings on her guitar might have been a sign. It was perhaps an indication, he writes, that Beth was ‘losing some kind of hope’.
A few months later, aged just 17, she took her own life. Thoughts like the one about the guitar strings, writes Mike, ‘still haunt me’.
It’s the ‘club that no one wants to join’, but eventually, through charity and social media connections, Mike teamed up with Tim Owen and Andy Airey, both of whom had lost their own young daughters to suicide.
The trio decided to raise awareness, and funds, by walking the route between their respective houses, from Penrith in Cumbria, through Sale (near Manchester), to King’s Lynn in Norfolk. As the subtitle of the book puts it: 300 miles of hope. The walk was more of a success than they could possibly have imagined.
The media publicised it, and from the first hour, car horns were beeping as people recognised them.
‘I’m not sure if satisfaction is the right word to describe my emotions,’ writes Andy, ‘ but I began to feel a sense of pride.’
Tim had forgotten to turn off his JustGiving notifications, so looked at his phone to find 2,709 unread emails. All along the route, people shared stories and offered support, helped by a tracker which gave the men’s current location on the walk’s website.
Eventually, the three of them had to give themselves some privacy at each overnight stop by covering the tracker in tinfoil, thereby blocking its signal.
ThEy received a £10,000 donation from James Bond star Daniel Craig. That amount would be matched later in the walk by Nicole Kidman, while ex-Manchester United player Lou Macari ( whose own son committed suicide in 1999) arranged to meet them as they passed United’s ground.
hearing about Craig’s donation, Macari replied: ‘ Right, I’ll give you ten thousand and ONE pounds. I don’t want to be beaten by James Bond!’
As well as detailing the walk, the book also relates the fathers’ reactions to the tragedies they endured. Mike and his wife, helen, differed in the early days: she would lie on Beth’s bed, ‘snuggling a jumper that still smells of our daughter’s perfume’, while he literally had to turn pictures of their daughter to the wall.
‘ We remain[ ed] on different planets,’ he said.
Mike felt anger towards Beth, who had ‘ throat- punched her family into a spiral of grief’.
A diary entry from the time reads: ‘I feel apprehensive and wonder if this feeling is shame — people thinking, “This man’s daughter was so miserable she took her own life”.’ Another is: ‘3.30 am. Another f***ing day.’
Andy, whose daughter Sophie was 29 when she died by suicide six days before Christmas in 2018, recalls her last conversation with her mother, Andy’s ex-wife.
Sophie was depressed after her own marriage had ended, but said: ‘It’s just a blip, Mum.’
Andy decided, with his family, that they would go ahead with the Christmas festivities. he vowed to take Sophie’s place in a forthcoming half-marathon.
At her funeral, he met the man who had found her body, and the pair became friends: ‘Sophie would have loved him.’
Tim’s 19-year-old daughter Emily took her own life — as did Beth — in the early days of the first Covid lockdown of 2020. She had always shown an angry side, and had
attempted suicide before, but in recent years had regained some equilibrium. The lockdown took that away: she was unable to visit the gym, or do her job at a pub, both of which had become crucial to her state of mind.
Tim, who’s in the RAF, remembered a video he’d once watched, where a U.S. general gave lessons he’d learned from basic training.
One of them was to make your bed each day. A very simple thing, but it allowed you to say that even if you achieved nothing else in those 24 hours, you’d achieved that. Tim found it a great help in the period after Emily’s death.
Eventually, though, he had to move house: the old one held too many memories.
EvERy day of their walk, the three dads were met by other bereaved relatives. One woman lost her daughter and husband to suicide within eight months of each other. (Mike admits that he, too, thought of it, ‘but I couldn’t do this to the rest of my family and friends’.)
A father brought his suicidal son all the way from Leeds to meet them near Derby: ‘We wondered what the future had in store for them.’ The talking only ever helped, as ‘the weight lifted from those other bereaved parents didn’t seem to land on us’.
This book is an excellent reminder of how important it is to keep talking to those closest to us, and even those not so close to us. Tim, Mike and Andy have learned that the hard way, and their determination to help others avoid the same fate is wonderful.
Their trip raised more than half a million pounds, and they’ve undertaken others since. They are, quite literally, talking the talk and walking the walk.