spinofflive
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

OPINIONBooksSeptember 3, 2020

Staying silent on suicide didn’t help my daughter

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

A recent column by the director of New Zealand’s Suicide Prevention Office argued that ‘normalising talking about suicide’ doesn’t help. Linda Collins, the author of a forthcoming book about losing a child to suicide, wonders how silence can ever be a solution.

Just this week, a friend who helps maintain a suicide prevention website messaged me about a piece someone she suggested she put up. It was from a major international publishing house and titled “Empathy Reading: the Best Novels About Suicide”.

The piece said “the tremendous success of the book and Netflix series 13 Reasons Why has shown us that there’s a hunger for literary explorations of suicide … We’ve assembled a list that, while not explicitly healing, provide clarity and above all, solidarity”.

Perhaps this is what Carla na Nagara, the director of the Ministry of Health’s Suicide Prevention Office, was talking about when she wrote last month in The Spinoff, “international evidence tells us normalising talking about suicide is not helpful”.

The books on the reading list are fiction and, as I told my friend, it is a bad idea to have them on a suicide prevention site. This is because they follow the conventions of action, rising action, obstacle, overcoming it, and resolution. Impressionable young readers will not get clarity, let alone solidarity (what is even meant by that?) about the reality of suicide. In fact, they will get a very wrong idea about it. I know. I live that reality.

My daughter, Victoria McLeod, took her life six years ago. She was 17 years old. I have written a book about it, Loss Adjustment, to be published by Awa Press on October 20. My book is non-fiction and had to meet the social sciences requirements of the university ethics committee where I wrote it for my masters degree. Unlike the fiction on the reading list, this is not a coming-of-age story where a protagonist learns valuable life lessons from a friend’s suicide, and life continues with this new “normal”.

My life will never be normal. In my book, there is no “plot”. My daughter died. That happens pretty much straight away in the opening pages. Any action is the resulting wake and funeral. Then after that, confusion, blame and anguish circling on itself. As for resolution, there is no ending to the pain of loss. No daughter magically returns and we continue on, older but wiser, skipping into the sunset.

The author’s book about the death of her daughter, and its aftermath.

Where I disagree with na Nagara is her claim that talking about suicide will not help prevent suicide and could have the opposite effect, noting that “all this ‘talking about it’ has not led to a decrease in our suicide rate”. Firstly, the increase could be due to other factors ranging from societal pressures that have not been addressed, to prosaic aspects such as more deaths stated as suicide rather than the more vague “accidental death”.

Secondly, one of the reasons I wrote Loss Adjustment is to open up talk on suicide. This is because I had seen the effects of being silenced. My daughter, a New Zealander in a school in Singapore, became so stricken by social anxiety that she became incapable of answering questions in class. I was not informed about this by the school, but I now know that she turned to writing a diary to express her thoughts to try and make sense of them, though at her young age, she lacked the problem-solving skills that would have enabled this. That is what happens when conversations are stifled, or when there is no mature or trained person to externalise and guide. The thoughts don’t go away but are driven inward in a dysfunctional manner.

Victoria understood this, and wrote of wanting to help others like her. In an entry one month before her death she said that she wanted money to “be given to charity. One that raises awareness about social anxiety … So that teachers don’t always assume that the kid at the back of class who never raises their hand isn’t just ‘shy’, when they are really paralysed with fear and hopelessness that they believe no one could ever understand”.

Yet for whatever reason, not enough resources are given to facilitate mental-health counselling to enable necessary conversations. I wonder, Why are the needy, regardless of rich or poor, marginalised this way? Why is this a lesser priority in society?

As for na Nagara’s implicit worry about copycat suicides, shutting down talk about Victoria’s suicide did not prevent such a death. The school forbade students from talking about her. It refused an offer of an external specialist counselling team to help teens talk about Victoria and express their grief. Yet, 10 months after Vic’s death, a boy who had been in her class took his life the same way.

I agree with na Nagara that mental health services are just a part of the solution – I would say, an absolutely vital part – and that there are serious issues of inequity and human rights to address. But reducing suicide is much more than addressing systemic problems. There is much yet to explore in the areas of sociological, biological, neurological, biochemical and environmental causes of suicide, too.

Emphasising that the conversation on suicide needs to be more about societal and systemic issues is good, but it is not the full picture. It’s important to talk about it all, all the confusing nonfictional mess of its awful reality, and to not signal to the suicidal that if your problems are not to do with the latest emphasis, better shut up and harden up.

And what has been the effect of Loss Adjustment opening up the conversation on suicide? It was first published in Singapore in September last year. Mothers there who have lost kids this way then formed the PleaseStay movement to advocate for suicide prevention. We have been to institutions of power, from high-ups at the Ministry of Education and the National Council of Social Services, to the Institute of Mental Health, and shared our lived experiences. The result is that authorities there are looking at where the system is failing within their organisations, and making changes. They tell us they are doing this because our talks with them bring home the message in a way they just cannot ignore.

These organisations are now also more aware of the need to co-ordinate the various services and are working towards this. Other stuff: three months after Loss Adjustment was published, the act of taking your life was removed from the statute books as a crime. Nominated MP Anthea Ong read the book and it informed her when she spoke up in Singapore’s parliament for better mental health care.

