This Christmas it will be fifty years since my mother committed suicide, at the age of twenty-nine. Researching and writing her story over the past six years, trying to understand who she was, why she killed herself, has been one of the hardest things I have ever done.
I was four when she died and I have no memory of her. After her death my father decided it would be best if we didn't talk about her. I grew up knowing her only from a handful of stories my grandmother told about her youthful adventures and mischiefs, and the copies of her posthumously published book, The Captive Wife. It was a study of the conflicts in the lives of young mothers, which I discovered on a high shelf in my teens.
The coroner at her inquest said that he had never come across a case in which the intent was so clear and the reason so mysterious. Suicide, especially the suicide of someone so young, her death so apparently inexplicable - leaves a legacy of shock, guilt, shame and bewilderment. "The suicide doesn't go alone," the novelist William Maxwell has written, "he takes everybody with him."
Investigating my mother's story, I had to battle against decades of silence and evasion. I did eventually have a few conversations with my father, though when I look at the notes I took I see that while he talked about his years with my mother, their friends, the holidays they took, their cars, the boat they bought, the old man who lived on a hut on the foreshore and looked after it for two and sixpence a week - he couldn't bring himself to say much actually about her.
Nor was it easy for me when I did get people to talk about my mother, at least at first. My grandmother's stories - about my mother locking the neighbour in the chicken shed until she promised to stop hitting her son, winning gymkhanas and poetry competitions, wanting to marry my father at seventeen - had made her seem to me like a character out of a fairy tale. The first time I spoke to one of my mother's friends, it was a shock to hear her described, even lovingly, as a real person: selfish, competitive, melodramatic.
Another of my grandmother's stories was about my mother having an "affair" with her headmaster at fifteen. I had never questioned this word, had taken it as another example of her precociousness. But now I was told how she would walk down the corridor at night from her dormitory to his study. For a time I became obsessed with this part of her story, thinking it might hold the key to her death. I asked questions no son should ever have to ask about his mother and it was a relief in the end that I never did find out exactly what happened in that study.
But while my researches were painful they were also cathartic. The explanation I had been given for her death, that in her last months she had had an affair that went wrong, seemed so inadequate that it was hard not to believe that she had killed herself too easily, that she couldn't have cared enough about my brother and me. But constructing, piece by piece, an understanding of her struggles as a woman, a mother, a wife, an academic - the difficulties of being an intelligent, ambitious, sexual woman in the early 1960s, when so much was being promised to women and so much less was still actually attainable - helped me to appreciate that it might not have been that she didn't care, but that perhaps at that moment that she couldn't.
Meeting my mother's friends also stirred depths of feelings in me. Early on in my researches I went to Bristol to see one of my mother's closest friends and meeting me at the station she looked me up and down and said, "You look like her." I was forty-seven and it was the first time anyone had ever told me that I looked like my mother - the first time it had occurred to me to consider that this might be true. That evening at home I stood in front of the mirror and reached up to touch the line of my jaw, my mouth, my eyes.
Until I began my investigations I had never spoken to anyone outside the family who knew her and now I met or spoke on the phone with more than seventy of her friends, schoolmates and colleagues. Many were women of the age she would have been, in her late seventies, and I wondered sometimes, in how readily I felt affection for them, how eager I was for their affection, whether I was not searching for something maternal in them.
Though it was also, I came to see, that these were my mother's friends, the people she had chosen to spend time with. I didn't know her, but I was her son, had her blood in me, and I found it easy to like these people who had cared for her, for whom she had cared, to laugh and cry with them. In time I came to think of these meetings as my mother's gift to me.
A Woman on the Edge of Time is this month's Book Club non-fiction choice and we have 15 copies for review to give away.
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Guest post: "Researching my mother's suicide was one of the hardest things I've done"
MumsnetGuestPosts · 23/11/2015 10:31
I would love to read this. I've just looked at your current photo and the photo of your mum holding you when you were a baby and can't believe nobody had told you how much you resembled her.
It sounds an incredibly moving journey through your mother's life and I hope it helped you come to terms with her death. I can't imagine how hard it is to be the child of a mother who committed suicide.
for you for having the strength to write the book.
I'm so sorry for your loss
We've lost someone this way too - and so I would love to read your book to try to help me understand more. Because there are so many questions aren't there?
I hope writing it helped you a little to begin to find some of those answers
I hope you know you were loved.
I think one thing I've had to learn is it wasn't all about me - there was so much stuff going on for him in his life that I can only ever half know about or understand. It probably wasn't because I wasn't a good enough Auntie.
Everyone asks themselves such questions don't they?
I'm sure for your Mum there was so much else quite apart from her mothering experience
I'm sure she loved her boys x
Oh god, coffeeisnectar, what an awful experience for you and your sister. Thank god you had your sister. To lose both of them like that must have been terrible. It sounds as though your parents had very sad lives.
I'm so sorry coffeeisnectar 
Of course those few words and a couple of emoticons are completely inadequate for your heartbreak, but I thought I'd offer them anyway x
Partly because having suffered a suicide in our family it's surprising how many people don't say anything to you about your loss. I guess it's too painful even for them.
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