Taking your own life seems alien to most of us, doesn’t it? Thankfully, most of us have lives that are nice and stable and so we can’t understand how anyone can be driven to such desperation that death becomes a valid option. Perhaps that’s why suicide is such a misunderstood death. It seems illogical – after all, we’re born with a survival instinct. Something must go terribly wrong for people to be able to turn that instinct off.
There are patterns, though. Most suicides are carried out by men. I think that is because us women are much more in tune with our emotions and more able to talk about our problems and get them out in the open. Men have a tendency to bottle it all up or ignore it until it’s too late, until it builds and builds and becomes overpowering. I know we’re supposed to be living in the age of the ‘metrosexual man’, where blokes are more in tune with their feminine sides and happily use skincare products, but there’s still a long way to go before you’ll walk into a coffee shop of an afternoon and see a group of men sitting there sipping lattes and gossiping about their problems. I hate to say it, and I know it’s a bit of a generalization, but most men are still emotionally repressed.
And this can lead to huge problems when they suddenly become faced with stress and anxiety. They can’t cope and, if you don’t have any way to offload your problems, they become such an issue that they take on a life of their own. This was what happened to Graham. I’ve spoken before about him. He was such a lovely young man, a friend of a friend of my daughter Fern. He was a soldier and got sent to serve in Afghanistan when he was twenty-two years old. When he finished his tour of duty, he made an appointment to come and see me. At that point, I had never met him but, because of the vague family connection, I found a spare hour in the diary.
He was a typical army boy. He arrived at my doorstep dot on time dressed in combat trousers, polished black boots and a tight white vest. He had intense eyes and short-cropped hair, and you could tell that he was a very fit young man.
We sat together in my office and I noticed how upright he was, straight-backed and almost standing to attention. I tried to relax him a bit with some chit-chat. It was obvious he was slightly apprehensive about being with me and I wondered briefly why he had made the appointment. He didn’t seem the type of person who would come to see a medium. I do get young men coming to see me, particularly gay men. I have a huge gay following. Graham most definitely was not gay.
‘Have you ever been to see a medium before?’ I asked him. He told me that he hadn’t, so I asked him why he had decided to come now.
You see, young people don’t spend much time wondering about spirit and pondering the afterlife, so I assumed he wasn’t with me out of curiosity.
‘I want to know if there is an afterlife,’ he replied.
I was surprised. It was such an unlikely thing for a young guy to say.
While he had been sitting there, I had opened myself up to spirit and I had a gentleman with me: Graham’s grandfather.
I told Graham that there was indeed an afterlife and that I had his grandfather with me and his name was Bill. I gave him more detail that confirmed that Bill was indeed in the room with us, and Graham was impressed and seemed relieved in a way.
The reading continued, and Graham talked about a relationship he had been in which had failed and how unhappy he was about that. He also spoke about how one day he wanted to have children. The strange thing was that I didn’t see kids in his future. He was quite tearful during the reading, and it was a powerful one. There was a lot of energy around him and there seemed to be a lot of other people in spirit who came to him.
All the way through I could tell he was troubled. I could see there was something weighing him down. It was only very near the end of our time together that he revealed what it was.
I had picked up from his energy that he was grappling with a big decision, and I told him that I felt there was something big that was due to happen to him in the following six weeks. He explained that he was going to be posted to Iraq and that he really didn’t want to go.
Then he told me why. In Afghanistan, he had been part of a patrol that had been sent into a house where suspected Taleban fighters were hiding. He was with a small detachment of three others. One of them was his sadistic senior officer. They smashed their way through the door of this mud-walled building and, sure enough, there were four men inside.
He explained, ‘The leader of our squad was a right bastard and wanted us to kill one man each. He slotted the first, and the other two guys I was with followed. But I couldn’t kill. There was one guy left cowering in the corner. He was the youngest of the lot, younger than me, and he looked terrified. He was jabbering away, begging for his life, I suppose.’
Graham told the other men he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t kill an unarmed man. So they killed him instead.
As he was telling me this awful story, he broke down in pained sobs and said that was why he couldn’t go to Iraq. He couldn’t bear what he had seen and been asked to take part in. He couldn’t buy himself out of the army and he couldn’t complain about what had happened because you don’t do things like that in the army. In war you all stick together.
I felt desperately sorry for him, but when I looked into his future I couldn’t see Iraq. I told him so. I told him everything would be OK and that he didn’t have to worry.
Before he left, he seemed to change. He straightened back up and he seemed OK, as if he had switched back into army mode.
‘I just need to know that you have my granddad and that there is a Heaven,’ he said.
‘Of course there is,’ I reassured him.
Three days later, he was dead. He had locked himself in a car in a garage, sealed the doors and windows and started up a chainsaw on the back seat. He was killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning.
When I heard, I was devastated. I couldn’t understand why I had failed to see his death, and for a time the whole tragic episode made me doubt my ability, for the first time. In the end, though, I think what that reading proved to me was that I’m just not meant to see a person’s death before it happens, no matter how immediately in the future it is. We all pass when our time has come, and there’s not a thing I can do to alter that.
About a year after Graham died I was doing a show in Cornwall and, as I walked into the theatre, a woman approached me and said hello. She said she wanted to thank me and introduced herself as Graham’s mum. I felt desperately sad for her and told her how terrible I’d felt when he died. She told me that she had found the tape recording of our reading that I had given to Graham. I make tapes for everyone I read for so they can go away and listen again, as often the messages only become apparent weeks, months or even years later.
His mum explained that just knowing that Graham had believed in the afterlife and that his grandfather would be there waiting for him had given them much comfort in the dark months after his death.
To this day, I feel sad that Graham felt unable to unburden himself and had decided that his only option was to end his life. He was suffering a deep mental anguish. That he’d taken the course of action he had was a tragedy, but it certainly wasn’t a sin.