Haz Joyce - Issue 35

Haz Joyce is an Englishman living in rural County Down. His writing explores our fragility and fallibility, but also how we manage to muddle through life all the same. Haz is a musician and folk singer, and is drawn to songs with similar themes. Haz’s studies have taken him to Cambridge and the South-West, whilst his work in the legal profession has taken him to London, Belfast and Dublin. 

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Note

This is how my mum tells it. I don’t think it’s how it happened. You’ll never guess what happened today, she says, then she describes it. My gran writes a note, so my mum says, to be included amongst her valuables, her effects, her jewellery I suppose, in the safe. “Now that I am gone…” it begins, my mum says. She doesn’t include any other details, which makes me suspicious, other than saying, it begins “Now that I am gone,” and then “et cetera: you know, the sort of note you’d write to be read after you’ve died.”

Anyhow, my gran then apparently forgets to put it not only in the safe, but in any sort of envelope, or indeed away at all. She leaves it out on the kitchen table and goes out for a walk. During this time, my gramps comes home and he finds it. What a wacky coincidence, is the sense my mum is conveying. What a crazy series of events to conspire to come together.

So, he finds it, and he thinks she’s taken her own life. And he races out the door and he frantically searches the town and the headland for her, and he eventually finds her, innocently out for a stroll on the headland.

Why’s my mum telling me this? Partly she thinks I might hear it from someone else. She needs to re-tell it with her stamp on it. Essentially, she’s re-writing what happened in the re-telling. She’s controlling the narrative. Because if I heard it from someone else, in a neutral, objective way – or even frankly in an accurate way – I’d realise what? That my gran either left a real suicide note on the kitchen table and my gramps found her before it was too late, or that she left something intended to look like a suicide note on the kitchen table, and he found her, and the realisation struck that she’d manipulated him somehow for some reason. I don’t know.

Either of those two options is more plausible to me than the wacky coincidence narrative my mum fed me. She was either about to take her own life and couldn’t or didn’t, or she was sort of cruelly dancing with the idea with her husband. To my gramps, this must have been a major event, believing for, what, one hour, two hours, that his wife had killed herself. This is another reason my mum told me. A major event is hard to keep completely under wraps. It’s easier to pretend you’ve aired it out in the open, where in reality you’ve aired something that looks a bit like it. A lookalike. An imposter.

My gran might’ve backed out and herself spun the story that it was a letter intended to be opened after she’d died and she’d forgotten to put it in the safe. Maybe my mum’s just playing along. Is that the done thing in these situations? It’d be difficult to say: “I don’t believe you. This is a real suicide note, and you intended to kill yourself.” There’s probably a halfway house though: “I’m worried about you. Let’s talk more about this,” rather than latching too easily and too unreservedly to the happy-ending explanation, humorous even, farcical, worth re-telling over morning coffee. It’s a denial of what really happened.

Many years later, after my grandparents had died, my aunt, their daughter and my mum’s sister, really did die by suicide, by jumping off the headland. She left a note, I believe in the front seat of her 4 by 4, parked nearby. I don’t know much about the note but apparently it mentioned me, maybe in the paragraph about how sad she would be at not being able to see the younger members of the family grow up. I know the darkly humorous detail that the police, who were searching for her, smashed the car’s window to get in, even though she’d left it unlocked. This was re-told as ‘typical bumbling cops’, and it is funny, but I wish I knew more about what was in the note. Other people control that narrative too though and, frankly, suicide notes are unreliable documents anyway.

How easy it is for us to latch onto the most comfortable explanation for something, and how hard, sometimes, to see what is actually true, to see something, someone as they really are. And how much can be different if we can manage to do that. How much could have been different.