24 years ago today my fiancé killed himself by standing in front of a train. We had grown up together and I knew that even at 8 years old, there was something different about him, something sad - a kind of melancholy. Later, when we had started University, he admitted that was about the time when he started having suicidal thoughts.
Adam was intelligent, sensitive, funny and good looking. He sailed through school and college and, at the time of his death, was training to become a vet. To the outside world he had everything going for him, including a devoted fiancée, loving parents and a younger brother and sister that idolised him.
When he first admitted how he felt: as if he was in a black hole and there were all these negative thoughts going round and round in his head and he could never stop them, people didn't believe him. They just looked at him, what he had and told him that he had everything going for him.
At 19 he was committed to a psychiatric unit for a week. He had started talking about suicide. His parents were so worried that they arranged for him to see a (private) psychiatrist and he organised the "break" in the hospital.
On his release, the first thing he did was buy a Stanley knife. He kept it with him all the time. He called it his comfort blanket.
For the next year he continued to talk about suicide. Whenever he left the house, or our flat, or whenever he was somewhere other than University or home - I worried that he had done it. These were the days before mobile phones. Eventually, his other friends, family and I managed to arrange things so that one of us were always with Adam.
About a week before he died he stopped talking about suicide. Looking back, that was when he finally made up his mind to die.
The day he died he went to a lecture and then went missing. We drove around to all the places where he would have gone: the library, the bar, a coffee shop that he particularly liked, the bench in his favourite park, the church. We searched for 3 hours, but none of us (his best friend, his girlfriend and myself) could find him. I phoned his parents at about 6pm in the evening and admitted that Adam had gone missing. They got in their car and drove 200 miles to where we were at Uni.
At 7pm the Police arrived. He was dead. He had died at 12.40pm.
I have no memory of the next few days, and few of the next year. Someone once described suicide as like a bomb going off under the kitchen table and it really did seem that way. Adam wasn't selfish, he was ill and it was an illness that he had struggled with throughout most of his life. He didn't want depression. He wanted to be happy, he wanted to be the person that everyone thought he was, but he thought that he would never be able to do that - that he would never get better, even though he had all the help that he could get and his parents were amazing. He was loved so very, very much - but it wasn't enough for him. In a strange way, I know that he left us because he loved us and he genuinely thought that by staying alive he would be ruining our lives and becoming a burden to us. He had no control over how his disease made him feel - ending his life was the only thing he could control.
24 years later I am married with 2 DDs and I am very, very happy in my life - but there is still the sense of loss that I felt then and I sometimes still feel angry with Adam because he left me. But I also know that wherever he is, he's no longer tormented by those thoughts and he is finally at peace.