"My father's death was never talked about at home"
Eva was eleven years old when her father died. That event had a devastating impact on the family. Her uncle then explained to her and her brother the meaning of the word suicide, but from that day on it was never spoken about again in their home. Not at home, not at school, not in any other environment. Silence reigned during the mourning, and the taboo and stigma surrounding suicide became evident in the life of this family.
"I needed to explain that my father had committed suicide, I needed to verbalize the word suicide, but I couldn't find a way back, a place to welcome him," Eva explains. And when she travels 33 years back, she remembers the need she had then to remember her father through the smell of his belongings. "How can it be that he's no longer there, if yesterday we jumped into the pool together?", she wondered at that moment. But she also remembers that, before his death, "I had a feeling that something would happen to my father, I can't say what it was, but there were some signs that made me live with anxiety thinking about it."
Silence, incomprehension, stigma, the feeling of abandonment , but also fear burst into her life. "When my father died, I began to feel terror and anxiety thinking that my brother, my mother or someone I loved could die. It was so much so that at night I would get up to check if they were breathing. I have had the fear of death, of loss, for many years and it has been very difficult for me to get rid of it." And also anger : "Why did he leave me? How could he do it? I needed him," feelings that gradually disappeared.
Julian B. Iglesias
And this fact has conditioned the whole life of Eva, who at eleven years old had to grow up quickly, and who at fourteen took her rebellion out on life. "Since we never talked about this issue and everyone did what they could, I was very angry with the world, and this led to some complicated years for me as a teenager," admits this survivor, who is sure that "if we had talked about it and it had been dealt with at home, it would have been very different. And of course, you don't talk about it at home because socially it is not well-received; in fact, I think that even today it is hidden." It has influenced her life and that of her brother, who was only six years old at the time and who now, more than thirty years later, needs to talk about it: "He is now mourning the death of his father and needs to fill that void he has of a person he can't remember and who has never been spoken about," Eva shares with us.
Tools and strategies to move forward
"We have a video from when we were very young where my father appears, and for a long time I couldn't watch him, I couldn't, I couldn't stand it for even two minutes. And now I do, now I put it on, I like to see it and remember it", Eva explains to us with a smile. She found the tools and resources to overcome death by suicide much later: recognizing emotions, talking about them a lot, not being afraid to ask for help and taking care of herself by doing mindfulness , yoga, meditation... Resources that she recommends to anyone who is now in her situation, but above all she tells them "to talk about it, not to keep anything. The worst thing you can do is keep everything. And to recognize the emotion, the sadness, the anger".
The necessary attention for people who have lost someone to suicide
But if there was one moment that was a turning point in Eva's life, it was when she became a mother: "Everything was shaken up for me, and in the middle of it all, the death of my father," she recalls. She, like other women, had postpartum depression , a delicate moment in which an idea landed in her head: "What if the same thing happens to me that happened to him?" This fear made her hide her suffering for a year, until she finally put herself in the hands of a professional to overcome this situation, which made her "become aware of everything."
"I remember very positive things about my father. He was very intelligent, he really liked to draw and he was a very sensitive person. I remember that in the mornings, before going to work, he would come and kiss us. But I also remember his crises and some complicated moments that made me feel that one day he wouldn't be there." This is how Eva remembers her father, as he was, when she looks at the photos that she was able to place on the shelves of her house six years ago.
This testimony is possible thanks to the Catalan Association for Suicide Prevention .
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