Getting to this point has been a very long journey.
More than eight years ago my Dad took his own life.
After that moment, receiving that phone call, everything changed for me. Some things were gigantic seismic breaks, others were smaller, quieter, subtler shifts. My perception of the world, my feelings about family, my experience of pain and grief, my understanding, or lack of understanding of myself.
But I’m not writing here to talk about my bereavement. I’m writing because recently I made a documentary about that bereavement, and there are aspects of that journey that I feel are worth sharing.
I recently completed a masters in Directing Documentary. When I started the MA I had no intention of making a film about my Dad or the way that he died. I felt that it was something I would inevitably attempt at some point, something deeply important, but something that would happen later in my life. In fact, two weeks before proposing this film, I’d written in a notepad, ‘I cannot make a film about this right now, it’s just too painful.’ But so many of the things that I was interested in sprang from that moment, from that loss, from that trauma, that all of a sudden it felt as though there was no choice. If I’d known then what I know now, I’m not sure that I would make the same decision again.
The statistics on suicide are horrendous. Every forty seconds someone in the world takes their own life. And that’s just the ones that are recorded.
After an intensive research period, I decided that the film I would try to make was about the affect of losing a loved one to suicide. Some research suggests that as a person bereaved by suicide you become more statistically more likely to take your own life. This is a very hard thing to hear. Meeting other people bereaved, and hearing about their experiences, I began to realise that certain things weren’t my personality, my eccentricities, or just getting older, but were as a direct result of the trauma experienced when you lose someone in that way.
Throughout the research period I also heard a lot of other people bereaved by suicide saying ‘no one else can understand what we have been through’. I understood the sentiment, the expression of solidarity, and the attempt to rationalise why at times other people say things that are deeply upsetting, whether intentionally or not. However, I felt, and still feel very strongly that if we have any hope of improving suicide prevention, and better supporting those bereaved by suicide, we need to start from a place of better understanding.
Many people across the world are doing great work to improve this understanding. Saying that other people cannot understand is not enough. If other people cannot understand, we need to find better words.
Early on in the process, I wanted to make the film observationally. I thought it was important to acknowledge that the loss threads throughout people’s lives, and alongside the inevitable sad moments, brings a bitter twist to the happier moments. Feelings of joy or accomplishment can be sharply undercut by the reminder that that person you lost isn’t there, and not just because they’re dead, but because, as it’s still commonly referred to, they took their own life.
Time was an influencing factor, but the major reason this version of the film never got further than the page was the realisation that the vast majority of what is experienced in the bereavement of suicide can only be expressed in words.
That you cannot tell from the outside that someone is bereaved by suicide was further confirmed to me during the research for this film. Whilst eventually seven people were interviewed on camera, I heard hundreds of stories. Suicide by no means affects one particular group, one particular kind of person, or people. That each individual has a different experience of bereavement by suicide is undoubtedly true. The circumstances of the death, the person they have lost, their relationship to that person, the person that they are all, the people that they have around them, all contribute.
This film endeavours to draw out on screen some of those similarities and some of those differences. It is by no means exhaustive. What is often and easily forgotten with a finished film, is that there is no perfect process. It was very important to me that there were different perspectives within the film, but it was not possible to construct the film, and select the contributors in order to cover every different relationship or perspective of those affected by suicide. Many filmmakers have told me that one of the first things you learn making films is that, for better or for worse, the finished film will never be the film that you intended to make.
We began by filming the interviews. The day after each filming session I felt as though I’d run a marathon. My entire body was stiff, I felt utterly drained, as though I had no energy, and as if simply peeling myself out of bed took a gargantuan effort. I only realised during the final interview that this was likely because my physical response to the emotional tension of asking these questions, was for my heart to literally pound in my chest throughout.
I was lucky enough to work with an incredible editor. Bearing in mind that for this particular part of the course the editors had no choice about which film they were assigned to work on, I was nervous. I didn’t want him to feel that he had been landed not only with an incredibly difficult film, but also with an emotionally compromised director. We quickly developed a very dark shared sense of humour, and introduced various coping mechanisms into the process, mostly involving sugar references to Sadness in Inside Out and walks outside of the edit in the bracing December air. We also introduced a pseudonym to use when editing my interview (as I was also interviewed on camera). Without blinking I volunteered the name Shakira, perhaps revealing more than I had intended!
Something that happened a lot during the interviews was the hypothesising of why the person bereaved felt that their loved one had killed themselves. It was probably one of the quickest decisions made in the edit not to include any of this discussion. The reasons for this were twofold. Partly, I felt that it was important that someone watching stayed with the person talking, rather than being with the person that they had lost (this is also the reason that family photos of them are saved until near the end of the film), I also felt that had this person not died by suicide many of the things talked about would have been normal moments in complex ups and downs of life, but because of the way that they had died, they immediately took on a different significance and, after the fact, became easy to interpret as indicators that should have been seen.
