Campbell Bolton’s note, left on his bed, was long, thoughtful. ‘Please do not assume you know why. Even I’m not completely sure. It is simply the best thing to do. The mechanism telling me not to kill myself is broken.’
Katie, your note was like a wave that just slipped out of you, too painful to write anything other? Or did you find that even though you had thought you wanted to be dead you couldn’t take seriously the possibility of actually succeeding? Old Freud’s dictum—‘our unconscious does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.’
(Bryn’s note was what might be called traditional. He said his goodbyes, made a point of wishing a special bye to his parents, and apologised to whoever would find him. To S he wrote, ‘You are a great mate.’)
S tells me:
—For a while I used to write letters to Bryn.
—Letters on paper?
—On paper. This is what I’ve been thinking. This is what’s been happening in my life.
—What did you do with the letters?
—Write them then burn them.
In China to honour the dead they burn offerings made out of paper—paper money, houses, cars, clothes, paper versions of the latest blockbusters. They burn representations of stuff the dead may need in the afterlife. Of course the dead have needs, what’s more they have standards, and you do not wish to disappoint. Katie died the week that the last Harry Potter book came out. ‘My mum was, like, she wouldn’t even wait for Harry Potter.’ Frances is laugh/cry-ing now. ‘I read the book all in one night and couldn’t remember a thing.’ Frances’s mum is Chinese. Buddhist. She asked Frances to write Katie a note, put it in the book, burn it. The grandmother burned a little paper house. Frances burned Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for her mum really, not for Katie. (In an interview J.K. Rowling said a crucial decision she made early on is that in her books magic cannot bring the dead back to life. Dead stay dead.)
‘I know why we try to keep the dead alive,’ writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, ‘we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.’
Once a week a cleaner came. Frances’s mum would hide all Katie photos, remove every signal of absence. Don’t touch that room, she’d tell the cleaner, my youngest needs to learn to do it herself.
Tough love n’all.
you told me you did this because you didn’t want the cleaner to know that someone had died in the house, but I knew it was because for three hours of every week you could pretend Katie was still alive. (‘A Confession to My Mother’, third-year creative writing)
Joan Didion could not give away her husband’s shoes: if he came back he’d need them. The smartest people on the planet wait for the dead’s return. Each night Frances lay awake. Her bedroom was next to Katie’s old room. ‘I’d make myself get up, go to the bathroom, walk past her room, feel that initial fear of finding her over and over again.’ Frances would get up at least ten times a night—ten times nightly ten years ago, you understand. ‘I didn’t actually need to go to the toilet. And I was frightened to my sheer core.’ As if she was punishing herself for not being there when her sister killed herself, or possibly seeking inoculation, try and wear out the demon through single-minded repetition. People called Frances stoic and she thought of herself as a coward. When finally she was asleep, dreams would come. In the dreams Katie was trying to hang herself from various places, often off a tree at a park near school to which Frances would run, desperate to save her sister, and to save others from seeing her sister dead. Sometimes in a dream Katie would come ‘alive and sparkling’ to Frances, and Frances would be filled with a euphoria unlike any she’d known.
‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it’—Didion.
Grief made Frances see her parents as if for the first time. The time you realise that your parents are human, that they feel, and carry, incredible pain, it’s an epiphany she says. Sight of her mother wailing on Katie’s bed that mornings…
when I saw you curled up on Katie’s bed you reminded me of a whimpering infant, a helpless child, not the fierce mother you always were.
Hurt and loneliness of her father…
all he has is his children and his books. Books are treated with respect in our household. Bright shelves of great novelists lighten up our home and every page has felt the breath of my father.
(Ann read these lines out in Year 12 English class. Frances read them to her mum. Her mum doesn’t usually read Frances’s writing, she’s not comfortable reading in English. She loved the bright shelves line, though.)
To get to sleep Frances would drift off to Friends, a show so intolerably twee now but a megahit, let’s not forget, for the ten seasons it ran. ‘After she died I watched all the Friends series. I had to fall asleep to Friends every single night for five years. Do you know how many times that means I watched each of those episodes? Because the voices drowned out my thoughts.’ Turning Friends off was a massive step. After that dreams were still there but she could let go of the jamming device.
I am a mother of a young woman. My daughter has not been well in her soul (her body too) for a while now. I can’t help it—can’t help being scared shitless. Have read and watched interviews with parents of kids who killed themselves. Each parent is burnt out with shock. Each parent did not in darkest dreams dream they were the one walking behind the coffin. ‘If someone like Chanelle does it, you just can’t stop it,’ said Karen Rae, her daughter’s suicide the fourth in six months, same Geelong high school, ‘because she was the last person in the world you would ever expect to do it.’ Last person in the world you would ever expect. Can any parent listen to these words and have them whiz by, no sting? A father said, ‘I thought there had to be dysfunction, like alcohol abuse, step-parents, child abuse… But then it happened to us.’
If this does not put fear of god in you what will?
