Missing Christopher

by Jayne Newling

  I often sit outside this house. It holds so many memories of our happy family in the time before the boys got sick. Sometimes a shaft of light will bounce against the red tulips in the stained glass window on the front door and it will make me cry. Christopher used to squash his face against the glass to make me laugh. Then it is gone and the memory fades and I drive home.

  chapter 45

  I know this much. I know that every day for the rest of my life I will be disfigured by Christopher’s death. I know the memory of that night will always be a sharp fissure, a cut which refuses to heal.

  The picture in my mind of his alive body, tumbling through the dark air, will be the last one I have each and every night. His final thoughts will plague me until I have my own.

  And as I write this, tears blind me and I know grief still lives, a fat lump of it just under the surface, a fine film under the mask.

  After eleven years, I can’t remember the sound of his voice or the way he walked. I can’t remember his touch or the way he sat in a chair. I can smell him but only because Nic has taken to wearing the same Giorgio Armani cologne. I keep the almost empty bottle, which I found in Christopher’s rugby bag, in the drawer next to my bed. When I need to, I inhale it deeply and for a moment I see his smile, hear his laughter, feel his arms around me. Then, as though he is a ghost who has just walked through my bedroom wall, the memory is gone.

  I still wonder how he would look now, who would he have married, how many children he would have had. I grieve for the daughter-in-law and the grandchildren I will never know. Time has not eased what I will never know or crave, for no parent should ever suffer barren arms. There isn’t a day I don’t yearn to have Christopher back.

  I would give my life for his and there isn’t a moment I don’t wish that I could wind back the clock, be given a second chance.

  There isn’t a day when I don’t sit in my rocking chair on our front verandah overlooking Christopher’s garden and tell him how much I love and miss him.

  And sometimes at night, Phil and I will sit together with a glass of wine and ask each other what happened—how did it all go so terribly wrong? There is no answer in silence.

  And finally, after eleven years, I have stopped searching for one.

  I had to let Christopher go, for him and for me. I don’t know for certain if he exists in another spiritual realm but, for a time, I felt him near me and that was all that mattered when I had given up on living. Now, I talk to him every day—just in case. There is much I don’t understand but I know this; life doesn’t end with the heart’s last beat.

  We went back to the headland on the eleventh anniversary—just Phil and me. We sat in the pre-dawn dark on the grass verge, under Christopher’s floodlight and at the exact spot where, 10 metres below, his life ended. We huddled and waited for the new day to begin.

  Then with arms outstretched, the yellow orb of the dawning sun throbbed in time to the burgeoning orchestral cacophony of nature. It burst through the horizontal hymen with a glint and, with a curtsy, danced off to its own tune. The subservient ocean dazzled in shimmering strobes, beckoning with tiny, encouraging fingers of mirrored light.

  A sailboat rocked in the distance and surfers bobbed on the undulating tide. Soon joggers and dogs and seagulls and swimmers and fishermen and mothers and fathers and children with buckets and spades would rush to this pretty beach to build another memory. They won’t look up to see the middle-aged couple holding hands on the precipice, looking out to sea, their features faded, expressions altered by the deep gashes of time and grief. They won’t see the lovers they used to be or their silent acceptance that renders them slaves to an uncertain future. They won’t hear the laments—never spoken, never said, but just enough to disturb their sleep.

  For this is where we stand—Phil and I—alone at future’s gate. We can shake it or turn the key.

  The last inspirational card from Christopher’s diary reads:

  Life is about making choices. Make it and try. Focus on making it happen. Never give up. My peace is a great gift to the world—when I find my peace, there is one less person suffering.

  Afterword

  Gordon Parker

  The phone rang at home as I was getting out of the shower. An ominous early morning call, held off until daylight. It was Jayne. She apologised before stating quietly and tensely, ‘Chris died last night.’

  Died. Perhaps a car accident? I tried to keep the urgency out of my voice but asked ‘how’ almost immediately. At one level, irrelevant, as the death of an adolescent is an enormity in and of itself.

  Jayne reported that Chris had fallen down the Avalon headlands. He had become separated from friends, dropped his mobile phone over the cliffs and apparently slipped trying to retrieve it.

  Please, not suicide, I thought. For many health professionals the suicide of a depressed patient is the marker of their greatest failure.

  Failure to relieve their patient’s distress, failure to instil hope that life is worth living and failure to assist the patient to recognise that their depression will improve and pass. Failure. Learning of a suicide starts immediate self-questioning, a review of possible acts of commission and of omission—perhaps something said or, conversely, failure to act during a high-risk period.

  As the day went on I knew that misadventure was an unsustainable explanation. I contacted the psychologist who had been helping me manage Chris over several months, and who reported that Chris had texted a distressed message on the day of his death but had appeared reassured by some suggestions returned by text.

  Driving to the Newlings’ house that evening I replayed an image only a few months old.

