Hi Everyone,
We passed on your messages to Libby, via this thread. She sent back her thanks and a copy of the Times statement as below:
Nicholas Paul Heiney 15.11.82 - 26.06.06
Our son Nick Heiney died in the early hours of the 26th of June, at home and by his own hand. He had suffered a serious depressive illness for some time , and was under medical treatment; outside close family most did not know the gravity of his problems because he faced them with courage and humour, preferring to retire from company rather than, in his view, blight it.////
He had no need. Before he was 19 Nick had crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific as a deckhand on a square-rigged Dutch ship Europa, helping train young Koreans in seamanship. He was a scholar of St Catherine?s College, Oxford, graduating last year. He rowed, cycled, and skied , overcoming the physical fears that go with strong imagination. He loved the classic Oxford English course and his tutors, particularly the late Michael Gearin-Tosh and Professor Duncan Wu , who will speak at his funeral. His first ambition was to teach at university level, but postgraduate life came to seem pointless and he wrote of the world he was in ?Too much bad writing about good writing ... it is ruining English as a subject, reducing it to a weird network of theory.? He said literature is best written about by people with experience of a wider world, and was exploring other work. ////
He tried out jobs as a short-term intern; he had little confidence yet came back from every posting, whether at the National Theatre or a jewellery stall, with good stories and insights even when he was low. He loved radio comedy and had a wonderfully dry sense of humour, even about himself, even at his lowest ebb. Lately he was considering work in a caring profession and training as a Jungian psychotherapist.////
From childhood Nicholas never found life easy, but he lived it with courage, humour and dignity in spite of diffidence and the depressive illness which in the end overcame him. He will not be forgotten . Tributes to his gentleness and fineness of mind pour in. God rest him.
Libby Purves, Paul Heiney, Rose Heiney