The first time I tried to kill myself, it was not so much a trying for death
as an abandoning of all pretence that I had, or any longer wanted, a life. I
simply gathered together all the pills that were close at hand and took
them. I didn’t count them, didn’t even look to see what they were; I just
swallowed them. So, when I woke again, I wasn’t surprised, I just accepted
my being alive with a kind of weary resignation.
The second time I tried to die, a few months later, I felt something. It was
relief. As I took the pills, I remember thinking, with absolute clarity:
“Thank God it’s all over.” I had tried, very hard, for two years to stay
alive. I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive
for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to
describe the intensity of that effort.
My daughter, Molly, was not with me when I took those pills. She was with her
father. Even in my blackest moment, I had that much sense. I also had the
sense to know that nobody would find me for three days.
In that way, I could have been said to have planned my death, but in no other.
I left no note, put none of my affairs in order. I did, though, tidy the
flat and do the washing-up. I don’t know why, except that I have never liked
other people having to clear up my mess. It didn’t occur to me that I was
the mess that other people would have to clear up.
I counted out the pills, having looked up the number required for a fatal
overdose on the internet. I trebled the dose and, almost as an afterthought,
added my usual nightly sleeping pills, just to be sure I would sleep. I
remember thinking, even as I took my sleeping pills, that it was surely
madness to take pills to make me sleep when I had just taken pills to make
me die.
I woke at 3.20am, my insomnia hour; my waking nightmare. I was desperate for a
pee. I swung my legs out of bed. They collapsed under me. I hit the ground
hard.
“What’s happened to my legs?” I said out loud. There was nobody there to
answer.
“What’s happened?” Then I remembered. The pills. How many had I taken? How
much vodka had I drunk?
I tried to crawl but my knees buckled under me. My legs would not work. I
wanted to pee so badly, I thought I would burst, but there was no way I was
going to piss on my own bedroom floor. I lifted myself onto my elbows and
crawled down the corridor. It took hours, or so it seemed. As I dragged my
paralysed body down that corridor, I thought, I have handled this badly,
with consummate lack of grace. Just like I’ve handled everything else.
I hated myself. I wasn’t dead. F***. I didn’t call the emergency services. I
was too humiliated. I was humiliated and ashamed, both of the impulse and by
the result. I wanted to go on the internet to check the drug profile and see
what the chances of paralysis were, but I didn’t have the strength.
How much vodka had I drunk? I could not remember. I dragged myself to the
kitchen and pulled the bottle from the fridge. There was, at most, one glass
missing.
I took the bottle and dragged myself back to bed, crying in despair and
frustration. I drank straight from the bottle, then passed out.
My dreams were filled with my child, her mute, reproachful face.
How could I have let her down so?
How could I be such a bad mother?
How could I still be alive?
How could I not be dead?
How could I go on?
How could you, Sally? How f****ing could you?
How it came to this
Before I tell you about my depression, I should tell you something about
myself so far.
I was born in Brunei, but I am English. After Brunei, we moved to Brazil, and
from there to Yemen, Oman and Angola. We spent about three years in each
country, with brief intervals in England. My father took a job with Shell
after the war and was posted abroad. We followed wherever his work took him.
I went to a boarding school in England from the age of 11, but saw nothing of
this country other than the school. It was not home.
I love fashion and studied at Central Saint Martins, where, having taught for
many years, I am now a visiting professor. I still love good clothes.
I am a mother, to Molly, whom I love very much, and who loves me. “This much,”
as she says, her arms open wide.
I love words. And books. I am a successful journalist. I am a successful
novelist. As a child, it never occurred to me that people would give me
money to do what I love best. I was a successful magazine editor. In the
mid1980s, I launched Elle, which I edited for four years. It was a
gratifying and immediate hit. Ten years later, I edited another magazine,
Red, for a brief year.
I am less successful at relationships. I have been married twice, which is not
something I am pleased about. At least, I am not pleased about the failures,
rather than the marriages, both of which, at the time, I liked very much. I
remain close friends with both my ex-husbands.
I am in love with and loved by somebody, and hope that I am better at loving
him than I was at loving my husbands. I suspect that he hopes so, too.
Gardening is my passion. So is good food. I love to cook. There are few
things I like more than to feed my friends.
I am, in all these ways, blessed. I am also a depressive. It doesn’t quite
fit, does it?
That night, drifting in and out of consciousness, I called Nigel, a friend I’d
met in psychiatric hospital. He came and got me, sat me in his kitchen and
cooked me food I could not eat, then put me to bed in his spare room. The
next day, I went home. The only other person I told, other than my best
friend Sarah, was my therapist, whom I was still seeing at the time, and
only because I felt that I should.
Why die?
Everyone thinks that a suicide attempt is a reaction to something. For me, it
was a reaction to nothing. It was a year after I had left hospital, where
they had attempted to treat my depression, that I tried to kill myself
again. A year of blank and terrible loneliness. A year of no improvement.
