It is very hard to be honest in this difficult entry about my mother. My relationship with her was very complicated. (Did you know that people generally have a much harder time getting on with the parent that is the same gender as they are?) My brother finds it much easier to think of our mother than my sister and me.

My mother killed herself on October 12, 2003. Yes, she committed suicide.

I loved her very much, and during the last 2-3 years of her life, I was able to get on well with her. We had long talks on the telephone (she lived in Sweden and I live in England).

During the last few years of her life, my mother tried her best to be kind, caring and understanding towards her children. She tried to be a good friend too.

A lot of people had criticized her while she was alive (including my sister and me). My sister was more vocal and actually told my mother she was a great egoist and lots of other things along these lines. I was more of a coward. I did not confront her, but avoided her instead.

I used to think of my bi-weekly telephone calls with her as an act of charity. Sometimes I enjoyed them though. I loved it during the last few years of her life when she never judged me but always seemed to agree with me. Partly it was difficult because I knew she was trying to make up for what had happened before. But I couldn’t help but enjoying the unconditional kindness she displayed. Sometimes it was a month or two during which I didn’t speak to her. I am ashamed to say that I sometimes didn’t feel up to speaking to her.

She was ill and talked a lot about her illness on the phone. Sometimes during our calls I rambled on about boring details of my life just to make conversation. While I was engaged to James, I asked her a lot about her courtship with my father. I asked her about household management issues (’how do I remove such-and-such stain?’) and health issues, something she was interested in. I was aware that she had many good sides despite the fact that people considered her self-centred. I am sure she changed during the last years of her life.

During the last few years of her life, I gradually became aware that I was the stronger party and she was the weaker. During this period I was gravitating towards Christianity. I felt that I couldn’t be unkind to somebody who was in the kind of difficult situation that she was in. I defended her to my sister. I told my sister to back off her and exercise some humility and charity.

Almost everybody in my family said that she was self-centred. They pitied me as the number one victim of my mother’s sometimes crazy behaviour. I was slapped around a bit by her, threwn out of the house a few times for being cheeky. It’s not the sign of the best parenting skills, but it does not mean the person in question is evil. Eventually I was excommunicated to boarding school without permission to come home. All family members thought my mother had behaved outrageously.

But I was a guilty too! You are supposed to honour your parents and obey them. I did not always do that. Although I wasn’t consciously rude or very disrespectful, I disobeyed her and occasionally did really naughty things like shoplifting. The biggest problem had been that my mother wanted to control me (and my siblings) fully. I was getting to the point in life when I craved some freedom though and being her oldest child this caused problems.

I ended up at boarding school at the age of 13 and that was the end of any close relationship I had with my mother. There were 2-3 years during my teens when I literally never spoke to her.

Later on in life it was painful to realize that she didn’t know some fundamental facts about me, such as the fact that I wore contact-lenses; that I had hay-fever, or what my favorite food was. In many ways I was a bit of a stranger to her.

She knew nothing about my life at university, what summer-jobs I had or what my interests, likes and dislikes were. When I started working, she was extremely unclear on what I was doing. I didn’t do much to enlighten her.

When I was younger and heard people bad-mouth my mopther I didn’t stop them. Even the staff at boarding school thought she was a bit crazy when she called them up and ranted about things. Everybody thought I was an innocent victim. I know that’s not true though. I was secretly glad to get away from her.

My relatives thought she was a bully. But if she was, I was not an innocent victim. I could have treated her better and I could have been more loyal. I had a very strong wish for independence from her and it would have been much better if I had not had that wish, or if I had been able to supress it.

Sometimes I was even ashamed of her because she behaved in an odd way. Later, after six years at the most exclusive boarding school in the country, I started thinking that she didn’t talk, behave and dress correctly. I was snobbish towards my own mother! How pathetic of me! How self-centered! I actually had thoughts along those lines for many years before I started to get over it.

After my parents’ divorce (which happened while I was at boarding school), my mother refused to sell the house where she had lived with my father. She kept it, despite the upkeep being well outside her means. Eventually she had to start letting out rooms in the house. But for some reason she really wanted to stay there.

