Professor Green’s Suicide and Me documentary aired last week, articles on male suicide have been popping up on major news sites and #BiggerIssues has been going on for some time. It would be an injustice to not to talk about my fathers suicide and the impact it had on me.
The story of my father’s suicide mirrors many others, on Wednesday May 29th 2013 in the afternoon my mother came home from work crying, called my brother and I down into the living room; “It’s your Dad, he’s hanged himself.” she said. I heard this on the cusp of my 21st birthday and 2 years on it stands as the day my adolescence ended and sadly as a definitive moment of my life.
The time before a funeral is a purgatory of tears, shock and disbelief which followed me through the weeks until it’s time, I half expected Dad to burst through the doors behind us misquoting Mark Twain shouting: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” but it didn’t come. The curtains closed, my father was cremated and my brother, grandfather and I stood outside thanking the handful of guests for coming; many of whom where my grandfather’s friends.
Before my fathers death my brother and I saw him a few weeks prior, we watched Star Trek: Into Darkness and he was fine; he looked good and appeared happy. I always thought of comedy as a way to help the healing process and to make awful things seem less awful, so I joke about how the movie was so bad it drove my father to suicide. In reality while I don’t know what drove him to the point where he would make the decision to take his life, but looking back on my fathers life there were clear signals that he was not okay.
My father was a severely unhappy man. He was in massive debt, his sister died of alcohol poisoning, he had very little in the way of friends, his third marriage was failing and he would suffer from mood swings where he would go from a “happy chappy”, to scarily angry and then so sad he would sleep for days. I learned that the last days before his death were not happy; his wife kicked him out over a domestic dispute and he was living with his father in the house he grew up in and where he would later hang himself.
As far as I’m aware my father never looked for help which is a common occurrence. I’ve personally fallen into this trap except I was lucky enough to get better. I’ve tried to rationalise why men don’t ask for help and it’s not an easy answer; some blame it society and it’s expectations of men while others blame biology and the anatomy of the male brain. There is no definitive answer and I don’t expect to find one, I only know that the current average of male suicide is 12 deaths a day which is unacceptable.
Not a day goes by where I don’t miss my Dad, he’ll never be at my wedding and he’ll never hold his grandchildren. My room is filled with photos of him, old RAF stuff as well as his old knick-knacks from a half strung guitar to an old mug with his name on it. I miss my Dad so much, I miss his big bushy beard and his stupid quirks but most of all I hate that he’s never going to see how happy my brother and I are because I know that would have made him happy.
For men it takes incredible strength to be willing to appear vulnerable, I’m lucky enough to have people I’m comfortable crying in front of, albeit very rarely. It’s very difficult to find comfort from a call centre or warmth in a doctors office and I think hell will freeze over before a majority of men will express genuine emotion to each other.
I really don’t know how to end this one, I would like to end it on a high note but I don’t know if things will get better. There’s a new Star Trek movie coming out in 2016 and I don’t want any more people to kill themselves. #StopStarTrek
Jonathan Brook. 