A year or so after Saagar, one Saturday morning we were driving on the M4 to see Simon’s mum. As we tuned into BBC Radio 4, my ears were assaulted by the prefix, ’committed’. Neither the BBC, nor the psychiatrists knew better. They hadn’t learnt that crimes are ‘committed’. Not suicides. Suicides came from a desire to end insufferable emotional pain. Either these people didn’t know or they didn’t care enough to modify the words that habitually barfed out of their mouths. That prefix is so firmly embedded in the English language that it thoughtlessly rolls off our tongues. Suicide was a crime in the UK before 1961. It is still a ‘sin’ according to some good men and women of God. Hence, the default prefix, “committed”. That has to change. Like people who sadly die of cancer, people die of Depression and Schizophrenia and the like. They do not “commit” a crime.
Part of me was grateful they were talking about it, even if their language was wrong. I tried not to get too put off by that. I had not heard so many conversations about it before. Had something changed or had I not been listening all this time?
My mind could no longer handle long complicated, rambling books. It forgot names, lost plot lines and wandered off, out the window within minutes. Short and gentle texts, it could deal with but nothing that puts too much cognitive load. I asked a helpful librarian to recommend a couple of small books. She pulled out ‘The sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes and ‘The French Exit’ by Patrick deWitt. Both the stories had suicide at the center of it. I have read many books but couldn’t remember this theme arising so often.
I joined a short-story writing course at the Himalayan Writing Retreat. The award-winning author, Kritika Pandey, our teacher asked us to read ‘Why I decide to kill myself and other jokes’ by Douglas Glover beforehand. My heart pounded right through those sixteen pages. I was asked to pay attention to the technical details – the elliptical way in which the word ‘blue’ appears at periodic intervals, the sub-plot involving the dogs, the side-story of Hugo’s mum, the symbolism of the car – all of these were lost on me. I was inside the protagonist’s head, feeling her dread, her quandary and her hopelessness. It was in my face again.
The e-mail from the V&A was advertising an Alexander McQueen exhibition.
The film on TV tonight was ‘The Hours’.
The book that fell off the shelf and broke its spine today was ‘The First Forty-Nine stories’ by Earnest Hemingway.
This blasted thing that came out of nowhere, is now, everywhere.
Had my eyes and ears been shut for all these years?

Or, I wonder if, like many others I was not aware of my belief – this kind of thing only happens to others?

PS: The author, Earnest Hemingway and the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, both ended their own lives. ‘The Hours’ is a film based on a book by Michael Cunnigham with Virginia Woolf’s suicide at the center of it.