I was constantly on her case about selling the house, dropping hints left, right and centre. I wish I’d just respected her wishes about this. I had an idea that if she moved she could start over, leaving all the bad things that happened in that house behind her (and me). She didn’t feel the same way though

I was also constantly on her case about getting a job, any job. My mother was ill on and off with an odd kind of tumour in her head. It wasn’t cancer, just benign tumours that grew and caused serious problems, among others giving her a disease called Cushing’s syndrome. She was treated for that and the doctor seemed to think she should be fine. She had a few recurrences, but as a whole people mainly thought she was a hypochondriac.

For a long while I was convinced that she’d start feeling better if she worked. She didn’t think so. She had a relationship with a business-man who took her skiing and travelling with him. It seemed to me that somebody who can travel and ski can also work, at least in an easy office job. I really don’t think it was my business to nag her about it though, and I realised that towards the end of her life.

Mother Gets Addicted to Prescription Drugs

She had some kind of phantom pain in her throat following completely unrelated surgery. As a result she became addicted to very strong painkillers. For a while she was completely crazy from the addiction.

It took quite a while before we spotted that she was stoned out of her head on painkillers. She had been slurring and rambling a bit when we talked to her, but we had all put it down to general weirdness and illness.

Then there was the horrible incident when she lost her driving licence after having zigzagged across the lines on a rural road. People saw her and called the police who started following her car. She wouldn’t stop the car when the police signalled her, which made them more hostile towards her.

I think it was then that my sister found a mega-stash of morphine and other drugs in my mother’s house. My sister is a nurse and knew what the drugs were. She got rid of everything that was addictive. It was acknowledged that my mother had drug addiction problem.

She struggled with that for a while, and I remember some phone calls with her when she was trying to convince me to get her out of the rehab clinic that she had been admitted to against her will. She called everybody in the family, but no-one agreed to let her out until she was off the drugs.

The First Suicide Attempts

My mother made a few suicide attempts while I was at boarding school. I don’t know much about these but my poor sister who was living with her at the time remembers it well. One of these suicide attempts happened while my brother and I was on holiday with our father in Indonesia (he lived in Singapore at the time and we had gone to visit him.) It’s disgusting to think that we were playing away on the beach and sun-bathing while she nearly killed herself in front of my 12 year old sister.

Many years later was the first serious attempt that I personally can remember. My mother took a picnic-blanket and some stuff with her and went to a pretty spot in the forest not far from her house. She took an overdose of some strong drug and just lay down to wait. In retrospect I think that was a serious suicide attempt.

She was found in time though, by some people who where out in the forest picking blueberries. They called 999. She was in the hospital for months after that – first in ER, then in at a psychiatric ward, locked up.

I didn’t go to Sweden when I heard about her suicide attempt. Perhaps I should have. I wasn’t sure if she had been serious. I tried to ignore it. I think it was a bad time to take holiday for work reasons, or something like that. Some people said she wasn’t serious about that suicide attempt and that she had known that people were likely to pass by. I don’t know if she had taken a lethal dose of drugs or not. I also thought that I didn’t want to be manipulated. How egoistical of me. I didn’t know what to think and I couldn’t face her.

The threat of her killing herself had been over us for years. One of the reasons I moved to England was to get away from the situation with my mother. I think I knew deep inside for a long time that she would eventually kill herself. I dreamt about it several times before it actually happened.

A while after getting out of the hospital, my mother somehow managed to be put in a hospice, a place for dying people run by the Church of Sweden. She was really keen on that place - she really wanted to be there for some reason. The only confusing thing about it was; she was not dying from any illness, to anyone’s knowledge.

I called up her doctor and spent half an hour on the phone with her. The doctor seemed to think that my mother didn’t belong in the hospice at all and was just acting weirdly. Many doctors, including this one had taken a dislike to her though because she was behaving in a somewhat obnoxious way towards them.

I stayed with my mother couple of times when visiting Sweden. I stayed for 2-4 nights or so. But the scar that had been caused by the tragic falling out when I was 12 had never healed. Really, things had been very bad, but that is a different story.