Frances and Katie used to sneak out the house at night. The night before killing herself Katie was out till the pre-dawn hours. I speak to my daughter. She says, ‘Oh, yeah, lots of people do that.’
While my daughter was still at school she’d say, ‘Don’t worry, mamochka. Our flat is too small and my window is too narrow.’
Then when we moved—she was an adult by then—by chance the window in her bedroom was the kind that didn’t open.
I don’t know how not to be scared and if it’s important that I try—children and parents always lead double lives, this separateness, a mutual elusiveness, being something like a structural necessity and yes I knew when and where my daughter smoked (and how much she and her friends paid for) her first joint, so what? So nothing. Parts of us will always, must always, remain unknowable to each other.
Unknowability triples in the period between childhood and adulthood. This is when we carry out, often involuntarily, a program of inquiry ‘into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart’. That is how American writer Michael Chabon (possibly relevant: a father of four) puts it—above and below—and it can’t be improved. In the process of inquiry the researcher discovers
the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises ‘adolescence’.
The ache of which Chabon writes tends to be treated as a developmental stage, like pooing into a nappy, devoid of farreaching moral seriousness. When big thoughts and emotions of adolescence do get taken seriously the serious taking is usually done in the language of mental health.
Frances sends me a poem of Katie’s she found in Katie’s school dia
ry—
thoughts flood my head
poisoning my mind,
your slipping from my grasp
leaving yourself behind.
Shadows haunt my mood,
guilt follows a laugh,
my life used to be full
it’s now cut down to half.
In the diary, next to the date her boyfriend died, is my boy said that he would never leave before me. he promised that he would always wait for me. he promised … promises ain’t worth shit.
When Melanie Woss’s family approached Pan Macmillan to see if their daughter’s work might be publishable, Fiona Giles was an editor there. When Fiona was thirteen her brother, seventeen, gassed himself. ‘I kind of identified with my brother, to some extent,’ Fiona tells me. ‘I identified with Melanie’—Melanie went to school at Perth’s Methodist Ladies’ College, where she was an undeniably brilliant student and tried unsuccessfully to gas herself in the science labs. (‘I taped my nose so I couldn’t breathe and then I taped Bunsen burner tubing into my mouth. I turned on the gas and then just lay on the bench.’) In 1989 shortly before her eighteenth birthday she did kill herself. Her book—the collected writings of Melanie Woss, compiled and edited by Fiona Giles—is proof Melanie could have become an excellent writer. That it was published in 1992, the time of literary (and all other frontiers) stepping around youth suicide, feels astonishing.
Fiona, after she lost her brother, suffered bad depression. In her preface to Melanie’s book she quotes Julia Kristeva, and writes—‘depression is less an illness than a language which needs to be understood’; it’s a preface which is in no way safely scholarly, the book no cautionary tale, or showcase of precociousness, but respectful of Melanie’s oneness, and lucidity, its landing on Fiona’s desk was great luck.
Melanie did not wish to grow up. She was scared of leaving school. Adolescence frightened and exhausted her. ‘In childhood I was cuddled and looked after, and in adulthood I will cuddle and look after, but here, in the middle, I seem to get the rough end of both the childhood and adulthood sticks.’ She felt the adult world was failing the children. A letter to a former teacher about six months before she died went—
Can dead children talk to each other?
Is there a name for when you feel really sad and unhappy and you can’t cry, even though you want to?
Can a person be too smart? […]
What makes a baby try to walk after it falls?
How do we know what is happening is actually happening?
Could I go mad and kill myself without meaning to?
‘Bryn was a high achiever,’ Monique says. ‘Some of the kids were angry. How could Bryn do it to us, and be so calculating? That’s him, A+ really.’
Brilliant kids, good at nearly everything, awash with friends, their talents and achievements get noticed, acclaimed, often they’re from privileged families, are killing themselves.
Fiona’s brother was school captain.
Frances believed Katie died because of undiagnosed depression. Believing this made Katie’s death make sense and gave Frances a language to talk in, to reflect in.
Katie’s dad thinks it’s the drugs that did it. Mum thinks it’s the boyfriend.
So much of adolescence, you cannot quite convey to yourself or others why you let things happen. It takes years, longer, to work it out. Sex, being bullied or a bully, friendships, betrayals, how far you might go to feel like you belong, all those experiences you did not object to, not loudly enough, not convincingly enough. Ashamed. Never discount shame’s power or its cockroach-like tendency for lingering on. American academic Brené Brown studies shame, and high schools rise up all the time in her research, so much so that Brown thinks of high school as the metaphor for shame. My daughter reminds me one of adolescence’s constants is not knowing what’s happening inside you. And by extension not knowing what you’re capable of. You are like a painting that’s gone beyond the paper. Watching my daughter’s not-knowing … my heart must have stopped a few times. How must it be for her, for them?
1.
I had a best friend growing up. Recently she told me how one day not long ago she decided to throw herself off a high-rise. She crossed the city (the city we’d shared and I left on the very Saturday she turned sixteen) and manoeuvred herself up on some anonymous building’s ledge. Her head was covered with a scarf. She had nothing to live for. Then she saw a cat. The cat came towards her. There was something about the cat, a neediness, a look in its eyes, warmth of its body, something. Anyway it pulled her off the ledge.
