First of all, I have to confess I’ve never been formally diagnosed with a mental ill-health condition. But anyway, let me tell you my story. I’m a widow and I lived with my son we had our usual ups and downs, but lived together very happily until one day something terrible happened.

 

 

I got a phone call to say my son, who was only 45, had had a massive heart attack and was in hospital on life support. His heart kept stopping and, in the end, the doctors couldn’t start it again … so he died.

 

This threw me into a whole world of agonising emotional pain. The torment was all consuming. It completely enveloped my mind, it was all I could think about and I could see no end to it … ever. All I wanted was for the anguish to stop and the only way I could see that happening was to kill myself. So I planned how to do it in intricate detail.

 

But then my granddaughter saw my distress and took me home with her. She held my hand while I cried so much I couldn’t speak.

 

When I did manage to say something, she listened and encouraged me to talk about what I was feeling, including feeling suicidal

 

After a while she got me to speak to the doctor and get some medication to help me through the worst of my grief. So, where’s the stigma in my story? Well, on reflection, there wasn’t any. It wasn’t so much what my granddaughter said, which was actually very little, it was more what she didn’t say …

 

• she didn’t make light of my distress or try to “cheer me up”

 

• as we talked, she didn’t try to steer me away from difficult topics

 

• she was grieving herself, but she didn’t speak about that until much later … instead, she focused on what I was going through

 

• when we were talking about suicide, she didn’t say “Oh, you mustn’t feel like that, think of the family” which would have added the stigma of guilt into the mix

 

 

And so I managed to live through it. Now, seven years later, I still feel some emotional pain, but it’s bearable, even though I feel part of me is missing. I still feel I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my granddaughter for all she did at this terrible time. I have thanked her and told her how much I valued her kindness, but I’m not sure she understood how much she helped.

 

So, there we are. Time’s up and we’ve come to the end of my story but I’d like to leave you with just one question …

 

If you found yourself in a similar situation to my granddaughter, how would you cope?

 

Thank you very much for listening.