Let them talk about the bereavement. don’t, don’t try and stop them talking. And let them, t’s not something you get over, it’s something they’ve got to learn to cope with and don’t expect people to be as they were before, we’re not the same people we were, we never will be the old Bob, the old Lynda. And you can’t have those back. Part of you has died, you know and your life becomes different. And let other people do the same. And the other important thing I would say to survivors is do not do anything drastic for the first 12 months. Do not move house, wait for 12 months and see what you feel like then. When this first happened Lynda wanted to get out of this house, but after a while she realised this was the place that had the most memories of him.

So the Parents of Suicide website is developing and changing all the time.

Yes, yes it’s updated all the time, it’s an active site, and it’s also linked with another site called Family and Friends of Suicide. It’s run by the same couple, for people whove lost members of family and friends.

Do you look at that one as well sometimes?

I don’t go on that one myself.

One’s enough I guess.

One’s enough to keep me busy, and she’s, there’s some of these e-mail support groups who; Grieving Parents and other links, link, other ones that are linked in various forms so it’s all different types there for different people, and once a year, no, once a year we, Lynda and I go over to America to join up with a gathering of Parents of Suicide. They hold four retreats a year now in this lady’s house, in Tennessee, near Nashville, and we go over once a year and meet up, sometimes there’s been about 70 people staying at this person’s house, but she’s decided it’s too much, she’s reducing it down to about 30 a gathering now. But we go and we share with other people there. We share, we live with them and we go and visit other people and stay with other families that have lost children to suicide and Darren’s name gets mentioned in other places and he, he’s on this, he’s in this, where we go in Tennessee she’s got a butterfly pavilion where she, where we get together to have meals and that sort of thing, and she’s got a memorial wall up in the, in the back section of that and Darren’s photo, pictures on that.

Oh that’s nice.

His name is on a brick in Evansville in Indiana for another couple we met, he’s on a wall in British Columbia in Canada, it’s to keep Darren’s name going. We, what we do we do in memory of Darren. Because Darren, we weren’t ashamed of Darren when he was alive, and we’re not ashamed of him now and we want to talk about him, we want to share him and

It’s very comforting all that?

Yes, and, and that’s what we do.

hen it came to the first Christmas without Darren, up to that point Lynda had always sent the cards out you know, she couldn’t face doing it because Darren’s birthday was the 15th December, or it is the 15th December, so it’s only 10 days later you’ve got Christmas, and we always had this thing, not starting Christmas things until after Darren’s birthday, so come the first one and it was so hard, and so much going on, that I took over sending the cards because I felt it would be a way to send the messages thanking people for all their support at the time, and well we don’t want to leave Darren’s name off, so I’ve got, I’ve got a stamp, a rubber stamp with a butterfly because one of the symbols of Compassionate Friends is a butterfly, so I just stamped the butterfly onto a card and put Darren’s name on, with those gel pens, so it stood out enough for me to see it and if people, it wasn’t in their face so, and since then that’s all I, so that’s what I’ve done to every card I’ve sent out, I’ve, I’ll do that. And if I send it to somebody else whos lost sort of a loved one recently or to somebody whos lost their child, I put their name on it as well. But every so often I send that to new groups so the new members can read it and they are so grateful too, because they don’t want to leave their child’s names off of cards, but
That’s really nice.

Yes, that’s it so it is, his name appears without being put there, it’s a sign, and it’s just something that helps you. Cos that’s one thing we’ve learnt over the time is you’ve got to do what’s best for you. don’t worry what, what other people think you should be doing or not doing, this is not something you get over, it’s not an illness, it’s an experience you’re having to face and you learn to cope with it. And you have to do things that are right for yourselves.

Mm.

And everybody’s different, everybody’s an individual. So you do what’s good for you and if we can help others by giving them ideas that’s, and they adapt it to suit themselves, so that’s, that’s what a lot of our journey has been about is

I mean we always have a candlelight for him, I light a candle every evening anyway but we, when we go up to the cemetery every week we light a tea light up there, and on his birthday and anniversary more candles are lit, we release balloons on these special occasions, we attach a message to them, and send them off and we’ve had quite a few back from various places, that helps us, you know just sending a message up to him.

