‘My dad killed himself when I was five and all his pain and sadness has shifted on to me’
Holly Brockwell, 32, was just five years old when her father took his life. Here she shares her devastation
SUICIDE claims a life every 90 minutes in the UK - 5,821 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters died last year alone.
But suicide affects far more lives than those it claims. Here, in brutal honesty, 32-year-old Holly Brockwell shares the devastating impact her father's death has had or her own life.
MY NAME is Holly and my dad killed himself.
Sometimes I feel like that’s how I should introduce myself. Because more than my face, or my job, or my age, it often seems like my dad’s decision to take his own life when I was five defines me.
The choice he made that day has shaped my entire world.
He’s in my relationships – all the times I’ve pushed people away in case I loved them and they left me.
He’s in the arguments that have torn my family apart endless times. He’s in the anger I’ve felt at my mother, the constant worry about my sister’s safety, the hatred I’ve turned on myself.
He’s the reason a missed call sends me spiralling into a panic.
There’s a hole nothing can ever fill, questions that can never be answered. This is what it’s like living in the shadow of suicide.
The strange fact is, ending your life doesn’t actually affect you that much.
And he’s the reason I’m here. He did, after all, choose to have two daughters, and we’ve had to carry on without him.
My sister found her path: to have children of her own and give them everything we didn’t have. She finds enormous fulfilment in providing her own two little girls a happy, stable home life, with two doting parents and all the love in the world.
I haven’t yet found my path, the purpose that will help overwrite all the sadness he left. Maybe I won’t.
But in a few short years I’ll be older than my dad ever was, just by putting one foot in front of the other every day and never stopping.
Even with the weight of him on my back, I’ve got this far.
I don’t know what my dad was thinking that day, or really who he was as a person – how can you know an adult at the age of five?
I’ve probably spent more time crying for him than I ever spent with him.
But I know what it is to be so low you don’t want to exist anymore, and for everyone else who ever feels that way, I want to say this: you can’t put an end to your pain that way.
You just transfer it to whoever loved you most.