For M

It's six am on a dark February morning. I've had a terrible night’s sleep, my eyes are swollen and my head is a heavy soggy weight.

Last night my husband told me some shocking news. Someone we knew had committed suicide.

Half of me is writing this, thinking I shouldn't be writing this. And should not be publishing it on a blog. The other half of me is thinking that this is what I do, I'm good with words and if just one person, reading, is helped, or pointed in a better direction or offered some comfort, then writing is exactly what I should be doing.

M, as I'm going to call him, was twenty years old. He killed himself in the summer of 2021. We found out yesterday.

The first and only time I met him was a little under three years ago, in the early Autumn of 2019. He would have been nineteen. He was the son of my husband’s long standing business partner, who I will call, D.

D and my husband both worked in the same business, and at various points during the year, they would come together with a few others to hold end of season sales. It was at one such sale that I met M.

At this point, his father, D, was a little over halfway through an ultimately doomed battle with lung cancer. I hadn't seen D since his diagnosis and his physical appearance was greatly changed. It was a huge shock.

I remember walking into the sale and seeing a man half the weight of the man I'd known. A man with a ravaged hollow face and a voice that sounded like it was already in the grave. And more than this, D himself was missing. He'd been a jovial, chatty, man. The kind of man who could sell snow to eskimos. Broad and bull chested, strong as an ox. He talked to anyone and everyone about anything and everything. Except now he didn't. Now he seemed to avoid eye contact and he kept his head down as he worked grimly on.

I've often thought about seeing D that last time. And what I mostly think is how unenjoyable the sale seemed to him. Usually these occasions were sociable and fun. Takeaway coffees and Chinese, the till ringing nonstop. It was a buzz. Home at eight, tired but a a job well done. Now I think that every time that till rang, D was doing mental arithmetic: how much will this help? How long will it last, after I've gone?

But more than that, more than remembering D, I remembered M, his son. The point of this blog.

M was there that day to help at the till. He was clearly his father’s son. The same build, although he had yet to grow into his father's breadth - with maturity I'm sure he would have. And he was clearly in pain. I don't believe there was a relaxed fibre in his body. He seemed hurt, wounded and terribly vulnerable. A whole different level to normal teenage angst. This is what I remember about him.

And my daughter was also there that day. She was seventeen. Painfully shy, slightly rounded shoulders, with blemished skin. I think she may even have still had her braces (retainers), having come to braces late. She wasn't, as you see, confident. She didn't want to be there, and she certainly didn't want to be left alongside a nineteen year old boy she didn't know and was too shy to look at. But left she was, as they both stood behind the till.

And then something magical happened.

I came back a couple of hours later to find M and S, both leaning back against a table, coffee cups in hand, smiling, laughing, chatting away.

They had, my daughter told me later, got on well. As teenager to teenager. They’d talked a lot. About teenage stuff, grades and gymnasiums, fun places to hang out, Netflix series, social media … more than enough to fill a couple of hours and all I recall is that lovely image. A wounded nineteen year old boy and a painfully shy seventeen year old girl, chatting so easily. As if somehow, together, they'd managed to stumble past the worst of it. As if they'd found a little key that had unlocked a door that had led away from everything most difficult in their lives. This is what I remember.

I only saw M one more time after that. At his father's funeral the following summer of 2020.

The image was incredibly brief. We were there only as work colleagues, we kept a respectful distance and when we left, I caught a glimpse of M, sitting with his friends. I guessed they were his friends because their faces were equally as young and this display of youth, stood out at the funeral of a middle-aged man.

I remember thinking how glad I was that he was with his friends. And I remember thinking how outstandingly brave he'd been to read out his mother's tribute to his father just an hour or so before. The funeral was a large one. And he'd read without falter, clear and strong, giving voice to his mother’s words, when she herself couldn’t.

M's father was too young to die, and I think of him often. And when I think of him, I always think of his son, M. And until yesterday I had always thought of how brave he was at the funeral, and how damaged and hurt he'd been back the sale, and how my daughter and him had talked and I wonder what else they talked about and vaguely I hoped that M was alright and finding a way forward for himself. Certainly, I always put that funeral speech as a pivotal moment for him, thinking that if a young boy could get through that, the inner strength it would cement, would support him.

But I was wrong, and the realisation of that has been devastating.

It's not that I think I could have done anything different, or that I could have helped. More that I know, that at any given time, there is always another path to take. And I only know this because I'm in my fifties. I'm hopefully halfway up, and the view it's given me makes all those other paths abundantly clear.

And as I sit here watching a mauve pink dawn unfold, I want to find a way of unspooling time back to that afternoon when my daughter and M sat and chatted. Because there, within that pocket of time, there was the chance of another road. I saw it with my own eyes. Something within M had opened up, relaxed. Then and there, possibilities existed for him.

I'm sure there were other moments like this, before he reached the moment where nothing was left.

I'm sure that between that day, halfway through his father's illness, and the day nearly two years later, when he took his own life, there was light. And this is why I'm writing.

Back in the autumn of 2019 when D's physical illness was so devastatingly clear, his son's mental anguish was equally obvious.

Mental health.

I'm going to do the only thing I can that might offer help, because on this beautiful day unfolding before me, the fact that a young man is no longer alive to see it, makes no sense at all.

There are many organisations that offer assistance, but sometimes it's too difficult to even pick up a phone, let alone talk to someone, or have to leave the house. But there are also ways in which having a conversation with yourself can help. It's called, Therapeutic Writing or Writing for Wellness. It’s not much, but it might, it just might be a start.

For now, here is a link to a wonderful organisation where you can find out more. https://lapidus.org.uk/

M was twenty years old.