I really hope the person posting here last night did not go through with their plans to die. Â I have been thinking about you all day. Â I am a stranger to you and this is how much your posts have affected me so just imagine how it will be for those who know and care for you. Â Please come on line and tell me you are still here. Â ‘ I’m going to die tonight’ I sincerely hope you didn’t. Â A stranger who cares enough to ask. Â Tina. x
Tina Bryan
Tina Bryan
I am 47 years old and the mother to four grown children. In 2001 just after 9/11 I lost my husband to suicide. We had been together since the age of 15, but on that night, at just 38 years old, I was widowed. He went into the bedroom, knowing all four of his children were at home and that I was in the living room. He never came out of that room alive. I remember my daughter Holly, just 16 years old, kissing me goodbye. Her boyfriend was waiting outside in his car. She was going out and said 'I am just going to say goodbye to dad'.....then I remember a blood chilling scream and as I jumped up from my seat, running on adrenaline toward the room I heard her screaming and saw her trying to pull her dad free of the noose he had made from his dressing gown cord and which he had tied to the window bars. It was like my whole world moved in slow motion. I could see he was ashen and losing vomit at the corners of his mouth and that he had lost control of his bladder. I knew enough to understand this was very very bad. I knew he was already dead. Despite this, I tried to rescucitate him. All hell let lose in our house. Later neighbours said they had heard the screams coming from the house from as far away as the top of the street. People were everywhere, a neighbour was ringing my mother in law and somewhere in the distance I was aware they were telling her that Geoff, her son was dead and to get here now. My son was standing in the doorway of the small room, just saying 'No, no what the fuck' he was just 15. I begged him to take the two little ones, just 10 and 11 years old and rush them to a friend's house. I had no idea where they were, but now know they were crying huddled in the bedroom upstairs not knowing what was going on but too scared to come down the stairs because of the screaming. It seemed an eternity before the paramedic arrived. Apparently it was minutes. He ushered everyone out of the room, which was tiny and full of chaos and my dying husband. I stumbled out of the house, finding family and friends walking towards the house or pulling up in cars. How had they all got there so quickly. The ambulance arrived. We all stood to the side, allowing the trolley to pass us as we wailed and held each other. Someone said he is gravely ill. The next thing I recall is being in the family room at the hospital, waiting and waiting. After an hour the nurse came in and said sorry, he is gone. I just know the despair I felt was indescribable and I felt like it was all a bad bad dream and was not happening. I was going to wake up. Then we were taken to his quickly cooling body and he just looked asleep. I am crying writing this nearly 10 years on. The image is stark and real in my mind still. The pain is so deep and cuts me every time I recall this night. Living with this memory takes so much effort. You have to block it, deny it and sometimes it overwhelms you without warning. If just one person reads this and chooses life, then I can say he did not die for nothing, which is how it has always felt. There was no gain from his death for him or any of us. Suicide is a loss for everyone. No winners only losers, especially my children, who now have no father, needlessly. http://www.facebook.com/
Surviving suicide