People tell you the best way to deal with grief is to get on with things and in the days between Maggie’s death and her funeral that’s exactly what I tried to do. For the odd hour or two every day I tried to go back to doing the job I make my living from – cleaning windows.
One morning, around 5 am, I was on a job in Mead Street when I had a sudden urge to go up to Beachy Head. I hadn’t even thought about going up since Maggie had been found, but now the compulsion was so strong that I simply had to. Perhaps I was experiencing a sort of car crash mentality – you feel you just have to look. Even though I knew it would be painful, I left my work and set off right away.
I had no idea where Maggie had been found. Beachy Head is a large area of headland and as I drove I realised I didn’t even know where Maggie had fallen. Nevertheless, I drove on and pulled into the first car park I found. I turned off the engine and stared out at the vast expanse of grass that leads up to the cliffs.
A woman came into view. She was walking along a pathway and was close enough for me to see that she was crying. Immediately I felt that something must be wrong. It was barely 5.30 am. What was this woman doing up here? Right away, I thought the worst – that she was going to kill herself – and after a few moments, I decided to follow her. Until I’d spotted the woman, I’d been in my own world of grief and emotion. Now I was focused suddenly, my feelings about Maggie temporarily switched off.
The woman had disappeared around a corner. Once I turned the same corner, I realised she was a surprisingly long way ahead of me and walking quite fast, though nowhere near the cliff yet. Still, I was concerned – she’d been crying.
Before I caught up with her, she sat down on a bench quite near the cliff. As I walked towards the bench, I could see that she was in her mid-30s and that she was writing a note – it turned out to be a suicide note.
I decided to sit down beside her. She said nothing. I had to say something.
‘I hope you aren’t going to do what I think you’re going to do, sweetheart,’ I began slowly, calmly.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ she snapped back. Plainly, she wasn’t glad of my company. Perhaps she had a point. Perhaps it didn’t have anything to do with me.
‘Do you realise why I’m up here?’ I asked her. She shook her head slightly.
‘I’m trying to come to terms with my wife dying up here a week ago,’ I continued.
‘Well, you know what I’m going to do, then,’ she replied. ‘And I’ve got a right to do it!’
‘No you don’t, sweetheart, you…’
I couldn’t carry on speaking. I just burst into tears. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Barely a week after Maggie’s death, I was sitting with another woman who was about to commit suicide. The thought of Maggie, the thought of this lady, the thought of her family… the sadness of it all was overwhelming.
I began to try and convince her that whatever her problems, suicide was not the answer. But she didn’t listen to me for long. Before I knew it she had got up and begun to run. There was about 100 yards between the bench and the cliff edge and she already had a head start. I sprang from my seat and ran like I’d never run before. The adrenaline made me fly along and soon I was gaining on her, just as she was gaining on the cliff edge. The edge loomed closer and closer and I’d nearly caught up with her by the time she was about 3 feet from it. It’s now or never, I thought, as I threw myself through the air with all my might.
I brought her down with a rugby tackle. A second later and she would have been gone.
I yanked her away from the edge, jumped on top of her and tried to hold her still. It wasn’t easy – the strength of a desperate person is phenomenal – but so is the strength of a person who is desperate to save someone, and I managed to keep her down.
In the distance I could see the police – I later learned they were looking for the very person I had wrestled to the ground – and began trying to wave while keeping a firm grip on the woman. Unlikely as it may seem – and unfortunately for me – the police thought we were a courting couple because I was on top of her and they passed us by at first!
The woman began to scream at me, repeating, ‘I want to die, I want to die!’ over and over. I had no idea how to calm her down. All I could do was keep on struggling with her as she writhed beneath me.
Then, suddenly, she stopped fighting.
Her body went limp, she stopped screaming and looked at me straight in the eye. ‘Why don’t you and I go over hand in hand?’ she said, her tone flat and cold, her eyes icy.
Her words sent a shiver down my spine, and for a few moments I was so spooked that I nearly lost my grip. A few weeks before she died, Maggie had woken me up to tell me about a bad dream. She had dreamt that we’d fallen over Beachy Head together – hand in hand. Those were the words Maggie had used and those were the words I was hearing now. When Maggie had spoken them, I was shaken rigid. Now, hearing them again, I was petrified. I thought it was a calling from Maggie for me to join her.
‘No way,’ I shouted, regaining my grip. ‘I’m not ready to die yet. I’m not going with you and you’re staying where you are. I’m not letting you go.’