  Of a Saturday afternoon rugby match at Northbridge, at Shore’s playing fields which were dedicated to its so many boys who had lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars at the height of their youth. The Shore and Scots First XV teams were playing on the main oval. A scrum ruptured and I glimpsed a Shore boy dive explosively at the instigator and land a dextrous uppercut before the referee could blow his whistle. It was Chris. An impetuous detonation I’d never seen from him before and one rarely observed by his family. For anyone who is suicidal, a propensity for precipitous action can be one of the most worrying factors, as it can summarily override any self-protective strategies.

  I called up an image of Chris on the Avalon headland. Perhaps further disinhibited by alcohol, perhaps going blazingly into the night with a ‘fuck it all’ detonation of emotions—overriding logic and the love of his family and his many friends.

  But an image is not an explanation. As Kay Redfield Jamison—a distinguished psychologist colleague and author of the wonderfully evocative book An Unquiet Mind—observed in a later book, ‘An act against the self, suicide is also a violent force in the lives of the others. It is incomprehensible when it kills the young.’ 1 In that book Jamison sketched her own suicidal mood states as background to a comprehensive and academic overview of suicide. Her book has a quite differing emphasis to Jayne’s account but the two complement each other and provide the richest and most evocative writings on suicide of which I’m aware, and I will therefore interleave some of Jamison’s observations in my discussion here.

  As often occurs following a suicide—and even more when involving an adolescent—diverse explanations and facts emerge, evolve and sometimes remain ever incomplete and incomprehensible. Jayne has vividly described their home that evening: everyone enveloped by grief and impotence in the immediate ‘impact phase’. A narrative was being consolidated. One of Chris’s friends had seen him slip on the rocks as he tried to collect his mobile phone. A construction of misadventure—of a fateful slip—and one that might ease the alternative, the enormity of a suicide. But a girlfriend’s statement to the police led an officer to inform Jayne gently but bluntly—‘If it’s an accident the person calls out. A suicide, they never do. There was no scream, Mrs Newling.’

  Time has allowed pieces of that alternative explanation to be collected.
In her scarifying account of Chris’s last day, Jayne details many stressful precursors: his high intake of alcohol, his being at the headland for some time before being found by friends—with one texting another that Chris was talking about suicide and that he had broken the car mirror and thrown it and his mobile phone down the cliff. We can presume he had a plan: the drive to the headland, then phases of contemplation and agitation before a combustible flame of untempered and impulsive emotions. Thus, seemingly, not as precipitous as I had imagined and, as I read Jayne’s account, I went back into morbid self-questioning.

  It is not uncommon for people committed to killing themselves to spend time in contemplation at the site in what is known as a ‘suicidal mode’, with Jamison stating that ‘ambivalence saturates the suicidal act’.2 At such times, most are agitated but some almost frozen, and such behaviours may alert astute observers. In the 1960s, a tavern owner at Watsons Bay in Sydney had a German shepherd dog named Rexie who could sense if someone was contemplating jumping from the cliffs at The Gap, an infamous Sydney suicide hotspot. Rexie would start barking and run to the edge of the cliffs, allowing time for others to intervene, and it was estimated that the dog saved about thirty lives. The late Don Ritchie who lived adjacent to The Gap would walk slowly towards someone he judged at risk, strike up a conversation and invite them to come to his home for a cup of tea and a chat. Over nearly fifty years it was estimated that he saved several hundred lives. Don supported the Black Dog Institute’s collaboration with the local council in redressing the high risks posed by The Gap; in addition to fencing, it now has CCTV coverage to help identify those who are clearly distressed and at risk. I have even wondered if we could train the equivalent of ‘life savers’ as a further safeguard. Another example of an effective ‘detector’ is of the highway patrol policeman who patrolled the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. When he presciently observed someone at risk, he would park his bike a distance away, stroll slowly to the suicidal person, introduce himself, invite the suicidal individual to join him for a coffee and, by asking ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’, would move the distressed individual’s thinking from the perturbing present to the future.

  If only. If only someone with such skills had been there that night, to talk Chris down. But he did have friends there, genuinely and fearfully concerned, and they were clearly alert to the high-risk scenario. An adolescent’s peer groups generally dictate key decisions, but Chris broke away from them and their support—and here we can presume a precipitous decision, driven by psychological pain and disinhibited by alcohol. Few depressed people who contemplate or attempt suicide do so because they want to die—for most, they simply want the pain to stop. His friends search for him down at the beach. Chris is observed two-thirds up the cliff and then falling. As Jayne writes in a later chapter, ‘For Christopher, it was easier to let go than to hold on’. Earlier she observes even more poignantly, ‘No one should die alone and in fear.’

  ‘If only’ a Rexie or a Don Ritchie had been there then it might have been different. But I suspect during that high-risk period Chris moved into an impervious non-negotiation zone. As observed by Jamison: ‘For those with a short wick . . . and impulse-laden wiring . . . it is as though the nervous system has been soaked in kerosene [and one or more precipitants] ignite a suicidal response’.3 As Jayne writes, ‘There was a moment, an impulsive second where death was desirable.’ And, here lies the heart of the tragedy, a moment experienced by so many people was acted on with irrevocable consequences.

