Louisa Simmonds

It has been a difficult week and it’s still only Wednesday.

Suicide prevention message on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kurt survived his first set of exams but I feel as though I have been put through a shredder and lived the anxiety HE should have been experiencing – vicariously.

When he refused to do the revision he needed to do, I fretted and mooched around the house like a dog that has been unfairly reprimanded.

If I could have disguised myself as Kurt and sat those bloody exams in his place, I would have. It terrifies me to think that his intelligence may be judged on how much he knows about Tutankhamen’s mummification.

Did you know that they pulled the poor boy’s brain out through his nose?

Hark, the distant whirring noise of my helicopter blades overhead?

We all feel like that though sometimes, don’t we? As though we’re being conspired against. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, (and it always happens when I’m already seriously under the pump), work suddenly leapt back into my life with a fucking vengeance and dumped STUFF on me, just to compound my stress.

And then I realised just how fucking self-indulgent and ridiculous I am, worrying about such mundane bollocks….

Because some poor soul jumped off the bridge on Monday afternoon – about the same time that I THOUGHT I HAD PROBLEMS.

And I can’t seem to shake that image from my head.

I didn’t see it happen but it feels as though a sadness still lurks in the streets around our house.

Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive, or maybe it’s menopause that is making me upset over the death of someone I never even knew.

No, I can’t really blame menopause this time because Kurt was affected too.

The death wasn’t reported on the television or in the papers – which proves my theory that the press sensors, or is sensored, and conceals suicides and rapes. Which is a shame, because both tragedies need funding, support and above all, AWARENESS.

Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death for males and it has reached a ten-year peak this year. Depression is the leading cause – meanwhile the government removes more funding from mental health organisations and makes the cost of going to the doctors prohibitive.

I don’t know anything about the person that jumped. I just happened to be walking down the street and saw the police standing over the still body, finally safe from scrutiny, under a blanket.

It’s a shame we couldn’t have protected them a little better; before they jumped.

What a terrible job the emergency services have – trying to fit the fragmented pieces of peoples lives together in times of terrible trauma.

And how desperate would you have to be to choose to end your life at school pickup time and in such an appallingly public way?

We failed that person somehow. Whether they did it because they couldn’t get the right support or they felt isolated. Whoever it was reached their tipping point at that particular time and on that bridge and ended up as another statistic.

Imagine feeling that your life was that worthless?

Some onlookers were taking photos at the scene – most of them had already forgotten that there was an actual person under that blanket.

But everyone will move on quickly with their lives. Except for the family and friends. The death didn’t even make the next day’s fish and chip newspaper.

Kurt was visibly shaken when he heard about it. He has a morbid fascination with suicide and death that often worries me. He often reads accounts about the jumpers at the World Trade Center and watches video footage.

I worry that he truly believes that there is a glory to taking your own life, or a triumph in being able to control your own destiny.

But if we could control our destiny I wouldn’t have had such a difficult week.

#menopause #suicide #Death #helicopterparenting #Family #Life #MentalHealth