By now the police had begun to suspect that we weren’t a loving couple, and were running towards us. They took hold of the woman, but I could see her continuing to fight like a tiger as they tried to walk her down the hill.
There was no way they could get her in the car. The more they tried, the more she struggled. I could see it was a futile exercise – the woman was only getting more and more upset, so after a few minutes I shouted, ‘Hold it, just hold it a second!’
The police paused and so did the woman. I looked right into her teary eyes –mine were teary too, because the situation was so emotional. ‘Look,’ I said gently, ‘if I come with you to the police station, will you come quietly? I’ll come with you as far as I’m allowed, I promise. Do you understand?’
It was as if I was saying what I would have said to Maggie had I found her up there a week before.
She looked a little bemused, but nodded. ‘Yes, if you come with me, I’ll go quietly,’ she said after a while.
The police breathed a sigh of relief as we got into the back of the car. It was so strange to be hugging and crying with a complete stranger as the police drove us to the station. When we arrived, they let me come in with her. I held her hand while the police went through their procedures. I constantly reassured her that she was not under arrest, but was only going to be questioned and kept in a cell for her own safety. I told her that she would be treated kindly so long as she cooperated, which she did.
Finally, it was time for me to go. I’d done all I could. The woman was in the hands of the police now. As I went to leave, she blew me a kiss.
I stepped out of the police station into the morning air and suddenly the strangeness of the whole episode hit me. Why did I get that urge to go up to Beachy Head? I wondered. It felt like an uncanny coincidence that I had stumbled across this desperate, lonely soul and saved her. It was quite a traumatic thing to have experienced so soon after Maggie’s death, but I knew I’d done the right thing by following her up the hill. If someone had been there last week, I thought, then Maggie would still be alive today.
And that’s when the idea came to me – patrols along Beachy Head were needed at all times to stop this sort of thing happening. People should be up there 24 hours a day. I had been told that there was some sort of patrolling in place, but I had never seen anyone up there and I knew there was certainly not 24-hour cover. From that moment on, my campaign to achieve that goal began.
The next day I paid a visit to the woman I’d dragged back from the Head. She had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, which allows people to be detained if they are perceived as a danger to themselves, and I was taken to her room in the hospital’s psychiatric wing. When I walked in, I didn’t receive the friendliest of welcomes.
‘You bastard,’ she shouted, ‘all I wanted to do was die and you stopped me!’
She continued before I could respond, this time lowering her voice. ‘I’m going to be a good girl in here and when I get out I’m going to kill myself!’ she said, quietly but angrily.
I didn’t know quite how to respond. I’m no psychologist or counsellor, and I wasn’t trained to know the ‘right thing’ to say to someone in such distress. But instead of worrying, I simply said what came naturally to me.
‘Come on,’ I began, ‘why don’t you just talk to me instead of shouting? Have you really thought about what you’re doing – do you realise what you’re going to do to your family if you kill yourself?’
‘My family hate me,’ she retorted. ‘My son and daughter can’t stand me and think I’m a nutcase. They never see me.’
It was hard to get through to her. I visited her four times. Each time we talked about how determined she was to kill herself and each time I became more determined to change her way of thinking. I described my pain over Maggie, I showed her Maggie’s photos, all in the hope that I could get through to her, make her feel her life was worth something both to her and others. The conversation often turned back to her family.
‘They don’t love me,’ she’d say, flatly.
‘Have you tried calling them?’ I asked, in response. ‘Why don’t you try and open up the lines of communication again and just see if they really do hate you? I think you might be wrong about that.’
It was no use. Her stock response was: ‘I ain’t ringing them.’
The fifth time I visited I learned that she’d been discharged. Considering what she’d been saying to me, I wasn’t sure this was a good thing, but I’d already begun patrolling up and down Beachy Head when I wasn’t organising Maggie’s funeral or dealing with other matters. I was worried. I’d keep my eye out for her.
Three months later, I was strolling through the Arndale Shopping Centre in Eastbourne when a woman approached me. Her face was familiar but I couldn’t pin it down right away. It wasn’t until she began speaking that I twigged who it was.
‘I just want to thank you very much for saving my life,’ she said, smiling. ‘I took your advice and phoned my kids, and now I see them every week. I’ve got my own flat too – my life’s back on track!’
Wow, I thought. I did the right thing. It warmed my heart to know that I had helped – and I knew there was more to be done.
* * *
I may have been innocent of killing Maggie in the eyes of the law, but in the days following her death I didn’t feel that way myself.
