Suicide doesn’t end the pain, it just shares it around

The most profound statement I have ever encountered regarding suicide came from a comment to an online article on our own website. I wish I could remember who wrote it, but with the nature of online commenters, it was a made-up name. Regardless, the single line written has stuck with me for nearly a decade and I thank them for it, because it is as true as grief itself.

“Suicide doesn’t end the pain, it just shares it around.” Pain. Suicide is all about pain.

The pain suffered by the individual becomes so profound, so all-encompassing, so complete and overwhelming that they become convinced the only way to stop that pain is to stop their life. Once they have stopped that life, the pain will evaporate like morning mist as the sun comes out.

READ MORE: DevonLive launches Shatter the Silence campaign to encourage people to talk

It doesn’t though. Instead, the pain is handed on like a legacy. It gets willed to partners, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, parents, friends, workmates. The pain is merely shared out so more and more and yet more people feel a part of that pain. It turns to regret and recrimination, to guilt and sadness, grief and even anger at the final decision taken. The pain gets shared around.

When you go to an inquest as a reporter, especially when you go to an inquest of someone who has taken their own life, you can’t help your mind from playing a pitiful game of ‘what if?’ What would have happened if..?

I have been to hundreds and hundreds of inquests and increasingly, over the last few years, I have gone to inquests where the coroner has recorded a verdict of suicide. In line with recent changes, it’s recorded as the person has taken their own life, but the old words do stick.

As an industry we – I mean the media - have changed the way we report on suicides, following advice from the Samaritans and the more direct intervention of friends and family of the deceased. I’ve learned bitter lessons about how tiny, inconsequential details stick like a hot needle in the soft skin of those left grieving.

Inquests, particularly suicides, are desperately sad, heartbreaking affairs. Sometimes they are short but others, where the circumstances of the death are contested, are longer, more detailed, more desperate.

The inquest of Trystan Bryant was possibly the most heartbreaking I’ve attended in 22 years as a reporter, not necessarily because of the untimely and too-early death of the much-loved father-of-one, but the pain he left behind.

That is not to blame him. The deceased cannot be blamed, as senior coroner Ian Arrow always sympathetically states at every inquest he presides over.

During a series of witness statements a picture was drawn of Trystan’s last moments, the Herculean efforts made by fire crews to rescue him, the empathy offered by medical staff and the police officers at the scene.

But it was the evidence of David Kay, a paramedic with South Western Ambulance Services’ Hazardous Area Response Team (HART) which was the most distressing to witness.

A very experienced paramedic, working at the very sharpest end of the service for a number of years, he explained how he introduced himself by name to Trystan, trying to create a human bond.

Yet just moments into his evidence, having recalled shaking Tristan's hand as he took him into his care, David – a robust, clearly very skilled and well-trained paramedic – broke down sobbing. The sobbing you get where it catches you unexpectedly, without warning, taking your breath away and leaving you gulping in air, shocked at your own emotional response.

The coroner politely asked the inquest jury to retire and called for a short break. While the paramedic attempted to insist he was okay to continue, Mr Arrow gently overruled him, urging to sit amongst his colleagues. After a couple of minutes Mr Arrow gently ordered that the rest of the written statement the paramedic was reading out should be read by a coroner’s officer, again gently accepting and then overruling the paramedic’s insistence that he could continue.

The paramedic was then questioned – at length – by lawyers for Devon and Cornwall Police, South Western Ambulance Service, the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Mr Bryant’s family lawyer.

The jury listened intently as David explained how Trystan had fled from the ambulance, scaled three fences in quick succession and eventually threw himself from the Tamar bridge, despite the continuing efforts of the many emergency service personnel, including trained negotiators, who had stayed with him throughout the incident.

At the conclusion of his evidence, Mr Arrow allowed the jury to leave, but as they filed out, the paramedic stood up and hesitated. He began to offer his apologies to Trystan’s family, who were sitting behind their lawyer.

David’s words became choked and again he found himself unexpectedly sobbing as he tried to say “I’m so sorry for you”. He even began to apologise for being so upset, so distressed, apologising because he feared it should not be him that was upset, because they were the ones suffering the loss.

Trystan’s brave family stood as one and, ignoring the bank of stern-faced lawyers in front of them, they walked around them, against all forms of inquest protocol, and together they embraced the sobbing paramedic, firmly reassuring him and thanking him for his efforts.

