I’d try to find other ways of getting him to think about it. Indirect ways. I’d ask him to come and teach my children to play golf and he would immediately sense what I was doing and say, “Sandy, are you trying to change my mind? I am not going to teach your children to play golf. I am leaving soon.”
Then I did say to him, “Why don’t you take this disease and talk about it in public, become a shining example, not a disappearing holidaymaker in life?”
Then my next thought would be: “How do I even have a right when I have not lived with this disease?” I still have not got to the bottom of how I feel about that.
George and I met afterwards and spoke. My personal view has still not been resolved, because each one of those arguments or those pressure points is valid.
Sometimes I think Craig should have gone and been a beacon, but he couldn’t because he was so sick at periods of his life. I had no right to judge. I had no right to try to change him because I had promised.
You can imagine, in my brain, going home to perfect kids and driving backwards and forwards from Summerstrand to Walmer every day, crossing between these two worlds.
Eventually I marked a spot in the road where I stopped thinking about him. It was halfway between, and I would switch the thoughts off. And then I would go home.
He was just such a warm and caring person. He always asked how I was, how my family was.
Craig was a very organised person and his level of control was palpable, but he could not control the disease.
He began to prepare his body for death. He had given up eating solids and was getting very thin. And I asked him why.
He told me he wanted to be in perfect health for his death. He wanted his body to be ready; he did not want to end up in hospital with another obstruction. He planned his funeral, the music that would play, who would get what.
He spoke with such pragmatism and clarity, I wondered whether he actually knew what it meant and I’d ask him that in my emails.
At the end of it, my emotional state the last four months of his life, when he took the overdose of Dormonoct, was extremely interesting. The way I had to handle my kids. Because they knew the story.
When I had told them that Craig decided to take his own life they were at an age where they understood suicide. And now they had to understand it through their mother who wasn’t hiding anything, and so that was an interesting process, how I explained it. I told them he was sick and he was giving up and wanted to die.
And they would ask me, “What about trying your best?” And whether it was okay, when things weren’t working out in life, to commit suicide.
I explained that we had never walked in his shoes and that his choosing to die was a very severe way of dealing with something that he could not control. It resulted in death, the final frontier. There is nothing after that.
Craig definitely believed that he was going to heaven. He believed God was going to be waiting for him. He believed it was going to be better and he believed 100 per cent and that there would be “no time” where he was going, and that he would be with his mom. He believed he was going to be his mother’s [guardian] angel.
But the problem is, his mother didn’t want an angel. She wanted Craig.
And then there was the long excruciating wait for Dignitas to reply to him. For months we sat in this holding pattern. It was like this vortex that formed around his imminent death. Every day we waited for Dignitas to reply. It was deeply traumatic.
Like when you wait every day for someone to go away and it is not like they are going to a happy place, you are now facing the loss of their lives and everyone is trying to be happy, accepting. Perhaps at that point we should have had an intervention with all of us, to find out how we were dealing with it.
George went to his own little place. I just got sadder and sadder. We all had our ways of dealing with it. Patsy and Neville sought refuge in their own ways. Patsy went inwards and Neville went outwards and also buried himself in work.
Craig went from hope to anger at every day Dignitas didn’t reply to his application. Every day we woke up with this hope… for someone to die!
I spent more time during those four months with the Schonegevels than I did at home.
One day Craig called me up and said, “Sandy, I have all my sports stuff here.”
He decided who should get what. The wet suits, the golf clubs. I photographed all his worldly possessions. I looked at all this stuff and it felt to me like he was going on a long holiday, or maybe going to live in Australia. Like he was packing up and going.
And in that process it became easier to dialogue with him. He was talking about whether 16 minutes of gas in a car was going to kill you or not. The one thing he did not want to do was die violently.
I am a very pragmatic person and I was able to hold my emotions with him, which I think helped him. Imagine if I cried every five minutes.
Craig was crossing off lists. Shaving his head, taking off the pictures from his bedroom walls, deleting files on his computer and sifting through his music to leave his favourites for Patsy. We now know that he was also stockpiling tablets. He didn’t want to
