Fran's story

I like to think I’m a get up and get on with things type of person, but as time went on the impact on me and my family was immense. My own health was suffering due to endless nights of no sleep, and I just wasn’t able to cope. There’s a reason sleep deprivation was used as a method of torture for prisoners of war.

There were times when I would question why this had happened to me – to us. But I couldn’t burden my girls with how I was feeling; they were hurting, and I felt I needed to protect them. Friends would say, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” but the best thing people can do to help is listen, and I wasn’t sure they always wanted to hear my true feelings.

I felt like I was trapped inside a glass box watching the whole world moving around me, seeing people getting on with their lives, as I was slamming my hands on the window begging for help, but nobody could hear me.

Night times were especially hard. The world goes to sleep and you’re left with time to think, and your brain goes round and round. Things begin to feel so enormous that it’s like having a rock on top of you and you just want to lie there flat and let it crush you. My situation wasn’t fixable, so I came to feel that my only option was to take myself off and never come back.

I often think when people consider putting an end to their life, that it’s not dramatic, it’s not goodbye cruel world. It’s simply a case of, I can’t take this anymore, so you know what, I’m leaving. That’s how I felt. I wanted it all to be over.

I wrote to Samaritans frequently, sometimes night after night. I would just go into the bedroom, close the door and get out my computer. I wrote so many words to describe the torture of watching the man I loved die before my eyes. I would write until if felt like everything was out of me and I could breathe again. I just needed to clear space in my head so I could get up and make it through the next day.

We all have secret corners of the heart that belong to us and knowing I would never meet or see the face of the person I was speaking to allowed me to say these things. It was great to get everything out there.

I actually kept a diary of the messages they wrote back to me. It was always supportive and not cliched advice asking if I had thought about getting support from x, y and z. I knew all of that already, what I needed was for someone to listen.

They also talked to me about grief, as I was worried about how my daughters were handling things. I remember one Samaritan saying to me, “You’re all in the same storm but you’re just in different boats.” It really stuck in my mind and reassured me that we would come to deal with this in our own way and at our own pace.

John passed away three years ago, and I’ve had to learn to negotiate a new world – to close one book and open another. I have bad times, like when I hear certain music or if I just think about him for too long. Then I’ll have a cry. You can’t shut down your thoughts or 54 years of memories, so you take the good with the bad. After all, grief is the price we pay for love.