Voice Post

I am alive, I am alive...

I have just come in from hanging the laundry in the sunshine. It is strange, sometimes, to realise that I am alive and my children are alive and we are all well and happy. It's even stranger to realise that almost no-one around me had any idea how close I came to dying.

Rob didn't know I was "really" suicidal, whatever that "really" implies. His mother had no idea I was suicidal at all. My mother knew, and thankfully her long experience of mental illness and her previous experience of having suicidal offspring enabled her to respond usefully to my "cries for help" - though they were never cries, just fairly calm statements of fact.

Health professionals took me fairly seriously, which is, in large part, why I was alive today to hang my daughter's underwear on the line to dry in the sun, and alive to admire my other daughter's skin in dappled shade from the jasmine bush, and alive to hear the small black cat clawing the garden fence, and alive to wonder why my cousin didn't make it.

Tadhg would probably be almost a year old now if his mother's puerperal psychosis had been treated.