Secrets and suicides: being open about a tragedy unveils world of hidden hurts

It is, I can see now, the book I became a writer to write. I was four years old when my mother died. In his despair, a shame and guilt I can only imagine, my father decided we should move on, shouldn’t look back, and I can remember him speaking her name to me only once in the next 30 years. I was 16. Driving in his car – sitting side by side, so we didn’t have to look at each other – he told me that her death had been suicide and gave me a brief outline of the story.

He quickly remarried and my two sisters were soon on the way. We moved to a rambling Victorian house with a big garden. I grew up in a noisy household, with four children, a menagerie of pets, guests enlivening our table with stories and laughter. But while, without tending, my memories of my mother were in time lost, I never forgot that she had existed. While I lived in the visible world, I was always conscious that there was another, unseen, forbidden, tantalising.

Why then did it take me so long to write about it? On December 14th it will be half a century since my mother’s death. It was partly that I had to grow up, to become a writer, to learn the skills of research and language needed to tackle the story. It was partly that once I embarked on investigating who she was, why she died, it took time – six years for the book to gestate and emerge. But it was also the difficulties of challenging the family pattern of silence that had been laid down when I was young, conceiving even that it could be challenged.

After my talk with my father when I was 16, I searched our house for the few clues to my mother that had survived: a box of photographs; a bag of cups and rosettes she had won at gymkhanas as a girl; the copies of her posthumously published book, a study of the conflicts of housebound young mothers, up on a high shelf. But though I kept out a photograph of her, I didn’t actually read her book, didn’t talk to anyone about what my father had told me.

In my early thirties, clearing out my grandparents’ house, I discovered two more clues. One was a yellowed cutting of a local newspaper report of the inquest into her death. From this I learned, for the first time, the date of her death, how she had died, and that she had dropped me at a Christmas party at my nursery school before heading off to end her life. The other clue, scrawled on a small white envelope, was her suicide note. It was 33 words long, four more than the years of her life. “Please tell the boys,” read the last of them, “I did love them terribly!” It was her only message to my brother and me, the only words she had left directly for us, and it shows the force of the family taboo that it never occurred to me to show the note to my brother – that I felt ashamed for having seen it, for having it in my possession, and I hid it away.

My first book, written around that time, was a non-fiction account of the mysterious death of a young woman in Africa. My first novel ended with the suicide of the protagonist’s mother, though she was nothing like the little I knew of my mother. My next two novels were fragmented narratives, attempts to construct a story out of pieces like an archaeologist imagining an ancient time from a few shards of pot or bone. I was, I can see now, circling around the story of my mother, both in subject and form, without actually approaching it.

It took my brother’s death from a heart attack at the age of 46, and a heart attack of my own at the same age three years later, to give me the courage to breach the family defences. I began tracking down my mother’s friends and quizzing them about her. That hidden world, I discovered, had been there in plain sight all along, only hidden from me. Some of the people I spoke to were family friends I hadn’t realised went back to my mother’s time. Others were easily traceable. One couple who had crucial information to give me about her had been my brother’s next-door neighbours for the last decade of his life. They had never mentioned to him that they knew his mother.

Silent for so long, I would now, like the Ancient Mariner, blurt out my story to anyone who would listen. It could be a conversation killer. “What are you writing about?” “My mother’s suicide.” But my readiness to talk both to my mother’s friends, and my own friends, aquaintances, strangers even, also prompted, confidences, confessions, in return. Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, I found myself “privy” to “secret griefs.”

As if I had turned on a tap, I heard story after story of early or tragic or unnatural deaths. A woman told me how her fiancée had disappeared on a sailing trip in Norway, his body never found. A man of my own age spoke of a death in his family that he was sure was suicide but no one would ever admit it. An older man poured his heart out to me about his own daughter’s suicide attempts.

A part of my mother’s story was the “affair”, as it was described to me, she had had with her headmaster when she was 15. One woman told me in hushed tones of a sexual relationship she had with a grown man that started when she was twelve. Others used a different language. Abuse, stolen childhoods, rape. One woman told me of her first husband’s violence. Another of locking herself in the lavatory and taking tranquilisers on her wedding day.

Some talked openly, were clearly telling stories they had told before. But others spoke in confidence, pledging me to secrecy. These were mostly women of my mother’s age – approaching 80, as she would have been. Holding on to secrets they had kept all their lives. I had made visible my own hidden world. But I became aware of all these other hidden worlds, there beside people as they go about their lives; unseen, but not unfelt, shadows accompanying them.

A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron is published by Scribe, at £16.99