And I receive many messages from readers who say the book prompted them to open up difficult but transformative conversations with their kids – talk they would have once avoided.

People come up to me after readings and signings and tell me things they anguished over in silence for years, such as being a closeted gay person, or feeling oppressed by racism, or worrying about being able to provide for their family. That’s the thing about talking about this taboo subject of suicide: the act of my giving testimony, allows them to bear witness too. And once the secret is spoken, it does not have so much power over a person. It is out in the open, to be examined, understood and acted upon.

Linda Collins is the author of Loss Adjustment, out with Awa Press on October 20. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.

Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor.

Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)

Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234, email talk@youthline.co.nz or online chat

Samaritans – 0800 726 666

Shine (domestic violence) – 0508 744 633

Women’s Refuge – 0800 733 843 (0800 REFUGE)

Alcohol and Drug Helpline – 0800 787 797 or online chat

Are You OK (family violence helpline) – 0800 456 450

Rape Crisis – 0800 883 300 (for support after rape or sexual assault)

Carl Nixon wrote The Tally Stick in France, after being awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (Photo: Supplied)
Carl Nixon wrote The Tally Stick in France, after being awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (Photo: Supplied)

BooksSeptember 1, 2020

Into the wild: A review of Carl Nixon’s astonishing novel, The Tally Stick

Carl Nixon wrote The Tally Stick in France, after being awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (Photo: Supplied)
Carl Nixon wrote The Tally Stick in France, after being awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (Photo: Supplied)

Deep in the wops, three children are caught in a pastoral New Zealand nightmare.

The Tally Stick begins like a waking dream, a horrifying free fall where time stretches out before snapping sickeningly back into place.

The car containing the four sleeping children left the earth …

It’s April 1978. It’s dark, and the weather is dire, and the West Coast road is treacherous, and a rental car carrying an English family who’ve been in the country mere days goes sliding off the edge into the unknown. No one knows where they are. It will be weeks before someone realises that they’ve gone missing, and no evidence of them will be found – not then, anyway.

It reminds me of the most vivid nightmare I’ve had in years, in which my own car spills off one of the curving roads that trace Banks Peninsula, then bounces off a bluff, with enough time for me to think with perfect lucidity this is what it is like to know you are going to die. Nixon’s opening paragraphs capture the stillness, the speed, the clarity of this horror, before punching us back into reality.

From here, the novel is taut and well-plotted, balancing a mounting sense of dread with unexpected payoffs, and dancing across two parallel storylines.

In the past, the Chamberlain family smashes into a river at the bottom of a ravine. Three children – Maurice, Katherine, and little Tommy – escape the wreck before it floods (more nightmare fuel), although their parents and baby sister are dead. They are left cold, alone and injured, attacked by sandflies, and with nothing more than a handful of biscuits and sweets between them.

In 2010, their Aunt Suzanne gets a call that Maurice’s remains have been found on a remote West Coast beach. Bafflingly, it’s clear he’d lived for at least four years after the family’s disappearance. With his bones are his father’s watch, some balled up cash, and a tally stick – a bit of wood, one half of a whole, scored with notches that quantify some sort of debt.

A lone tree, near Greymouth (Photo: Elodie Raedersdorff/EyeEm via Getty Images)

It would be rude to illustrate plot further, as much of the experience of the book rests on us fearing for the children, and wondering, like Suzanne, what the hell actually happened. The action doglegs in often unexpected but satisfying ways. There’s a comment, at one point, that New Zealand doesn’t have dangerous animals, the unspoken inference for the reader being that people have not been included in this summation. I admit I spent a bit of time wondering if this was going to end up like Aussie horror Wolf Creek. What is important, though, is that Katherine, Maurice and Tommy find themselves somewhere unexpected. They must find ways to adapt to their new environment and their new identities, in a way that troubles and expands their understanding of family.

We switch between the children’s perspectives. Maurice, at 13 the eldest, is congenitally resentful and possessive, his father’s son, something of a bully. He balks at his new situation, looking for ways to lash out or take revenge against everything from his siblings, to the eels that gobbled up his dead parents. Katherine, slightly younger, is resourceful, clever and kind. On the first night sleeping rough she finds solace in fireflies – “glowing pinpricks, faint, almost bluish” – and as the story progresses, her perspectives and senses unfurl. Nixon illustrates, in beautiful detail, a rich sense of environment, sketching out the land, water, flora and birdlife. “Welcome to paradise,” we hear at one point, perhaps mocking, perhaps not. Elsewhere, the wonderful phrase “The West Coast had air you could roll around in your mouth” and, watching a kingfisher, “She glimpsed a gas-flame flash of iridescent blue as it passed through the sunlight … A moment later the colours that were the bird reappeared on the same branch, with movement that may have been a flopping cockabully in its beak.” Over time Katherine learns the local names for the things around her and builds herself something of a pantheon – a way of encountering and living within the complexity of the non-human world that weaves an idiosyncratic spirituality with a grounded understanding of the here and now.

