Random tragic memory found in my old diary **Content Warning** Title edited by MNHQ

[cardiologist349275]

Sorry this isn't an AIBU but I didn't know where to put this. I was going through 20+ years of diaries and came across a story my mum told me before she died.

There was a little girl who went to school with my brother. She had a brain tumour. She was extremely unwell but still went to school every day, and one boy was always bullying her and pushing her over in the playground and she would cut her knees open all the time. The teacher was also a nasty bully (this was the 80s so she got away with it for years) and was very cruel to the girl because she had to wear trousers because she couldn't cope with a skirt, but she found the trouser buttons really hard to do up and the teacher would pick on her about it and not help her. She died on the day of the school play aged five.

My Mum was haunted by it and never forgot that little girl who she said was so, so sweet.

To add to the family's tragedy, their other daughter sadly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had to live in sheltered accommodation. One day about ten years ago the mother went to visit her, not knowing the daughter was having an episode and had snuck a knife into the flat. She was stabbed to death.

Though I never knew any of these people, I think of them often. Their tragedy has been lost to time, but I think if I remember them then they won't just be....gone.

Does anyone else have any memories of other people that come back to them in a haunting way?

When we were 16, my friend’s dad who had been unwell, sadly died in the April. Then in the June, my friend went into the bathroom one morning and found her mum half lying over the bath, with her head under the water. It was thought that she had slipped on some water that had spilled out of the bath and banged her head, before drowning.

Went to Catholic primary. My friends family were told off for not attending mass regularly. On a Sunday the family were returning from church and a large wall fell on them. My friends sister died, the Mum was badly injured.

A friend of mine from primary school got drunk one night at university and, for some unknown reason, decided to drive herself home from a night out. She veered off the road, drove straight into a tree and died on impact. She was only 21 and had just been accepted into the job of her dreams.

Another friend from primary school went abroad to study at university. He went missing on a night out on New Years' Eve and his body was found in the city's river three months later. Nobody ever came forward to say they saw what happened and now (eight years later) nobody knows how he died - whether it was an accident, suicide or murder.

A year 2 child has passed away recently from my DC school and I’m not sure I’ll forget it for a long time

At my primary, one little girl just did not come in one morning. No one ever said anything (it was the seventies) - I learned later her mother had smothered her. Terrible.

A girl at my school died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage when we were about 9 or 10. She was a lovely girl, very sporty, played the piano beautifully and was often top of the class too. She'd gone to bed perfectly fit and well one Saturday evening, came downstairs half an hour later to tell her mum she had a headache and suddenly collapsed on the floor and was pronounced dead when the ambulance arrived.
It was my first experience of death and for a few years left me quite worried that I too would just drop down dead without warning.

@Curioushorse

Argh. Yes. Kids I've taught.

But I think the one that most affected the whole staff, and I don't think I've ever seen such collective sadness and anger. It's something I come back to almost daily.

We had an ex-student convicted of murder. It happened very quickly after he left our school. He became a gang leader, but this was a petty crime gone wrong.

Even typing this I'm so angry and sad I'll probably cry. He was one of the brightest kids I ever taught, and his mum so hard-working. She had two jobs to try and support him, but they never got their heads above water. They were homeless the whole time he was at our school. He was in shitty bed and breakfast accommodation and it just overshadowed his whole life.

Yes I have no doubt he committed the murder- but it was absolutely a preventable tragedy. His life was so shit and frustrating. His horizons were just so low.

I think about him every time I see those Eton fuckwits who run our country. Our school was only a few miles from Eton. If he'd had a hundredth of the opportunities that those Eton kids had I genuinely think he wouldn't have killed somebody. And now that's two lives ended.

I hear you. It true that it takes a community to raise, a child. If your community is crap then it’s very very difficult. It annoys me when all the successful people seems to have successful parents. From Olympians to actors.

I went to Junior school with 2 brothers born a year apart. 2 different dad's, absent parents. R was older and hard/tough kid, always nice to girls but beefed with any lad that gave him a hard time. K was younger- gentle, sweet, awkward.

Many years later when I was staying with my Grandma (I was 22 I think) there were police up and down her road- a lad of about 19 had OD'd on heroine in a house a few houses up from Grandma. The dealers/people he got high with had fled as he stopped breathing but were caught and charged later. I think another local user had arrived and called police.

A week or so later I went back to see Grandma and the newspaper reported that it was K. His brother R had to be told whilst serving a sentence for GBH and his mother was devastated but had neglected them since they were kids.

Not really as heart breaking as some of these but I think about R and just hope he found a way to break the cycle. I hope K is at peace as he was sweet.

@cardiologist349275

Sorry this isn't an AIBU but I didn't know where to put this. I was going through 20+ years of diaries and came across a story my mum told me before she died.

