Parachute

We have plenty of time, I tell my car in my head as I leave my house, we'll get there. I approach it with my keys in my hand, I feel my tie a little too tight around my neck - coffee will do that to you. My neighbour, Alan, looks at me from across the road with a far too cheerful smile. I mean, it's not his fault, he has no idea where I'm off to. I won't ruin his mood.

‘Where’re you off to?’ He asks me as he washes his Reliant Robin.

‘Just off to see someone,’ I respond, ‘and I’ll probably get there a lot faster than you would in my normal car.’

Look, I do like Alan, don’t get me wrong, he’s a good bloke, but literally the only conversations we ever have are from across the road from each other’s houses, we know virtually nothing about each other, apart from the fact my car has four wheels, and his has three. So naturally, it’s the only thing I can think of to joke about with him. I guess I also know he can take a joke, otherwise he would have already shouted at me for laughing about his really, really dumb car.

‘Well that may be true, but you won’t look as cool as me now, will you?’ See what I mean? The man knows how to joke.

‘That’s true, Alan,’ I tell him as I get into my car, ‘have a good day, mate.’

I reverse out of the drive and drive down the road of my street. The council really needs to fix this damn road, the car won’t stop bumping me up and down. I don’t get how this hasn’t been fixed, it’s a visibly fucked road. At the same time though, I’m not gonna be the one to call and get it fixed. I’m not that type of person. You have to be a special type of person to give a shit about something that’s annoying you but also call to get it sorted, especially if you’ve been coping with it for 3 years.

It’s a 2 hour drive, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to it all that much. Sure, it would be a lot less enjoyable in a Reliant Robin, but it doesn’t mean I’m excited to be driving for 2 hours to get to my best friend’s funeral. I’m putting myself through 2 hours of something that, let’s face it, I don’t even enjoy, so I can go and stand with a bunch of people I care about to get sad about someone we all cared about. There is the argument to be made that we're all going to be celebrating his life instead of mourning his death, but there will be one or two people there that will cry their arse off. And we’ll all hug them and tell them it’s okay, and that he’s in a better place and that we should remember how great he was, but we’re all just going to say that to avoid the actual truth that is: Adrian’s dead and there’s no way we can ever contact him again, and that’s horrible.

If I sound insensitive, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with a lot of death in my life. When I was 8, I remember sitting down in the garden and just crying my eyes out. Somehow, the concept of death had just hit me, I realised that one day I’m going to die and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I don’t even know how I realised this, maybe it was because my Great Nan was super old and it was pretty obvious she was on her way out, or because I’d seen enough films to understand that death is a real thing that happens. My family wasn’t very religious but the school I went to was, so the idea of heaven and hell was drilled into my brain, but even at that age something in me was saying: are these just two imaginary places used by people to help ease the actual inevitability of death? (I was 8, obviously I didn’t use those words). So when I went into the garden, I sat down and I had the realisation that one day, I’m going to die and because I’m older than my sisters, I’ll probably die before them, and I just cried. I bawled my eyes out. The whole idea of death and how big and serious it was had been numbed down by my school, films and never witnessing it, but the reality had hit me. I remember my mom coming into the garden and asking me what was wrong, and as I explained it to her, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t expecting me to come out with this shit. Imagine your 8 year old kid telling you he’s realised he’s going to die. I think this upset her, it must have done, but she told me it’s all okay and it’s not something I should worry about right now. Then I remember my dog, Danzig, coming up to me during all this and putting his head on my lap as if to say ‘Oh no, dude! Don’t be sad, that makes me sad when you’re sad and I don’t like being sad and clearly neither do you because water is currently coming out of your eyes whilst saying the words ‘die’ and ‘sad’, I’m a dog and even I know these are bad words.’ 

