The effects of suicide are different for everyone. When someone you love decides to take their own life it is never an easy thing to deal with. You are left with questions that can never be answered.
I was thirteen when my father decided that his life was not worth living. It was the 29th of October 1990 just two days before Halloween. It was a Monday morning, I was on holidays from school and was at home with my older sister. My father wasn't working that day as he said he wasn't feeling well. I remember the loud bang and in my innocence I thought that my father had fallen out of the bed. How wrong I was.
My sister was the one that discovered him and she protected me from the horror she saw. My father had shot himself.
The days and weeks that followed are still a blur today. I used to fear that these memories would one day return to haunt me but now I know they never will. They are my minds way of protecting me.
When someone you love commits suicide there is no end. You wonder if it was something you did. You wonder if there was something you could have done to stop it. You wonder and wonder but there are never any answers.
I used to dream about my father returning constantly when I was growing up. I'd dream that he would be there and everything was normal. This would never happen though and it took a long time before I was eventually able to face up to this.
I hated meeting new people as a teenager. I hated the question "What does your father do for a living." When I said my father had died people always automatically asked "what happened?" I used to lie and say that it was a car accident or something like that. I just couldn't bring myself to say the word suicide.
Over the years I have come to terms with what has happened in my life. It took a lot of talking and family communication and in 1995 I finally put pen to paper and wrote "From Those Death Left Behind" a book dedicated to the memory of my father, in a bid to promote suicide awareness. It is available to buy on Lulu.com at http://www.lulu.com/content/120733
Suicide has such a stigma attached to it that it is very hard to talk about this subject openly. When someone you love commits suicide you feel alone, you feel empty, you blame yourself. Death is always an ending of life but when death is chosen by someone it just feels so wrong. Why was life so unimportant? Why was I so unimportant? These are the questions that no one can answer, but I know I will get the answers when my life comes to an end and I am reunited with my father.