We all process information and memory in order to try to make sense of what has happened, and over the years, and with repeated tellings, these stories become cemented until they feel as though they are the only version of events. What those interviewed confirmed to me was that the reasons that may have led to someone taking their own life are incredibly complex and nuanced, and if we edited them down into manageable narratives we would have done a disservice both to the person that died, and to those on camera.
One of the most common criticisms I’ve received regarding the film has been that there are too many contributors, that we don’t get to share all of each individual story. I feel that this is exactly how the film had to be. I’ve found that different viewers empathise with different people in the film. For me, this means that the likelihood of someone finishing the film having not empathised with anyone is reduced. This film, for me, wasn’t about a single experience of bereavement by suicide, but an attempt to express a little of what people bereaved by suicide go through.
There were very definite reasons that the interviews for the film all took place in the same room, with the same neutral backdrop. For the incredible people who agreed to share their experiences, I did not want to go into their homes, ask them to open these wounds, and leave them in that space. I felt that if they physically travelled in order to do the interview they would have time both to prepare, and time to move back into the world. I also didn’t want people viewing the film, to be trying to categorise their lives from the rooms that they were in, I wanted the attention to be solely on what they were saying and the emotions on their faces. This, for me, is why the film works so well in the cinema, because on a big screen you can really see the slight shifts in emotion crossing the faces.
I found it incredibly difficult trying to remain objective about a film that shares some of my deepest thoughts and most vulnerable feelings. Whilst my own interview only makes up a small amount of the screen time, the words expressed by others are thoughts and feelings that I have also shared. Trying to remain open whilst tutors and fellow students discussed and criticised it took every ounce of strength that I had left. They may be unaware of this. I’ve often been told that even when I feel surprised that the ground isn’t cracking because my emotions are reverberating so intensely, that I appear to others to be calm. It’s a very difficult conundrum: on the one hand you desperately want to receive honest feedback, and gain fresh perspective in order to improve the film, on the other you want people to be sensitive to how their comments will make you feel.
At the end of the process of making the film I felt, and still feel, incredibly privileged to have worked with the wonderful team that I was lucky enough to work with, and the incredible contributors who trusted us with their vulnerability.
Beyond the film school environment, trying to share it with people I know and whose opinions I trust, presented a new and very different challenge. I knew that I was asking them to watch something that is not easy, not light, and certainly not laugh out loud. I’ve realised in the process of making the film that when I’m uncomfortable talking about something I often retreat into humour, and I began to joke that every time I emailed someone a link to the film it was as though I was flashing them, just not in a sexy way, more in a my flesh has been peeled off, see my inner organs, blood and guts all laid bare.
Yet, I felt that the film had something useful to offer. That I hadn’t made it as a cathartic form of self expression, but because I wanted to make something that would be useful, that would help other people to understand, or at least to feel able to begin the conversation. And so the email flashing continued.
I had some really positive feedback from mental healthcare professionals whose opinions I trust, and I felt emboldened to try to find ways to put the film out there. The advice that I was then given was not to just post the film online, but instead to try to enter film festivals. It was overwhelmingly tempting to give up when the first film festival rejected the film. Then the second, then the third, and so on. Receiving generic rejections via email is a particular form of modern torture no matter what they relate to. For me, for this film, it felt a little as though my deepest fears of rejection were being repeated over and over and over again.
The tears shed have been significant, there have been many moments of regret and self doubt. I experienced a great deal of guilt having asked people to trust me with their stories, and felt that by not finding a way to get the film out there, that I was failing them, that I had asked them to open up their wounds and share their pain for nothing.
For what it’s worth, there were two major conclusions I made during the process of making this film. Firstly, that it is incredibly difficult for a close relative or friend to recognise suicidal thoughts in someone that they love. My feeling is that in a way they have known them too long, have seen previous ups and downs, and that it’s harder to notice a shift, than perhaps for someone who knows them less well. Suicide awareness needs to be much greater public health issue, so that we can all recognise the warning signs.
As far as I understand it, cancer used to be something that no one wanted to talk about, that was known as the dreaded ‘c’ and that was seen as all being the same diagnosis. As we’ve understood more about cancer, the different types, the different treatments, it’s been more possible to talk about, and progress is being made in treating it. Perhaps we need to start breaking down suicide into more precise categories and change the words that we’re using so that we can understand it better and talk about it more easily.
What I can say, wholeheartedly, is that I do not have the answers, but now that the film is beginning to find its way to reach an audience, I do hope that the small part we played in making this film, can be taken forward by other people, be useful in ways that haven’t occurred to any of us yet, spark conversations that we won’t necessarily be a part of, and hopefully be a part of a much larger change.
And I can also say a huge thank you to Chain Film Festival 2019 where I’ll Love You Till the End will have its world premiere in New York City in August 2019.