But then, as I’m sure you expected, Danzig died 3 years later. Which again, made me very sad. This was my first experience with actual death, when a pet dies when you’re young, it’s like a trial run for real people dying. You learn to cope with the actual feelings of loss and mourning, and the acceptance and weirdness that you’ll never see them again. I’m not saying a pet dying is less sad than a human dying, everything is a matter of perspective and experience, your perspective of a pet dying could be wildly different to mine. To me, you gain a bond with your pet, you get used to them looking at you and cuddling you on the sofa, but you don’t talk to them the way you talk to a human, their life revolves around yours whereas actual people have their own thing going on. I think, in a weird way, this makes it easier to get over a pet, because they’ve only left you behind and no one else is going to be as sad as you. I really struggle to comfort people whose pets have died because I didn’t personally know them, I never had an actual conversation with them. But when a human dies you also have to deal with the fact, it’s not just you that’s lost them, it’s everyone else this person knew.

A few years later, when I was in high school, I found out my old primary school teacher, Mrs Campbell, had died of cancer. I had her as a teacher through every single year of primary school, she was a big part of my childhood, yet when she died it didn’t hit me as much as it should have done. To this day, it still hasn’t hit me, and I’m 27 now. When I was told she had passed, instead of feeling sad and like I had lost someone I cared about, I just thought about how awful her children must have felt. This was their mother, she used to talk about her kids all the time, she obviously loved them.

Then, another year later, my high school science teacher, Mr Jones, committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. Now, I felt awful about this, I felt so guilty. Obviously, we didn’t know what was going on in his life, it could have been anything, he could have had some serious issues at home, but his lessons were like walking into hell. That might sound like a lazy analogy, but it's the best and most realistic thing I can come up with. It was loud, there was unbearable shouting, no one listened to anything he said. One day, I remember just sitting in silence and watching him react to the chaos, and I could see he had given up, he had no control. And it wasn’t his fault, we all saw a weakness in him and took advantage of it. He left the school and a year later he took his own life, and all I could think was ‘If we were kinder, if we listened to him, if we just made his job a little easier, maybe that could have made all the difference.’ But I guess there’s really no use in thinking that.

My Great Nan died a few months after and it was the first funeral I attended. I wasn’t close with her, in fact, I can’t say I even liked her that much. I was told she wasn’t always the nicest, but when she died everyone had come to the realisation that, maybe they were a bit harsh on her, maybe she was just old and of her time. My Nana (her daughter) kept herself together well, I was shocked, but there was a moment when the entire family met before the funeral and we were all getting ready to get into our cars and my mom and I talked to her in private, and she just started crying.

‘Oh mom, it’s okay.’ My mom said as she hugged her.

‘It’s not that,’ my Nana sobbed ‘It’s just sad that this is the reason the entire family have all finally gotten together.’

I was 14, I didn’t exactly know what to say so I didn’t say anything, I just gave her a hug. I’d never even thought about a funeral like that, and she was right, it is sad that a funeral is the reason everyone finally gets together. Everyone talked in a quiet, dark pub, no one was really crying anymore, we were all just there. Everyone had kind of just accepted the fact this woman was no longer around. We were all talking about what we’ve been up to, what we’re going to be doing later on in the week, the occasional story about my Great Nan, and we all left and moved on. When I say we moved on, I don’t mean we just got over it and forgot about it, no, I mean that we had mourned, dealt with, and accepted it. 

No one ever tells you about that part; the acceptance part. When someone dies you deal with it by crying and mourning it, you think about the memories you had with them, and the fact there are other people utterly heartbroken by it. But no one ever says you begin to accept it. It doesn’t mean you can’t still be sad, but you do reach a point where you’re able to continue with life and move with the rest of the world.

Although, I’ve never had a child, so when Dan - a lovely, beautiful autistic boy at my school - took his own life at the age of 15, I don’t know if the same process applied to his mother. It’s been years, and I wouldn’t know if she could have even begun to move on and accept that.

Man. That was shit.