There was a little girl who went to school with my brother. She had a brain tumour. She was extremely unwell but still went to school every day, and one boy was always bullying her and pushing her over in the playground and she would cut her knees open all the time. The teacher was also a nasty bully (this was the 80s so she got away with it for years) and was very cruel to the girl because she had to wear trousers because she couldn't cope with a skirt, but she found the trouser buttons really hard to do up and the teacher would pick on her about it and not help her. She died on the day of the school play aged five.

My Mum was haunted by it and never forgot that little girl who she said was so, so sweet.

To add to the family's tragedy, their other daughter sadly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had to live in sheltered accommodation. One day about ten years ago the mother went to visit her, not knowing the daughter was having an episode and had snuck a knife into the flat. She was stabbed to death.

Though I never knew any of these people, I think of them often. Their tragedy has been lost to time, but I think if I remember them then they won't just be....gone.

Does anyone else have any memories of other people that come back to them in a haunting way?

Oh my god, poor little girl, that's so sad, I went to school in the 80s and I can confirm teachers could be evil bastards back in those days..

I feel bad writing mine as they are mostly bad luck stories.

My friend from primary school lost her sister to leukaemia when we were about 7.

That school was in a very mixed area and there were two families where the kids were being brought up by their grandparents. As an adult I now look back and wonder how much crap they saw in life to get to that point.

There was an RTA of kids slightly older than me when I was at Seconadary that shocked our community - girl who hadn't long passed her test totalled her Dad's car and killed herself and all four of her friends that she was driving home. Certainly made my parents very wary when I passed my test (not that they had a high-powered premium marque car to lend me!)

The next lot of shit happened at Uni. One of my friends was killed cycling to lectures and then a week later my bright sporty flatmate committed suicide. I know that if things had been different we would still be friends (I'm in touch with most of my other university friends).

25 yrs later I still sometimes think "oh, S would so enjoy this film". Her Dad died a couple of years ago - I'm not in touch with her family but his obituary was in one of the national papers which brought it all back.

I also met her much younger stepbrother by chance.

He didn't really know any of her friends as he wasn't even a teenager when she died and I think appreciated hearing about her and that she is still missed.

When I was 13, a girl in my year at school hanged herself. We on different sides of the year so had never really interacted much but I have never forgotten her.

She was being bullied but because she answered back, she was deemed to be “giving as good as she got”. The school had a real issue admitting there was a horrific, school wide bullying problem.

She’d be 33 now, I find it unspeakably sad that she never got to live the life she should have had.

A little boy I went to school with for a couple of years, we were 5-7. I assume now he had/has adhd. The teachers used to move the desks to fence him into a corner and he had to sit alone at the back. In that corner the wall display paper used to get all tattered and broken where he was so restless and fidgety and teachers called it his pig stye. He was bullied and teased a lot by other children because he was so 'naughty' and teachers didn't mind if he was picked on. One day I was sent to headmasters office for talking too much and I was beside myself walking alone to the office, absolutely balling. Because I'd never been in that much trouble before. The boy was already on his way for his daily telling off and he asked me what was wrong. I told him and he put a hand on my shoulder and told me it's not that scary. He was so lovely to me and this was the first time I'd really spoken to him. At that age I just accepted that he was bad and just avoided him. But I remember feeling confused and sad after that.

I moved schools not long after and I hope he did too. I hope things got better for him but I doubt it. This was only the 90s I'm amazed how much things have changed. Still not enough but I don't think a child like him would be treated quite so badly now by teachers. I can't really blame us kids because we were told not to look at him, not to speak to him, and that he was bad, he was letting us all down, he needs to learn. At 5 you just accept what they tell you at school I wonder if it haunts them too, especially the ones that bullied him.

@currylover55

Did her name begin with K?

I have a few memories from childhood back in the late 90s when I was in secondary school there was a girl in year 7 that I knew of but wasn't friends with and we were told she died in assembly she went to sleep and never woke up.

Also there was an older teen who used to catch the same bus and one day he didn't and a few weeks later I found out in the news he had been a victim of assault one night and died due to his Injuries.

My best friend in primary schools sister died in her early 20s of a brain tumour and later on in secondary there was a boy in my class who had some kind of health issues (I think dwarfism) and one day he didn't come to school and he had passed away he was only 14, later on then two boys the year ahead of me (they were 16/17) bought a seriously defected car and crashed it first time driving it and they were both killed.

These are just a few of my memories there's more in my later years of people I've lost....life is so fragile there one minute and gone the next. Id be lying if I said it hasn't affected me because it has.

Oh @WrongWayApricot Poor little boy. I hope better things came for him too.

I used to play with some children on our road as a child, aged 5/6, because we moved house by my 7th birthday.

I stayed for dinner quite often and on one occasion their Dad taught me the 7x table. From that day forward I knew it by heart and I still do at 46. He would randomly check every now and then.

Anyway, one day the mum and children had arrived home from somewhere and all we could hear was screaming on the street. He had hung himself whilst they were out and they all walked in the house and saw him.

We never saw them again and moved not long after. I remember that kind man and those screams most months/years. Only briefly, when 7s come up.

Very sad.

