Tag: suicide

Both Sides Now (2)

You leave your family wedding ring in my jewellery box. I find it when I find the courage to return to our flat. Not straight away. Why would I look in the jewellery box? I can barely choose clothes never mind trinkets. The ring is tucked deep into the green velvet slot with my other rings. I tell your father. Your father asks for it back.

I don’t protest.

I see you for the last time in the Indian restaurant. You are shade and blur and long woollen sleeves curling your fingers. Your knuckles are tight on the pen. You sign a cheque for the meal and leave. There has been an argument. About what? Kristine follows you out. Let me do it, she says. Later she says you walked directly into traffic, in front of a bus. She says she pulled you back onto the pavement. You head home. We finish our meal and go home to find you.

It is too late.

You smash the flat windows from the inside and call a glazier. Is that so that I don’t find you? That he will instead? We tell ourselves that. Over and over. But we don’t know. Perhaps you smash them in anger and call the glazier to clean up the mess and then. And then. And then you make a decision. Nobody knows but you.

I want to ask Kristine about this again but Kristine is dead. She survives you by twenty-nine years.

Such different deaths.

The glazier calls the police when no one answers the door. He boards up the windows from the outside. To secure the property, he says later. I don’t remember paying the bill.

I wear the ring until I have to hand it back. I don’t recall for how many days or weeks. Twisting and wheeling. Coruscation cold in the lean October sun.

I let myself into the stair. Kristine and Simon are behind me. We are puzzled by the broken windows. We think we’ve been burgled. Our flat is the first on the left on the ground floor. The windows open directly onto the pavement. It is around nine, ten in the evening. In the stairwell, there is a policeman guarding the door. The policeman asks me who I am. Then he tells me you are dead. Not you specifically. Not your name. Rather he says ‘the bloke in there’. And he tells me how you’ve died.

Just like that. With no ceremony. I am twenty years old. Nine days away from my twenty-first. You are dead. We were in a restaurant. You were signing a cheque. There is no other way of writing this. You are dead.

It is true what they say about knees giving way.

You wear the ring and you take it off and you put it in my jewellery box.

To be continued – maybe.

If you are struggling to cope or worried about someone with suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.

Tags death, grief, suicide

blog diary

Daffodils

This morning, I woke at 6. It was unusually early for me, and still dark out. I turned the radio on. Something Understood was just starting. The long running show on BBC’s Radio 4 has a different theme every week. In this episode, the poet Kenneth Steven reflects on poetry that brings healing to the heart. Steven selects poems by Edwin Muir, Robert Frost, WB Yeats, Ted Hughes and others (mostly or all men?) to explore the idea of why people are drawn to poetry at moments of crisis.

I was dozing, and didn’t hear all of the programme, but I woke properly, sat up, when I heard mention of Syliva Plath and Ted Hughes. What would Steven say about Hughes, and his response to Plath’s death, and, crucially, his role in it? Steven says that ‘Daffodils‘ is the most beautiful of all the poems that became the Birthday Letters volume, published in 1998. The poem, he says, is a love poem that reaches out to the long deep scar of death.

I hadn’t heard the poem before, and I wonder, now.

Where have I been?

Where has it been?

Why is this poem not pinned to my desk, folded in the backpage of a notebook, dog eared in a volume that I proffer and parry? Have you seen this? You must read this. Borrow my copy. No no, have it, I don’t need it back, I’ll buy myself another one. Take it, just take it.

This intimate tender poem catches at my throat.

It talks to me now of the suicide of my partner in Edinburgh when I was just twenty years old.

It talks to me now of sun-bossed springs and doughty dreams and naivity and lost landscapes and a time before we understood climate change and the devastating impacts of modern agriculture.

It talks to me now of aging, weathering, withering even, stems cut and sliced, a gathering in, ephemeral beauty, transience, and old grocers curtailed by a winter, concrete in its frigidity.

It talks to me now of keepsakes, the keepsakes I didn’t keep, keeps I tried to treasure but failed, keeps that dulled and muted and curled, pulled out of the blue leather wallet less and less, until finally the keep, the passport photo with its soiled pale frame, wasn’t there and isn’t there and though I search for it most octobers it has gone, as if, as Hughes wrote, ice had a breath.