I looked down at my pad, writing what I was seeing. My eyes filled up, my throat went tight, and all I could think was “poor man, poor man”. I was thinking of the sobbing paramedic and of Trystan, so in pain that he found no other way forward.

As Trystan’s loved ones hugged a stranger who was sobbing at the death of a man he had never met before that night, it would be impossible to deny that suicide is about pain and it is a pain which is only ever shared, it is not ended.

It brought back memories of a friend I lost to suicide, many years ago, and reminds me yet again that suicide does not end the pain, it just shares it around.

I knew Sean from our class in junior school. He was tall, angular, gawky, friendly, kind and funny, with dark, wild hair and a quick smile. If he was a Disney character he would’ve been Goofy, but with the heart and mind of Mickey. By the time we reached the local comprehensive, he was put in another tutor group, but was still a friend you’d say hello to and pass some time with.

By the time I left school at 16 we’d lost touch but a couple of years later we reunited and a group of us would meet up every Friday at the local pub and sit, eat crisps, drink cheap beer and laugh. There was always a lot of laughing.

By this time Sean was fully into the environment and he’d regale us with his tales of late night badger-watching at the local nature reserve. He hunted out rare Victorian bottles and had located a local Victorian rubbish dump where he found an array of incredible glass remains – old beer bottles, glass-ball stopper bottles, green hexagonal poison bottles. His black hair meant his chin sported a real beard while the rest of us were still dealing with bumfluff faces.

And then Sean stopped coming to the pub. Phone calls asking him out were met with excuses. Then they were met with his mum having to make excuses on his behalf. She wanted him to meet with his friends, but you could tell she did not like acting as an intermediary saying he wasn’t coming out.

Time passed and two of our group went off to university. Their summers were spent inter-railing. We occasionally met up at the pub when they were back. Sean would still rebuff attempts to get him to come along, like old times. We didn’t think any more of it. We weren’t aware of depression. Depression was something that happened to other people, in other places, not to us or our friends.

I quit my job in London, applied for a degree at a remote Polytechnic and while waiting to start the course went off to work on a kids camp in America for a few months. I called home occasionally and late into the summer learned from my mum that Sean had been in touch. He had phoned my home – an incredibly rare event – and told her he wanted to get back into the fold. She said he’d revealed he’d been down but was better now and wanted to reconnect. I was overjoyed at the news. I looked forward to the homecoming and reunion.

A couple of months later, back home, I met up with my two inter-railing friends at a cafe. We shared our tales of adventure and nearing the end I suddenly remembered my mum’s good news about Sean. Excitedly I said how Sean had phoned and was rejoining the pub gang.

Stonefaced, they told me the desperately sad tale. He’d phoned their homes looking for them and had left the same uplifting message. Like me, they were away for a few months. Like me, they came home, expectant and hopeful.

After making his fruitless phone calls to us Sean had written a letter to his mum, urging her not to be sad, saying that she didn’t need to worry about him any more. He’d written a will, bequeathing his bottle collection to one of my inter-railing friends who also collected the glass antiques. He also bequeathed a record he liked, Golden Brown by The Stranglers to one of our group. Sean had then gone out into his back garden and taken his life. I still can’t listen to that song without feeling a sense of loss and sadness.

By the time we had all arrived back home to our dull little town in south Essex, Sean’s funeral had already taken place. He had believed that by ending his life, his mother’s suffering, her worries about her lovely, beautiful, funny, kind boy, would be over.

We all played that “what if” game afterwards. What if I hadn’t gone to America? What if I had been at home when he called? What if the others hadn’t gone inter-railing? What if Sean had held on just a little bit longer, when we’d all made it back home and we could’ve all gone to the pub and talked about badgers and women and crisps and just laughed? What if we had realised sooner just how much pain Sean was in?

I’m sure the emergency staff who attended the Tamar Bridge when Trystan stood on the wrong side of the railings have played the same awful game, asking what if they had done something different that night. I’m sure Trystan’s family, his wife, his friends have all asked what if, what if, what if. They’ve felt that awful pain of imagining what if, what if they had done something, then maybe the person they loved would still be here. That they could somehow help stop or ease that pain that living can cause. What if they could somehow make that person see that suicide is not the answer to their pain.

Because suicide doesn’t end the pain, it just shares it around. Don’t let suicide and the pain it causes be your legacy.

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