He was such a nice kid. Everyone in the school, and I mean everyone, loved him. Even if you didn’t know him that well like I didn’t, you’d still wave to him or say ‘hi’ in the hallway. And he’d know everyone’s name, like, how? He’d just know. There was nothing wrong with him, absolutely nothing. Yet he took his own life because he was scared of having to live the rest of it with assistance because of his disability. He didn’t want to put that on people. This is the death I saw affect the most people; an entire school. I remember having to go to the toilet and just sit in a cubicle because I couldn’t get over the effect this had on my class. It felt surreal. Looking around and seeing everyone in shock, it was weird. But we were still able to move on and accept it, because that’s what you have to do.

The pattern in all these deaths I’ve witnessed and experienced is that there was some sort of distance between me and them. My dog wasn’t a human, I hadn’t seen my primary school teacher in 2 years before she died, my science teacher had left the school, I didn’t really know my Great Nan all that well and I wasn’t that close with poor Dan. So the next death hit me hard.

One Saturday when I was 18, I had been at my friend’s house for a little get together of about 6 or 7 of us. Her girlfriend, Tammy, was there. I’d never really gotten on with her all that well, in fact, I’d say she kind of annoyed me. But that night when everyone had gone to bed we just stayed up, drank wine, and chatted until about 4 in the morning. We talked about politics, we talked about life, she explained to me what had happened to her in life in regards to self harm and abuse, we bonded over films, we really got to know each other. I really thought ‘wow, I’ve made a good friend here. This is wonderful.’ 

The following week, on a Sunday (and I’ll never forget this), I was on the train for an hour to see a girl I was seeing. And you know when something feels off? Like, you just feel like there’s a shift in the balance of everything and you don’t know why? I hadn’t heard from a couple of my best friends all day which was weird because they’d usually message and see how I am.

About half an hour into the train journey, I got a text from my friend, and the text just read ‘Tammy killed herself.’ No explanation. No build up. Just that one text.

Instantly, I called my friend, she explained what had happened, how it happened and what the situation was right at that moment. I’m not going to explain what she did, I don’t really want to. This time I saw the effect it had on my friends, I saw them breakdown crying, even my mom, who didn’t even know Tammy, was crying. Yet I didn’t, nothing in me wanted to cry. I was just in this weird limbo of not feeling settled and wanting to look after my friends. It’s just shit that I finally thought I had a friend who I connected with, then the following week she basically stopped existing. I saw her girlfriend breakdown and cry to her mom. To this day, I’ve never heard anyone cry like that, I’m not sure I ever will. She cried the same way at her funeral.

Then, those 6 or 7 friends I had seen the Saturday before, slowly started to drift, it was like this death was lingering over us. We all went on holiday together to try and get over it and give ourselves a break, but surprisingly, that was when I cried. I felt awful and guilty the entire trip. 

Then, nothing. I just kind of stopped talking to them. Surprisingly, it felt like the natural thing to do, the most normal thing. 

Death has an affect on people in ways you wouldn’t expect sometimes. Sure, the pattern of mourning them, dealing with it and accepting it is there, but the lingering effects it has on people will shock you. Prior to this, I would have thought it would have brought us all closer together, when really it did the complete opposite. But alas, we move.

Sorry this is so depressing. Death isn’t exactly a fun way to start something off, but I feel like it’s an okay way to do it. Death shouldn’t be this big, scary thing we’re all afraid of mentioning, it’s just something waiting for us. Alright, yeah, we could all probably do without it waiting there. Imagine if I had Alan waiting outside his house washing his Reliant Robin every day. I’d probably want to tell him to fuck off eventually (sometimes I want to say that anyways. He just cleans the thing constantly, it’s a three wheel car, I’ve never even seen him drive it, he just washes it. If you’re embarrassed by your own poor choice of purchase, get something else or don’t get it in the first place. There’s a reason it didn’t take off as a car. It has three fucking wheels compared to everyone else’s four). But that’s all we’re doing really, we’re constantly telling death to fuck off, by either avoiding the topic, getting upset at the idea of it, or being scared of it. But it’s okay to talk about it, please trust me on that.

Anyways, yeah, Adrian’s dead now. My actual best friend. He literally forgot to put on his parachute when skydiving a couple of weeks ago. Fucking idiot.