  As Jamison observes, family members ‘are left to deal with the guilt and the anger . . . to try to understand an inexplicable act . . . to miss a child whose life was threaded to theirs from its very beginning’ and so, in the context of those who are left behind, the suicidal act appears ‘personal, cruel and thoughtless . . . yet suicide is tangential to reason and . . . is almost always an irrational choice, the seemingly best way to end the pain, the futility or . . . the hopelessness’.4

  An even greater tragedy when suicidal thinking is generally a temporary state. One of the few people to survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge was interviewed almost immediately afterwards by a journalist, who asked what his thoughts were when he was halfway down. The survivor smiled and stated, ‘I realised that I had three problems in my life currently but that two were correctible.’ In essence, suicide is a tragically permanent solution to a temporary problem. That reality should underpin our plans to reduce predisposing risks but also our approach to those periods of high risk.

  As a professional my brief was to identify and ease Chris’s pain. We first met in August 2001 when Chris was sixteen and suspended from school for smoking cigarettes and marijuana. My priorities as an assessing psychiatrist are to identify the particular condition (i.e. provide a diagnosis), select the most appropriate treatment paradigm and craft a management plan. Such tasks are common across all age groups but adolescents bring other issues to the foreground. Adolescence itself is a stressor—some of the many issues that need to be faced include moving to a more independent life stage, preoccupation with physical appearance and identity, peer group pressures (including bullying), handling home life, school strictures and examinations, contemplating career options, and making choices about drugs, alcohol and sex. Add a substantive mood disorder, plus perceived stigma associated with the need to attend a professional, and the adolescent is further weighed down. Australia has led the way in advancing the destigmatising of depression but until mood disorders can be viewed and discussed as comfortably as medical problems, there is still a considerable dissonance, with such stigma experienced more severely by adolescents.

  Chris appeared comfortable about assessment. He related well, and in between periods of clear despair, his baseline sunny and mischievous personality style shone through before a worried mien would return to create shadows. He detailed a strong history of depression in the family but I positioned his depression as secondary to other factors, especially when the disorder had failed to respond to an antidepressant prescribed by his excellent general practitioner John Eccles. I judged the primary problem as a set of anxiety disorders present since early childhood, which had worsened when Chris developed a severe and prolonged infection at three years of age and with the anxiety becoming increasingly debilitating in adolescence. Regrettably, he was handling it by self-medication, with the marijuana and alcohol creating their own problems. It was clear that rugby was his key priority and sporting success integral to his identity. However, his leg muscles had not grown at the same rate as his leg bones, and depite a number of surgical procedures none had produced any definitive improvement. He was in considerable pain, especially when he exercised and, perhaps worse, he was pessimistic that the medical and physiotherapy interventions would correct the increasing limitations and pain that dogged every training session and match. I doubt whether his coaches or team companions had any appreciation of just how much pain he was experiencing and how he sought to push himself through the pain barrier. This was a mark of his courage but also of his desperate concern to maintain and advance his identity as an elite rugby player, and he saw that aspiration melting away. Loss of that role and its potential in the future struck me as central and shaped discussions with the Shore authorities as to how it might be addressed practically. As noted by Jayne, the forethought, wisdom and practical pastoral care brought to addressing this issue by headmaster Bob Grant and school counsellor John Burns were exemplary, sensitive and demonstrated that the school authorities ‘walked the walk’ and did not merely ‘talk the talk’ of pastoral care.

  Management strategies also involved modifications to medication and referral to a psychologist to address his significant anxiety states. However, review sessions suggested that therapeutic gains were slight, either reflecting their intrinsic failure to gain traction and/or background issues—of living arrangements, his girlfriend, and drugs and alcohol. These latter issues remained in the background, perhaps reflecting their peripheral status
or the private world of his adolescence. As the months went by, my initial respect for Chris and his courage increased further. When the shadows of depression disappeared intermittently from his face, I could observe more of his intrinsic personality as described so evocatively in Jayne’s account. The tragic death of any adolescent evokes a flood of grief throughout their family and community but, as detailed by Jayne, Chris’s death had an immense impact. The memorial service at Shore brought an extraordinary number of people, overflowing across the lawns from the chapel. Headmaster Grant asked me the day before to sit with him and his wife during the service. I appreciated such sensitivity—it partially salved my personal sense of failure to bring his depression under control and his parents’ unstated expectations of keeping him alive—it signalled a team effort. I observed the line of silent, solemn and preoccupied masters, with several struggling to contain their distress, who became an informal guard of honour as people left the chapel. Jayne recounts the impact of Chris’s death on those beyond the family, his closest friends and his rugby team-mates who played above themselves in a memorial match, and the many who tattooed themselves to forever cement their memories of him. Such an outpouring not only speaks of how he was viewed but of the reality that the loss of those who enrich life is felt so keenly and for so long.

  As many have observed, depression is the core and key driver of suicidality and thus bringing the mood disorder under control and into remission is the objective. Depression alone can be borne ‘as long as there is the belief that things will improve’, writes Jamison. ‘If that belief cracks or disappears, suicide becomes the option of choice.’5

  CLINICAL DEPRESSION IN ADOLESCENTS