“When Gary Speed took his life real questions got asked. “When Alexander McQueen took his life this was simply put down to him being artistic, and his mum dying,” she says. Jane Powell set up CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, when public knowledge of the figures was woefully low. In 2017, 75% of the 6,213 suicides recorded in the UK and the Republic of Ireland were men. With every high profile male suicide the nation becomes more clued up on the shocking statistics. I know now that at the heart of his death was the inability to speak out and ask for help – the destructive conditioning that tells men and boys ‘being silent’ is ‘being strong’. It’s coming up to five years since Billy’s suicide, and in that time learning, listening and connecting with other people who have had similar experiences has provided the comfort and solidarity I couldn’t find elsewhere. I do believe that the intensity of our relationship, the impossibility of our move across the country at such a young age and the pain we both experienced after the inevitable messy demise led to a chain of events that neither I, nor he, had much control over. Ultimately I don’t believe I was responsible for my ex’s suicide. In the absence of answers and closure, I wore my grief like a badge of honour and told myself this great, lofty tale of Shakespearean proportions where tragedy was the only outcome At first I took some comfort in his family’s blame, and in blaming myself. That I was unimportant in life, and therefore also in death.īut equally, it felt like the opposite was true. The most painful part was the feeling that in the period of time that I hadn’t spoken to him, I had become irrelevant. Being denied my chance to mourn him with others who loved him meant grieving was a solitary process, and I’ve marked the anniversaries of his death alone ever since. I slipped away from some of the friends I relied on to feel close to him, knowing they’d felt torn about their loyalties. It was made clear to me that his family didn't want me at the funeral, despite our distance over the past year. But, given that Billy and I hadn’t spoken in a year, it still came as a shock when I found myself unexpectedly in the firing line. In an attempt to carve out some answers to the myriad of questions piling up in the aftermath of his death, finding someone to point the finger at can help ease some of that turmoil. When someone dies by suicide, I can see how easily people go looking for someone to blame. But we hadn’t spoken the year since we’d broken up. My relationship with Billy had been tempestuous and when we broke up – a short, sharp shock that was the culmination of a year’s worth of desperate fighting – I always thought we would one day get back together. As I started to comprehend his suicide, there were even more questions. As the news spread – that he had died by suicide, just miles outside the city we’d moved to together eighteen months before – the reality of how he died weighed less heavily than that of his death itself. He rode a motorbike, so we thought that maybe he’d been in an accident. In the immediate aftermath of his death we – the friends of his I had stayed tentatively close to and I – didn’t know how it had happened. I had no idea that male suicide was such a huge problem, affecting so many, so profoundly. We know that now, after the deaths of a string of high profile men in the last few years – The Prodigy’s Keith Flint, music producer Avicii, and most recently, Love Island’s Mike Thalassitis, who died by suicide last month, aged 26.īut when Billy*, the ex-boyfriend I had split up with a year before, died in 2013, I had no idea. Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 49 in the UK.
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