In time Frances has come to believe Katie’s death cannot be explained away. With someone so young it is not one thing, it’s everything, squashed and smashed together each bit reacting with every other bit, all the bits, in that one particular moment and five minutes later it could have been a completely different story.
Boori Pryor, whose father is from the Birri-gubba nation, his mother is Kunggandji, wrote a book Maybe Tomorrow documenting the big bite suicide took out of his family. His brother Nick hanged himself when developers acquired, defiled, sold off their land. It hurt that much. Aboriginal suicide is said to be profoundly existential. It is filled with meaning. It may be a demand for a respect one is not daily afforded, or asserting autonomy in a life marked by powerlessness. It could be a statement of anger. Perpetual cycles of grief may encircle it. It may be driven by loss of culture, an emptiness within. In the background: pounding of racism, of alienation. It may be a rational response to life (life = a situation too awful).
Another brother, Paul, couldn’t handle being a black man—a successful black man: actor, storyteller—in a white world. Their sister Kimmy could find ‘no space to breathe any fresh air into her body’. She was an artist. Had felt haunted, hunted, by shadows. ‘It is impossible, unreasonable and immoral,’ Colin Tatz writes in his Aboriginal Suicide is Different, ‘to maintain “mental illness” as the key causation in Aboriginal suicide.’
Untreated depression or other mental illness is reckoned to be linked to nine-tenths of suicides in Australia right now and if you accept the model the solution is this: earlier diagnosis, more mental health services, greater mental health issues awareness. Lives have been saved. Families, saved. Still people are falling through cracks, no services in some areas, waits of months for an appointment, follow-through funding shortfalls. What is needed is more, of money, of services, more, if you accept the model.
I talk to Erminia Colucci, the fastest talker I know, who has studied attitudes to suicide and suicidal thoughts among young people in Italy, Australia, India. (There are intellectually rigorous reasons for her choice of countries. There are lovely, simple ones too: ‘I am Italian. I love Australia. I am fascinated by India.’) She noticed Australians use depression and mental health as explanations much more readily than Indians or Italians do. Why, I wonder. ‘It’s a Western framework,’ Erminia says. ‘Actually’—she stops herself—‘the concept of the West is full of holes. Does Italy belong to the West? What I mean is it’s an anglo way of looking at suicide.’ Erminia’s view of suicide is existential. You cannot begin to grapple with the SOMETHINGNESS of a suicide without talking about the crisis of meaning people experience, the what’s-the-point-of-it-all questions that get asked and stay painfully unanswered.
It is not like anglo ways do not recognise soul. Our culture gets how what David Foster Wallace called The Bad Thing is much as Jenny Diski fixed it to paper. ‘Place that makes no sense, that no sense can be made of, but which is all there is when I am in it … obscurity and obstacle always increasing.’ It’s just that when talking about suicide takes in culture, chemistry, disease, meaning, soul—‘Conversation about suicide becomes almost unmanageable,’ Erminia says.
Mental health is people’s way of holding the conversation down like an animal.
‘The concept of mental health,’ Erminia thinks, ‘is not a law. Not a religion, not a dogma.’
There can be no totalitarian theories about depres
sion, mental health, suicide, human nature.
Easy to overlook, in the medicalised air, how much sorrow and pain about the world a person can carry inside. Your life may be privileged, safe, white but that won’t make you immune from despair at the world. Doesn’t mean you don’t feel things with an intensity that turns being in the everyday—to-do lists, plans—excruciating at least some of the time. Fiona’s brother grew up during war in Vietnam. Terrified he’d get called up. His family were antiwar campaigners. To him the wide world outside his window felt broken. Bryn was deeply sorrowful too for the world’s state. ‘It was the time,’ S says, ‘of the Iraq invasion.’
Frances says she won’t read the draft of this chapter to the end. Too emotional: her words. Not gripped anymore by need-to-know is what she means I think.
PTSD, tram platform, that forum, the narcissist—‘I was so angry’ (Frances [then]).
Me (then) making notes—People in pain’s anger is clarifying, takes us closer to truth, rages at euphemistic bullshit, fixes contempt on those getting off on the high emotions around a young person’s death. Felt insightful that night, feels obvious now.
The five stages of thought, from the initial thwack to gah.
‘Well, people are angry, aren’t they?’ says my friend Wendy, fresh back from seeing parents’ angrily inconvenienced faces at a morning tea held for the dead (it was suicide) school captain at a sister school of her daughter’s school. ‘They are angry when traffic stops on the West Gate Bridge because someone has jumped off it. They are angry when trains get cancelled because someone leapt in front of one.’
Frances says she read an earlier version of the chapter and—Maria, it’s fine, your interpretation. Anyway.
Everything has its limit including sorrow
No, not sorrow, it has no limit.
A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril;
a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even.
And what is space anyway if not the
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