Sun and Clouds

The weather for John and Felicity’s wedding was unexpectedly sunny: they deserved it, as they came to sign all the paperwork no less than three years ago, and had to wait all this time because of pandemic delays. While I was in the vestry thinking that my cotta was so creased I really ought to run the iron over it, I checked my phone and found a message from church member Elaine. ‘Rest in peace Annabel’, it said, ‘they found her’. 

Annabel had been missing since the day before, and unlike Bill, the search for her didn’t end as we wanted. Deeply unhappy over recent months and increasingly lost, Annabel had been engulfed by sadness and it defeated her. All the good she might have done is gone and we will mourn that as well as the loss of what she was. The last time I’d spoken to her had been for the parish newspaper, talking about the series of children’s fantasy books she’d just begun to publish as she left her teaching job to pursue new avenues, it seemed then. Now I wonder what the families who bought those books and have them on their shelves, excited by a work whose author’s name they knew, will do with them. What will parents say to their children? How will Annabel’s family, and all her friends at school, absorb her loss? 

 And then there are the questions that are unanswerable but you can’t help asking: what must her last thoughts have been? Were they despairing? Did she imagine herself unloved, or did the knowledge of being loved just make no difference to a soul in such darkness? Could she have taken any comfort from dying outside among trees and birds? ‘Could any of us have said anything? Could we have made a difference?’ asked Elaine on the phone. From a Christian point of view, we can at least say Annabel knows the truth now, about herself, and about what we felt. 

She was the very opposite of isolated, socially, even if she was shut off within her own sorrow, and although we are, rightly, encouraged to speak up about our mental health struggles, she did and yet didn’t make it through. Survival seems so arbitrary. 

One former colleague of Annabel’s was at the 8am mass this morning and another congregant mentioned her to me on the way out. As I came home after the main service and the Annual Church Meeting (‘People say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, when we know it’s the APCM’, I told them), a neighbour called to me on the hill. How could she tell her five-year-old that Annabel wouldn’t be coming to give her lessons anymore, she asked? It’s another question with no easy answer, but how she planned to do it seemed about right to me. I offered the thought that very small children are usually quite matter-of-fact about death because they don’t necessarily understand it, and may have more searching questions later. 

This is not the first suicide in the parish in my twelve years, and certainly not the only dramatic death. About 18 months ago someone I knew well was murdered in a very public way, and for legal reasons that case has never been reported in the media or officially referred to at all, but we all know it happened. It’s part of a community’s human scar tissue – and in fact we do well not to forget, but to be kind to our most tender souls, in the hope that, perhaps, we might help keep them alive.