Nature Strikes Back
PART I
I have never feared death. Fear, uncertainty and unpredictability are parts of life, whereas death is an indisputably reliable fact. However. On September 21st 2013, my brother stepped off a station platform in front of a train. This time he had to be absolutely sure.
The suicide of a sibling changes everything. It legitimises the act. It suddenly seems like a much more reasonable course of action than it did before. In the devastating and complex psycho-emotional pain that follows, this is very dangerous. Especially if you are alone. Death remains as certain as ever but now there is an awareness of agency, that on the bad days verges on compulsion.
You find you have no choice but to negotiate an accommodation with optional death. On the good days it has become almost comfortable. Companionable. Like a mirror with which I exchange views on the option I now seem to have reserved. That doesn't mean I'll take it, but being aware of it keeps me in control of the situation. Talking about it keeps me safe.
Reassuringly Certain
Reassuringly Certain
Dialogue
PART II
2017
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my brother's suicide.
He was very ill. There was no doubt about that. In the nine tortuous months between his first, and his fifth and final attempt, he had extreme paranoia and ghastly delusions absorbed from a news cycle that was on a particularly horrible loop at the time. There was also the constant struggle with an NHS mental health service that was chaotic, unresponsive and completely unable to cope.
Ultimately we were trying to save a deeply lonely, middle-aged man, finally being dealt the ultimate hand by a lifetime gambling addiction for which there was zero support or understanding. A man who could have had no notion that almost 400 people would be at his funeral and would give him a standing ovation.
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It was not my brother's final, devastating day that triggered the post-traumatic anxiety I still experience. It was the extended trauma of that 9 month period with its constant stream of incidents and uncertainties. Sometimes the reason for my rapid emotional and mental disintegration would be obvious but at others I didn't understand why at all. Even now I never really see it coming but after the event I can usually piece it together.
What I have learned is that suicide changes those close to it so profoundly you become a stranger in your own body and your life becomes a stranger to you. There is a chasm between the person you were and the person you will become. You fall into that chasm numerous times. You have to drag yourself out the same amount of times. Each time is more exhausting than the last. The gaps between the falls eventually grow longer but the risk of falling never goes.
What I have learned is that suicide changes those close to it so profoundly you become a stranger in your own body and your life becomes a stranger to you. There is a chasm between the person you were and the person you will become. You fall into that chasm numerous times. You have to drag yourself out the same amount of times. Each time is more exhausting than the last. The gaps between the falls eventually grow longer but the risk of falling never goes.
Another thing I have learned is that each member of an affected family goes through this process in a different way and on a different timescale. The death of a sibling has little in common with the death of a child. In other words it is as difficult for the parent to understand the grief of their surviving children as it is for them to understand the grief of their parent. Confusion, frustration and pain is unavoidable. Even with good communication relationships within the family become temporarily and sometimes permanently unrecognisable. Each person is ultimately faced with the metamorphic isolation of their own grief.
Listening to others talk about their own experiences of bereavement by suicide has made me realise that in some ways I am lucky. I had a closeness with my brother and had enough time and involvement in his last chaotic months to reach an understanding of his pain and of his situation. I have come to realise that my experience of being there relieves me of the far worse pain of never knowing so never having the comfort of understanding at least some of the how and the why.
Because of my brother’s suicide, death has become a constant prescence in my life both as a reality and a subject. What has emerged is this project which connects the artist I thought I was before, with the person I am in the process of becoming. The project enables me to embrace the subject of death from many angles and I have discovered an emerging network of people who work with death and talk about life. Realistically, empathetically, creatively and ethically.
Fear, uncertainty and unpredictability are parts of life, whereas death is an indisputably reliable fact. I like facts.
PART III
Soon it will be six years
Within 8 months of Nick's death I made a decision that I should never have made. I was not in my right mind, but I have discovered it is common for huge and often unwise, life changing decisions to be made by traumatised people in the aftermath of a suicide loss.
After three decades of living and working in international cities, I moved from London to an isolated village in the area I was from. At the time I felt I wanted to be closer to my remaining family. At first the beauty and calm of the rural environment was soothing and healing but as I began trying to make a life, the enormity of the mistake became very clear, very quickly. I had removed myself from my professional, social and support network just when I needed it most. I was here not from rational choice but because my brother had taken his own life and somewhere in the profound, emotional chaos that followed, I lost all that I recognised as my own.
I began to take over a lot of the responsibility for my 81 year old mother. The impact of her son's death was a series of mini-strokes and a grief that was all consuming. In 2017, she was diagnosed with cancer. Towards the end of her life I had finally got her to accept that Nick's suicide was not her fault. I was with her when she died. I was prepared and she was prepared so it was as good a death as it could have been.
What had changed, however, was the relationship with my sister. The experience of trying to save our brother and the aftermath of his death, seemed shared with that almost telepathic, sibling love and understanding that makes you feel safe and whole. The closeness I felt to her was a huge part of the reason that moving nearer seemed like the right thing to do. This feeling remained for some time and got us through the horrendous aftermath of a long and drawn out inquest where we finally got an acknowledgement of failure from the mental health services.
By the time of my mother's last months, the impact on each of us of losing our brother, combined with the isolation and emotional chaos of my own life, had made our relationship unrecognisable. And since my mother's death she has slowly but definitively pushed me out of her life. The loss of the living is much harder to bear than the loss of the dead and her absence from my life is devastating. Understanding why doesn't make it any easier.
I have at least come to terms with the decision that made everything so much more difficult, although I still struggle with the isolation and my seeming inability to build a sustainable life here. I still experience periods of crushing depression and anxiety and I still sometimes find myself at the negotiating table with optional death. This process of acceptance often takes me over the same piece of ground repeatedly and it seems interminable. It is not made easier by the knowledge that there is no other route to take.
Nicholas John Grove
January 19th 1966 - September 21st 2013