I thought that if I went into hospital, I would become well. I thought a pill
could make me better. The failure of both to do either was almost more
catastrophic, for me, than the illness itself. Far from making me better, it
sent me into a despair from which I thought I would never emerge. If the
great panacea of the 21st century could not help me, what could?
Soon after I left the hospital, I was standing in the kitchen at home, making
a cup of tea. Molly, who had just turned nine, jumped out from the shadows
and said: “Boo!”
I screamed, dropped the cup of scalding tea and burst into tears. Once upon a
time, I would have laughed.
Moll shrunk against the wall in terror. “Sorry, Mum. Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she
cried, holding up her arms as if to ward me off.
I longed to comfort her, to say that everything was all right, but I could not
speak. I could only cry in great racking sobs and shake, as if I was having
convulsions. Molly fled up the stairs, crying for her father.
I collapsed, hysterical, on the floor amid the spilt tea and broken china,
and, as I sat there sobbing, I remembered, ludicrously, a phrase from some
long-forgotten black-and-white movie. “It’s her nerves, poor thing. Her
nerves are shot to pieces.”
Once I had quietened down, I went to find Molly. My exhusband, Jonathan, had
put her to bed. He was quietly furious. “What was all that about?”
“I don’t know.” He said nothing. I could see the look on his face. He thought
I should know.
I shrugged helplessly. “She gave me a fright.”
“You frightened her.” His tone was accusing. I realised then that he thought I
was better. I had been in hospital. I was cured. I wanted to believe it,
too, but I knew it wasn’t true.
Moll’s light was out. I longed for her to be busying herself around the room,
desperately trying to be quiet as she arranged her Beanie Babies in random
piles. She was humped under her duvet. I found her blonde hair and stroked
it. “Sorry, darling.”
A whisper emerged. “You frightened me.” “Yes, baby, I know.
I didn’t expect to find you behind the door.” A small hand emerged from the
duvet, a blue eye peeked out. “Sorry, Mummy. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t, baby. It wasn’t your fault. I upset myself.” She scrambled up,
put her arms around my neck. “Is it the depression thingy?”
“Yes. I’m not quite as well as I thought I was.”
“Didn’t the hospital make you better?”
“They tried very hard, but it takes longer to get properly well.”
“Poor Mummy. Never mind, you’ll feel better soon,” she said, patting me on the
back. She did that often when I was ill, her arms wrapped around me, her
little hand busy on my back. “There, there,” she murmured into my neck.
“There, there.”
It is what I used to say to her when she was tiny.
Living with it; living with my daughter
I went on living for Molly. She was my bright star, the fixed and living point
in my dead universe.
On the days that she was with me, I would get myself up and dressed in the
morning, then wake her and get her ready for school. Once she had left, I
usually crawled back into bed and stayed there. I was always up and dressed
when she got home, and the flat was always clean. Mrs Twitchit, she called
me, because I shook so much from the effort. And from the medication I was
taking.
We ate supper together and watched television. It was a small television, a
portable perched on a chair. I didn’t have the energy to buy another,
despite Molly’s protestations. She did not, bless her, protest too much. I
think she understood the effort it took just to sit in a chair.
I tried not to cry, ever, in front of Molly. I did not want to frighten her
again, although sometimes I would cry without realising I was doing it.
Anything could start my tears. Moll says now that it was usually the news on
television, particularly anything about children being abused.
Sometimes, she would switch the TV off.
“You’re crying, Mummy.”
“Sorry, darling.
“You’re not to watch it any more. You’re especially not allowed to watch it
when I’m not here.”
Moll played music constantly, perhaps to cheer me up. Her favourite – “our
song” as it came to be known – was Robbie Williams’s Angels. “Dance with me,
Mummy, please.”
And I would try. We’d turn the music up loud and lip-synch along to Robbie,
using hairbrushes as microphones. To this day, I am word-perfect.
Angels played a big part in chasing away the demons, both mine and Molly’s.
She found God a terrible trial, and still does. But she did believe in
angels, and so it became the angels who looked over us. Angels, she said,
were very good for chasing away depression, because angels, as she announced
with the irrefutable logic of a child, are light and depression is dark –
the light will always cast out the dark. “If we turn on the light in my
bedroom, Mummy, the darkness goes away.”
At night, if Molly couldn’t sleep, I lay with her on her bed, and we summoned
our guardian angels and dressed them like celestial Barbie dolls. Moll’s
wore silver and white (she hated pink: “too girlie”) and were dressed in
Vegas-showgirl lamé and marabou trim. Mine were kitted out in
top-of-the-range Prada in spun gold.
She remembers little of all this now that she is a teenager, and not given to
believing in angels, but I do. I remember it well, and sometimes, when sleep
eludes me, or the black dog bites, I summon that old, gold Prada angel.
NEED HELP WITH DEPRESSION?
Samaritans; 0845 790 9090. Sane; www.sane.org.uk
.
Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton (£15.99
Bloomsbury) is published on February 4; www.shootthedamndog.com.
You can buy it for the special price of £14.39 (inc p&p) through
The Sunday Times BooksFirst; 0870 165 8585