Do people pick up the message and then write back to you?

Yes, we’ve had, the very first time we did it was his, well his first anniversary. He, he died on a August bank holiday Monday, which was on August 31st, so the following year we had August bank holiday Monday, and the 31st as two separate days, so we did something special, we had a we had a family and friends picnic day up at the local scout camp site where he spent a lot of time, and we released balloons there. And the very first message we got back was from, was by e-mail, the power of the internet again, because as I’d included my e-mail address, it was from some youngsters whod just been to the Notting Hill Carnival, and they’d been celebrating the night before and they was staggering down to get some breakfast and they saw this thing float down from above them and they thought, Oh message And they were saddened with, tinged with sadness when they read our message but they sent a very nice e-mail to me.

That’s a really nice idea.

So they send the cards back so that I’ve got some of the cards home now and it’s nice when they do, when they do reply to it. But the last two anniversaries, one of Darren’s favourite meals or takeaways was Kebab and chips from his local, from our local fish and chip shop, so the last couple of, well we’ve been out for meals at various places or takeaways, but the last three years we’ve taken, we’ve got the Kebab and chips and taken them up to the cemetery and sat by Darren’s grave on a couple of chairs and sit there sharing with him, if he can’t come to us, we’ll go to him and, we, and that was one of the reasons why we want, I wanted him buried cos we have a stone, cos when you have them cremated there’s no stone, there might be a little plaque but there’s no memorial stone.

You felt it was important to go [to the inquest]?

It was important to go and we had some friends go along with us as well, and the coroner read out the various bits and came to the open verdict because he could not prove intent, he could not prove that Darren intended to die by suicide, because he hadn’t tried before, because he hadn’t left a note, and because he might’ve had alcohol in his system he could not faithfully reach a verdict of intent.

Mm.

Now, he, he was good, he was very compassionate and we have met him since, and we just sometimes feel that perhaps an open verdict was not the right verdict, because is it, is it, is Darren now not a statistic, because if he’s not a figure on a suicide list, does it, is it an inaccurate balance of the figures shown? Cos these figures need to be accurate to show what’s actually happening to our youngsters. But he, as I say, the coroner he did what he had to do and he was very compassionate with it, and, I’ve got no qualms about it.

Is that the main reason why you would’ve preferred a verdict of suicide for the accuracy of the figures?

Yes.

Were there any other reasons why you didn’t

No other reason at all. It, it’s accuracy of figures, I mean in the actual death certificate issued in France, does say, suicide, so he is somewhere on records somewhere, but in this county it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Does he show up as a suicide or not? Because sometimes it, to get funding for various things you need to have lots happening.

I feel it is important for figures to be accurate, because of funding for people trying to fund research into, into these reasons why so many people die by suicide. But I can see the other side as well where people have doubts about whether their loved one did actually die by suicide or whether it was a cry for help that went wrong, and it’s also still a certain amount of stigma involved with suicide.

Parents of Suicide are, basically it’s an internet e-mail support group, but we have a website as well which gives all the different support things, there’s a page or pages which have loved ones’ names, photos, and a message about them. Then we’ve got one called Suicide Memorial Wal where they have all the photos up on this website and every month they have a list of their names, a list of the names of the people who died in that month scrolling across the website so, they, so you can read people’s names from that month, and we have information pages on there, different things that can help you.

How often would you look at it for example?

I go on it every night.

Oh do you?

And most people do it one, they go on it once a day. If, but again it’s, it’s like anything, it’s, it’s, if you feel you, it’s too much for you, you don’t, you come off it for a while. And you use it when you want to, it’s, I, I do it every night cos it’s something I, I, I find helpful and I send out messages to, on anniversaries of birthdates and, I’ve been on there now since 1999 I think, I joined that website, so I’m now one of the older members and I can offer help to others if, if I can find the words to put down. We share poems, and inspirational quotes; people find, they send us, so it’s all different sorts of things, and we just release our feelings on this website, on the e-mail support group site.