Even though the last words we ever spoke were ‘I love you’, and although no matter how bad things got we never went to sleep without saying those words, I felt as if I had condemned Maggie to die. I turned it over and over in my head – If I’d gone home that lunchtime, she’d be alive today, I reasoned. I could have saved her. It was my fault that she was dead.
Sometimes I still have those thoughts, though now I know they are wrong. I didn’t condemn Maggie to death by not going home. Sure, if I’d gone to meet her I may have prevented her from doing what she did that day, but there’s a good chance that I would merely have been delaying the inevitable – and it makes me very sad to say that.
At the time, however, my mind was all over the place and I was convinced it was all down to failure on my part. I felt guilty and numb with disbelief. I could not believe what had happened. As I walked around the house, staring at the photos of Maggie that lay on every surface, I found it impossible to accept that she was never going to walk through our front door once more. I would sit for hours and stare at the smile that drew me to her in the first place, trying to absorb the fact that I would never see it spread across her face again.
I would constantly open her wardrobe and look at the clothes she used to wear on our evenings out; I’d open her perfume just to smell her again. I’d go to her pillow and hold it to my face, desperate to get close to whatever remained of her. I’d play our favourite songs, look at her wedding photos and then eventually I’d fall asleep on the sofa. For a long time, it would take me a few moments after waking before I realised that Maggie wasn’t lying beside me and that I was waking up to a life that should have been a bad dream.
Before the funeral, a very strange thing happened to me. I was sitting indoors, wide awake, yet quite suddenly my vision misted over and I couldn’t see. After a few moments, the mist began to clear slightly and all I could see was Beachy Head. I was standing by the cliff edge. (It wasn’t until weeks later, when the coroner took me up to Beachy Head that I realised the spot I was visualising now was the very spot Maggie had fallen from.) I was looking back towards the car park and to Maggie’s car. Maggie was in her black-and-white outfit, walking up the hill towards me. She came closer and closer, until she was within an inch of me – and then she walked right into me. She was right inside me… Suddenly I’m her and I’m falling over the cliff, but instead of going down I fly up and become me again. Looking over my shoulder from my position up in the air, I see Maggie’s body going over the cliff and down and I hear her calling: ‘Don’t worry, the angels are coming to get me,’ she cries out. ‘I didn’t suffer. My body went down there, but I went up there where you are!’
I was floating, looking down at her body for a few moments, and then my eyes cleared. I blinked and looked around the living room, shaking like a leaf. I was drenched in sweat from head to toe.
I hardly knew what to make of it, but I believed that this vision was a sign of Maggie somehow making contact with me. I’d never had a spiritual experience before, but I’ve no doubt that this was one. I was sure that Maggie was trying to help me; that she knew she’d hurt me badly and that I was blaming myself for her death. My vision came before the funeral and it gave me enough strength – just about – to hold myself together and get through the day.
Maggie and I had always been open with each other. We’d talked about what we wanted for our funerals should one of us die. Now she was gone, there was no way I was going to do it any way other than how she’d wanted it. Making the arrangements was the only thing I was able to apply myself to in those blurry few days. I was living from moment to moment through the chaos of emotional ups and downs. I felt capable of nothing and cared about very little, but one thing I knew I had to get right was the funeral.
‘I don’t want lots of flowers,’ Maggie had told me. There would be no flowers.
‘I only want one orchid.’ Then there would only be one.
‘And I want it to be placed on the coffin.’ So that’s where it was placed.
‘There are to be no prayers and the only reading is to be written and read by you, Keith.’
Before we arrived at the church, ‘Tears from Heaven’ by Eric Clapton was playing and the only other music was to be Ronan Keating’s version of the Garth Brooks song ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes’, and the Toni Braxton song, ‘Breathe Again’ that we both loved dearly – I’d often kneel on the floor at home and sing it to Maggie while she laughed her head off!
On the day of the funeral, the coffin was brought in while ‘Breathe Again’ played, and once it had been put down I stood up to do my reading. If identifying Maggie’s body was the hardest thing I have ever done, then that reading was the second hardest. I conveyed my love for Maggie to a room of mourners and only just managed to hold it together. I began to choke up with tears towards the end, but ‘If Tomorrow Never Comes’ began to play as I finished speaking and it gave me the crutch that I needed. I turned around to face Maggie’s coffin, and I sang every word at the top of my voice, as if I was performing for her on our settee again.
Tears ran down my cheeks as I sang my heart out to Maggie, and as the song ended I blew her a kiss and said, ‘Goodbye, my darling.’
It was the only thing left to say.