I often wonder what happened to a girl in my school who at 16 years old married a man in his eighties. It was in the national papers at the time.I didn't know her parents, but her and her sister always had that vaguely neglected air about them. I think she just married the first person who showed any interest in her. Her sister got involved in religion.

When I was a wee girl, every so often, our neighbours used to take me to visit the husband’s g’parents who lived with his sister (their daughter) and her two children in a cottage with a big garden that had a stream at the far end of it.
The younger of the two children, the same age as me was a stocky, freckly, red-haired boy who I loved playing with.
He disappeared one day, he’d been playing in the garden as usual, but when called in for a meal, no one could find him.
Search parties were organised very quickly, but to no avail before darkness fell. The search continued, and at first light, he was found dead a couple of miles down-stream. Although he’d always been told to not go near the water, he was just an adventurous wee laddie.
This happened 60 years ago, we were both 7 when he died and while I don’t think of him all that often, I’m in floods of tears writing this, it’s still so clear in my mind. His was the first death that I really remember clearly.
The family moved very soon after that, his mum/g’parents all blamed themselves for his death and couldn’t bear to live there any more. Both the g’parents, who were only in their 50s died within a couple of years, and who would argue that it wasn’t due to heartache. His Mum never got over it either and died when she was also in her 50s. His older sister never married or had children of her own.

My grandmother grew up in East London and was a schoolgirl just after the First World War. As an old lady she used to tell us about her best friend who drowned when the Thames flooded one winter (pre-Thames Barrier obvs). Decades later she still thought about her lost friend.

When I was 14 a school friend of mine died in a horse riding accident. I remember how shocked we all were that someone our age could die.

My friend's younger brother aged about 22 killed himself because his girlfriend had dumped him (after a very on-off unhealthy relationship.) His whole family were just devastated. I still feel angry at the terrible waste - he was so young and missed out on so much - life, fatherhood, better relationships, all his nieces and nephews who never knew him - just a terrible waste.

A lovely boy I taught when he was about 9 died of a sudden cardiac arrest aged 17. I hadn't seen him for a long time since he left primary but I remembered how much his mother adored him as her only child and I couldn't begin to imagine her pain.

Mine doesn’t involve anyone dying but it’s something I won’t forget for the rest of my life.
When I was 3/4 my mum sent me to a local playgroup which was run by an old woman in a back room of her bungalow. I think it was like a big conservatory. There was another old woman who helped. There was quite a few children there.
One day there was a little girl,she must have been younger than me as she seemed so small and she had a little bob haircut. She was crying. In this room was a very high stool (it seemed it anyway) and the woman running it put this little girl on the stool. She got all the children’s attention and she told us all that we had to laugh at this little girl as she’d wet herself. The kids all started laughing and this poor little tot was crying her eyes out. I knew even at that young age that this was so wrong. I can still see her in my mind to this day. I will never forget it. It makes me feel ill now and I genuinely hope the old bitch who ran the playgroup is in hell

@MauveMavis

I feel bad writing mine as they are mostly bad luck stories.

My friend from primary school lost her sister to leukaemia when we were about 7.

That school was in a very mixed area and there were two families where the kids were being brought up by their grandparents. As an adult I now look back and wonder how much crap they saw in life to get to that point.

There was an RTA of kids slightly older than me when I was at Seconadary that shocked our community - girl who hadn't long passed her test totalled her Dad's car and killed herself and all four of her friends that she was driving home. Certainly made my parents very wary when I passed my test (not that they had a high-powered premium marque car to lend me!)

The next lot of shit happened at Uni. One of my friends was killed cycling to lectures and then a week later my bright sporty flatmate committed suicide. I know that if things had been different we would still be friends (I'm in touch with most of my other university friends).

25 yrs later I still sometimes think "oh, S would so enjoy this film". Her Dad died a couple of years ago - I'm not in touch with her family but his obituary was in one of the national papers which brought it all back.

I also met her much younger stepbrother by chance.

He didn't really know any of her friends as he wasn't even a teenager when she died and I think appreciated hearing about her and that she is still missed.

This stood out to me because when my sister was seventeen her then boyfriend took her for a drive in his Dad's car ,he had passed his test a few days before he wasn't insured and he hadn't asked his Dad to borrow the car ,he drove down a local road that is very winding at 70 miles an hour 🙄crashed the car bumped into three other cars and turned the car over three times ,him and my sister got out without a scratch on them ,how God knows but they were so bloody lucky ,the car was a write off and his Dad was furious ,but when you think what could have happened it's a small price to pay

Tiernan

Has this thread gone? It was so lovely, if heartbreaking.

Barwell76 no - why?

A boy i was friends with in primary school. His name was Ryan and he was such a lovely boy, was always nice to me and would stop some of the other boys from picking on me (I was a short skinny asthmatic glasses wearing book worm in a rough area in the north in the 90s. I was prime bully fodder)

He died of leukemia when we were in year 6.

I still think about him and his mum (who was also lovely) most days.