I remember feeling so tired that even talking seemed to take too much energy, so I barely spoke at all. Eating felt equally difficult, but my mother insisted, told me I really needed to eat, darling. She started me on Dad’s broth and, later, on his vegetable soup.
I remember time itself was a torture to me. Every moment felt like a year.
I still could not make sense of why I was shaking so much, or why any passing thought or noise seemed to set it off: the phone ringing, a bird chirping loudly at my window, even the sound of my own voice in my ears was enough to shoot bolts of fear down my spine.
The worst part of all of this was that I had no real idea what was actually wrong with me. I didn’t even know where to start. The doctor in Oxford had used the word ‘depression’, but I didn’t like it. Doctors scared me; everything did. There was no relief. Things that had once brought a feeling of fun, or distraction, now held no interest. I no longer sang, or played my guitar, or listened to music, or wrote in my diary, or watched television. Just thinking about doing them seemed to take more energy than I believed I had. Trying even to read—to make sense of words on a page, lines in a sentence—left me feeling nauseous with exertion.
There is no easy way to say this, but I will say it anyway: in those first few weeks at home, my only hope, my single hope, was that I would get to the end of the day without somehow killing myself or—as the voice in my head kept warning me was possible—hurting someone I loved.
The last thing a girl like me would ever, ever want to do is hurt anyone, let alone someone I loved. As I said, this was the most insidious part of the illness. This, I am heartbroken to say, is what I suspect to be one of the fears that lies behind so many of the unexplained suicides that our community has to grieve: the thought that just by being alive we are running the risk of somehow causing harm to the ones we love most.
Inside me, even in this darkest of times, there was still a quiet voice that floated up sometimes, telling me I would recover. It would only bleat in for a few seconds, but it was there.
Mostly, however, what I heard was: I am broken for good. Whatever this is, I will never recover. My mind is gone. There is a devil in me, and if I am not very careful, I will end up dead. They would be better off without me.
In the dead of night, I felt the pull of these stories, I felt the temptation of them, but the one grace of this situation is that I really did know better. I knew these ideas were lies—tempting lies dressed up in dark sparkles. I knew that my own death was a line of thinking that, although I could not seem to stop it, I must never, ever indulge. I knew—had always known—the truth of what grief really does to a family. Despite my obsessive thoughts, despite the story in my head that my own death was unavoidably close, I was not, under any circumstances, allowed to die.
And so, at first, to make sure I stayed safe, I refused to leave the house at all.
After a few weeks, however, I did finally agree to attend a charismatic healing mass with my mother. It was in the middle of the day, in a church hall half an hour away. At least here, I reasoned, the devil could not get me. In the car, I told Mum to slow down—she was driving too fast. She said, ‘I’m driving thirty kilometres an hour.’ Still, the motion, taking in all that information from the outside world—sounds, smells, colours, billboards—felt like too much. I closed my eyes, put in my earplugs, and hummed to myself until we were there. I don’t remember much about the prayer meeting except that it was very, very loud, and I was very, very scared, and there were lots of older people who raised their hands in the air and said, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ and it was, frankly, far beyond anything I was capable of processing. In the end, the only thing I could think of to do was stand up when everyone else was sitting down, and cry. Mum quickly got the cue; ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’ So we did.
More nights passed and, still, I could not stay asleep. Sometimes I dozed off, but I never seemed able to pass over into the next level of sleep. Again and again I woke with a start, my heart thumping. This feeling of panic in my chest stayed with me from the moment I got up in the morning to the moment I lay my head on the pillow at night. I felt like I was walking on a knife-edge between life and death. My sensitivity was so heightened that, even at home, smells overwhelmed me: the spice in an Indian dish or a strongly perfumed shampoo—both pleasures I’d previously enjoyed—now made me nauseous. Bright colours made me furious, like a personal assault. And a glimpse at Dad’s morning newspaper could send me into a spiral of panic for hours. The missing persons headlines haunted me; when I pictured the missing people and their families, all I could think of was Rowena. I’ve only ever had one recurring nightmare; one in which the child I was supposed to be