The tension between the two siblings feeds the novel’s conflicts, and comes to speak of the way visitors – settlers – might understand environment as something capacious that demands respect and reciprocity, or something hostile and empty in need of suppression. I like that the novel tests this Eurocentric notion of “the wild”, and that it clearly looks to other dominant forms of narrative, not least the ambivalence of New Zealand Gothic. But it challenges our expectations of genre, and in doing so engages with thorny questions about the nature of our relationships with one another.

Water and light, Franz Josef (Photo: Per Engström / EyeEm via Getty Images)

In this sense, the titular tally stick is really a McGuffin. Sure, it has a literal purpose at one stage. It’s a good hook, and its initial appearance is one of many oh shit, what now moments in the plotting. But it comes to stand in for bigger questions about reciprocity and obligation that act as the marrow of the story. What do we owe the people around us, in a literal sense? What obligations do we also have for kin, for the living, and for the dead? How are families formed, and what do they do for each other? There are the obvious moments of familial duty: Katherine builds a small cairn for her dead baby sister. Suzanne, in the past, does her best to find her missing sister, and in the present, she attends to Maurice’s remains with dignity and respect. More broadly, the book is a tangle of competing accountabilities and obligations, some of which sit deep within ethically shadowy spaces. Duty might be doling out, or suffering through, a brutal physical hiding, or it might manifest as the tender, everyday care a sister shows in toileting her injured, incontinent brother. It asks what love might look like.

All elements of suspense, genre and environment aside, this exploration of reciprocity illustrates how The Tally Stick is invested in looking at identity in post-colonial Aotearoa, with gestures towards England then and now. It pokes around in the spaces between European, (neo)coloniser, Pākehā, settler, “émigré”, privileged insider and cultural outsider, even if there’s still a heavy whiff of the Romantic about Katherine’s rich encounters with the birds and the bush, which sometimes stray into magical realism.

This is flagged early, repeatedly, in the opening sequences. There’s the English father’s job as an executive for a multinational extractive industry, his sniffy attitude towards his new short-term home, and his lethal dismissiveness towards warnings about weather and geography. There’s the ironic image of a bloated copy of Five Go Off to Camp bobbing in the river with the mangled car. We hear about the children’s upper middle-class upbringing, all piano lessons, Kensington Gardens, holidays to France, please and thank you.

But it’s also there in the way that present-day Aunt Suzanne makes note, quizzically, of the darkness of her Ethiopian-born, adopted grandchildren’s skin. She’s not quite impugning their Britishness – if anything, she’s addressing her own surprise that multiculturalism is more than a visit to the local Greek restaurant – but it’s not far off. It’s uncomfortable for both her and the reader, not the blunt denaturalisation of her whiteness but her curious objectification of their blackness.

They’d been so much blacker than she’d thought they would be. That sounded terrible, she knew, but their colour had thrown her off kilter for a long time. Every time she saw them, she was startled all over again. She’d found herself taking every opportunity to touch their skin … 

Suzanne’s unshakeable internalised Englishness, a ragged empire in mind if not in practice, also prevents her from recognising what might be important information about the fate of her family.

Driftwood, bird, Westport (Photo: Jong Beom Kim, 500px via Getty Images)

So, what forms of living and knowledge might open up for those who are able to shake this paternalistic point of view? Allen Curnow’s poem about the moa in Canterbury Museum – over-quoted, sorry, but I’m doing it again now like a hack – famously finishes “Not I, some child born in a marvellous year / Will learn the trick of standing upright here”. I thought about this couplet a lot while reading, not necessarily in terms of literature in Aotearoa New Zealand itself, although this book clearly explores complexities of identity and adaptation in ways that have become more nuanced over time. Rather, I thought of how Katherine, Maurice and Tommy try to find their feet after their unexpected dislocation, after they are ripped off course physically and psychologically, all ideas of home, family and selfhood tipped on their heads.

It’s also possible I’m predisposed towards such a reading, as I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be tangata tiriti, too. I’ve been researching my mihi as the Ōtautahi-born child of white immigrants who met in Aotearoa. From what I can glean historically my various family lines – American, English, Polish – didn’t stay put for too long in any one place. My parents’ respective journeys here were internationally circuitous, and buffeted by the forces of globalisation, war, oppression, colonisation, expansionism, and trade. Unpacking the implications of arrival, adaptation and reciprocity in Aotearoa, in the here and now, is tricky business for tauiwi. It’s tricky for these characters too.

I appreciate, then, that the book retains a degree of ambivalence about cultural identities of some key characters. It acts as a small case study of what it means to adapt to your environment, bar the easy reading that it’s better to be open-hearted and humble than arrogant, closed-minded, and fixated on enemies, real or imagined. Although poor Maurice comes to grip onto the tally stick as cold evidence of the things that have happened to him after the death of his parents – some of them legitimately terrible – Nixon’s satisfying book suggests that the myriad and sometimes shifting obligations we have to one another, as well as the things that we specifically owe, aren’t mere transactions. Instead, they form the meat and sinew of our relationships, however tangled those relationships may be. To pretend otherwise will leave you alone, or, in the case of Mo, royally screwed.

The Tally Stick, by Carl Nixon (Vintage, $36), is available from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.