I don’t know this poem ‘Daffodils’ because I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death and I stopped reading Hughes’ work once the grudge cantankered and coagulated. Plath died before I was born. But somewhere along the way, having studied both Plath and Hughes in English at school, something I read somewhere laid the blame for her suicide on him. I didn’t stop to analyse this. Didn’t ask myself about Plath’s long struggle with mental illness. It was convenient to look at his behaviour, both before and after her death, and to point the finger. The dreadful suicide of Assia Wevill, and her killing of Wevill and Hughes’ four year old daughter, some six year’s after Plath’s death, also with a gas oven, merely cemented my conclusions.

But is this why I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death? Or was it because, for years, I blamed my partner’s death on myself? Was my default to look for external influences, for obvious explanations?

I don’t know. This seems too glib, too neat. And it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t add or take away anything from this extraordinary poem.

Read ‘Daffodils’. Hughes wrote more than one poem with the same name. Ensure you find the correct one.

Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

Tags Hughes, Plath, suicide

Uncategorized

Not you, me

I fill silence. I can’t help myself. It’s a family thing. We take a hush and we trash it. We’re right in there when you’re just pausing for breath, readying your next word. Sculpting a phrase with your tongue. We’re seizing the space you’d rounded out for yourself. Our mouths wide open before yours had even closed. Spittle on our lips. We might point a finger. We might even stand up. Stand over you. Lining you up through our cross-hairs. And then we launch. Our opinions tearing at you like missiles. Right in there on God, independence, nuclear waste. On mental health. On climate change and food banks and the monsters that spread fake news.

Don’t take it personally. I fill my own silences too. Speak to the dead more than the living some days. ‘Don’t go in there, lass. Bloke’s just hung himself,’ the policeman had said outside our front door. And then I was out in the dark street while they cleaned it all up. The world was different in those days. Before social media. Before mobile phones. Before the Internet. I try to describe the new world to the dead lover. Tell him about the future that he’d twisted off with a belt. Use words that I hope he’ll understand. Twitter, I tell him, is when you tell the world your latest umbrage and you type it out on a little machine and send it out like a telegram and lots of people you don’t know might send it on to lots of people they don’t know. He raises an eyebrow. His teeth are neat and white except for the crooked one at the front. His jaw hasn’t sagged. His skin is still smooth tablet brown. He can’t grasp it. Twitter? He motions to his sketch book. Passes over a blunt pencil. I reach out to stroke his cheek. How do you draw a tweet? His questions skim over the cool of my bare arms, slip through a barely open window, slither into a thin shadow at the back of the shower. I watch him in the mirror. Running long pastel-smudged fingers through the dark curl of his hair, buttoning up his brown striped shirt, kneeling down to fiddle with the laces of his cherry-red sneakers. I don’t look at his neck.

After his death I kept his photograph in purses then wallets then inside pockets. A passport photo he’d given me the day after we’d met over spilt cider in Mathers. I was dressed up as a gnome. He must have liked gnomes. Took that photo with me backpacking across Australia. Hitchhiking on river boats down the Sundarbans. Cycling the Andes. In the evenings, lying lonely in dank hostel bunks, I told him everything. The crocodile eyes floating on night rivers like scattered diamonds. The tiger prints disappearing into the muddy swirl of mangroves. The volcanoes puffing and panting out coils of thick grey ash.

Smudged and faded, the photo curled at the edges and every so often I’d put it between a couple of books to flatten it out. And then one day it wasn’t there. ‘Sorry’, I said. I’m so sorry for all of it’. He didn’t reply. He never says it wasn’t my fault. It isn’t, wasn’t in him. One day he’d taped his last Rolo to the handlebars of my old brown Raleigh. Another time he’d sent me a ‘miss you’ card to the French hotel I was staying in without him. ‘It’s not you, it’s me’, I’d said as we’d stood on the platform on Waverley and he’d begged me not to go. After the funeral I tucked that card into his sketchbook. On dreich days, when the starlings crowd in on the guttering with their heads hunched low and their tiny beaks pressed up hard against the glass, I get it out and trace the words with a finger.

I don’t hurl my opinions at the dead. I whisper. Bargain. Petition for clemency. Plead for release. I curl my tongue around my crimes. Roll mercy into the balls of my cheeks. Sometimes the dead lover catches me out. I see him slipping down London Road, or turning up Leith St. I call out to him through closed lips, without sound. Once, on the bus, the words escaped, voluble, fizzing. ‘I love you,’ I’d said. And someone young looked up from a mobile phone, then turned away. Embarrassed for me. As with the living, as with the dead. I fill silence. I can’t help myself.

This piece was originally written for the Scottish Book Trust’s Blether series 2019

Tags grief, suicide