I had had some awful nightmares that my mother tried to kill me and as result I was a tiny bit scared of her when I stayed there. The dreams had been so vivid and I actually occasionally dream of things that come true… I locked the door to my room at night. I didn’t dare to take some of the un-labelled painkillers she gave me once when I had a terrible headache. How weird does that sound! Beiing scared that my own mother might kill me…

I just feel like crying writing this. I practically never speak about this, and I don’t tell people how my mother died. At the time it happened, I just pushed the feelings that I had about it back to some-place where they couldn’t disrupt my life.

The Suicide, How it Happened

At the time the suicide happened I was working somewhere that had a very generous policy regarding compassionate leave. I took two and a half weeks off.

The telephone call about the suicide came late at night on a Sunday. It was my brother. He and my sister were together. They asked me if I was alone, which I was.

I just screamed. The phone call lasted 10 minutes or so. I then called my mothers sister and told her about it. She was remarkably cool and un-surprised which upset me a bit. Then I took some sleeping pills that I keep for emergencies, and fell asleep although I didn’t exactly have a restful night.

For a week I couldn’t get myself to book a ticket and go to Sweden. I just stayed in England behaving like a lunatic. I went on some crazy shopping sprees and ran 7 miles every day.

I did another crazy thing as well – I convinced myself that I was in love with an idiot of a guy that I had just been about to dump when I learnt about the suicide. I remember calmly thinking “I simply cannot manage this without a strong person giving me support. I just can’t do it alone. I need to get back with Brian.”

So I calmly called him up, told him what had happened and said that I took back what I had said earlier, He was away on business and told me to “keep strong and go shopping!” (Like me, he was a survivor of a totally crazy family situation, and had grewn up at boading school. He became an officer in the British paratroop regiment, and later a banker. He was also a complete lunatic and incurable womanizer but I didn’t know the full extent back then.)

I knew he’d be tough on me, preventing me from falling to pieces. He came to Sweden a day after the funeral. Him and I actually went partying at some nightclubs only a couple of days after the funeral - can you believe it! I also also attended a party at a friend’s with him while I was there. I needed his extreme stiff upper-lip and survivor personality.

At the time, I am ashamed to say, I was upset and disillusioned about Christianity. My faith was too new and un-grounded to cope with an event like this. That’s why I turned to a guy instead of to Christ for strength.

My old female friends from school were absolute rocks as usual. “Through thick and thin & sick and sin…”

In a way, the crazy illusion that I adored this guy helped me not to think about the horrible details of the suicide. My father turned up for the funeral as well, flying in from Australia, without his new wife. I didn’t need or want him there, but apparently my sister did so he did the decent thing and came.

My mother had committed suicide through drowning herself after getting stoned on painkillers. Somebody had found her body floating in the water and called the police. It was recommended to the family not to see the body but I think my brother did anyway The whole thing was quite well planned. It became obvious that she had prepared it for days at the very least.

My mother left a letter which I cannot bring myself to read. My sister read the letter though and said that it was mostly ramblings but they made her feel worse. My sister also found my mother’s diary and read it during the days after the suicide. My brother had to take it off her eventually because she got so sad from reading it.
Lidingö K:a where she is buried
Was there anything I could have done to prevent the suicide? How guilty am I in this? I tried to talk to my mother about Christianity and Jesus, but she never took it on. I didn’t call her enough by far, but when we spoke I tried to be nice and kind to her. I told her several times that I had no hard feelings about all the things that happened when I was a teenager.

I still feel guilty though and wonder if anything that I could have done might have made a difference. My grandmother feels even worse about it though. I know that very well. But I was not a very good daughter to her.
Same church, different angle
I think she knew that I loved her. She called my sister and brother shortly before the suicide, but not me. Perhaps she called and couldn’t get through? Apparently she mentions me in the suicide note, but I can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe I will one day if I have a big strong husband by my side and feel safe and secure. But as things are right now, I can’t cope with that amount of pain by myself so I have put it off indefinitely.

One friend of me Agnes, has been through the same thing. Her mother, a divorced lawyer killed herself too. Agnes and I have spoken a bit about it.

Peace to her memory and let her rest in peace. She is buried at the cemetery at Lidingö outside Stockholm.

Mamma, jag älskar Dig så mycket och jag hoppas att träffa Dig igen in himlen. Snälla förlåt allt dumt jag gjorde! Vila i frid. Jag tänker på Dig varje dag.
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