It [Darren’s suicide], it was an absolute shock and totally unexpected. You never expected to hear the word suicide you know in our house, it was some, nothing ever talked about and we had to make arrangements. His friends parents went out to fetch them back and, because they’d gone in Darren’s car and they couldn’t drive it back so they went and fetched his friends, friends back and all his luggage, and then we had to start the process of getting him home. We used a local funeral firm and they sorted it all out for us. But then you’ve got to start the, coping with this traumatic experience and I mean, like most married couples, Lynda and I had been married 30 odd years at the time, no 20 odd years at the time, and we were just going along comfortable together, but when this happened, this was something that could’ve either torn us apart or brought us together. We made the conscious decision at the time we, we both brought Darren into the world, we both see him out of it and we worked together and one of the biggest things we realised is that even though you’re grieving for the same loss, you grieve differently, you are individuals. But it’s so important to, if you can, to work together and when’s one down the other one’s up and you can help each other through it.

Mm.

And I’m fortunate Lynda has helped me through it, and I’ve helped Lynda through it so, I don’t know what we’d have done without each other.

Is there anything else about the inquest, I was asking you what it, what it felt like to be there? And you said it was alright.

Yes, in our case, in our circumstances it was fine, the coroner was very Good, and because we had friends there, as people from Compassionate Friends had gone as well and we had Darren, a couple of Darren’s friends there and their parents, so we, we had a lot of support. The press was there but it was only the local reporter, and it, again they covered it very compassionately in the paper, just a local bit in the, in the, well piece in the local paper. So we didn’t find it intrusive, or hurtful like some people can, some people have a lot more to go through if there’s a lot more doubt or as is sometimes the press don’t always help people because they like to dig up all the dirt at times but in this case it was the headline just said depressed teenager hung himself on holida or something, in France or something, and that was about, that’s all it said you know.

Our son Darren, he was 19, died on 31st August 1998. He died by suicide whilst on holiday in France. We didn’t know he was depressed, he’d been a full time student at college doing A’ levels, he, he started that in 1997, and by the time 1998 came he’d had finished with all of them. Because of one thing or another and he’d been; but he got himself a full time job and some time he came home, he used to come home feeling a bit, look a bit down and I spoke to him, but we just took it as the normal teenage; going from education into you know full time employment. But he had a good job, he was at minor supervisory level for a local building supply firm, and well I gave him every chance to talk, but he didn’t seem to want to. In August he’d arranged several things to do, he’d done a bungee jump in 1997 and he, he enjoyed it so much he wanted his mates at work to do it as well, and they, he had set it all up for the whole group of them to go and he’d paid for them and he was going, pay for it. And it was going be the Saturday he came back from holiday so he had plans, and he went away, and then it was the August bank holiday Monday, I was, I was at work in the evening and my wife Lynda got the call and that it one of his friends he was with, he’d died by suicide, and Lynda had to phone me up at work. Got home as best I could and, and that’s when our journey started.

One of the reasons we think might be behind Darren [and what happened] is the Men don’t cr attitude, and men, men don’t show emotions. He probably held it in, all his emotions in too much, he didn’t let it out. And all I would say is, men do cry, and men are allowed to cry, and we have emotions, we should show em and I’ve cried, I’ve cried on TV as well, national TV I did some interviews with various programmes and yeah, men do cry.

Did he leave a note or anything?

No note, nothing. And one of the hardest things we’ve had to deal with is, Why And we keep asking ourselves that question. We know we’re not going to get an answer, I remember saying to Lynda soon after it happened, when she was on about, Could it have been this, could it have been that I said, Well the only person who knows is gone, he’s taken it with him But afterwards I started to do it myself, you do, you, well the great human mind does not, does not like mysteries, it always like to find out answers to questions that, that’s why you have so many history programmes and we like to find out what could have happened at so we’re the same, we, we keep asking, Why And we’ll go down a particular route, come out nowhere and later on we’ll go down a different route and try something else but, we, we know, we might know, we might have well said what the truth is, but we don’t know the truth.

No of course.

So and that’s, that’s one of the biggest things that’s probably, well biggest thing for everybody I think is the; it’s to know why. And not everybody leaves notes.

No.

And sometimes people do leave notes but there’s still no answer. it’s not your fault, love Mum Or I love you Mum Or something, and it’s not your fault but it doesn’t say what the reason is, and, and that’s one of the biggest things.

Which is difficult?

it’s one of, yes, the biggest difficult thing to get over is not knowing why.