One of many memories of my eldest brother, James

Photographs taken in 1988, gifts for the occasion of our father’s 50th birthday, when I was twenty-one, and James was twenty-four.

 

Between 1987 and 1988, while in my third year at Nottingham University studying for a BA in Psychology, I took the opportunity of a working year experience. My placement was in the Cabinet Office in London, working with a team of business psychologists who are still part of the fabric of my life today, almost forty years later.

As I was only earning the equivalent of a student grant and needed to keep my costs low, I chose to live cheaply with my eldest brother, James, who—just three years older—had recently begun his career and was training to be an accountant.

Over the decades, I have often remembered and retold a conversation from that time. I recall it with absolute clarity.

James simply couldn’t understand why I chose to take the bus to work rather than the London Underground. He would walk around fifteen minutes to the nearest Tube station, take one line for a few stops, change to another line, ride it for a few stops, then emerge above ground and walk five minutes to his office. His journey probably took around forty-five minutes in total.

I, on the other hand, took the double-decker bus—number 70, if memory serves me well. It carried me from within a hundred metres of our shared flat to within a hundred metres of the Cabinet Office at Parliament Square, where Big Ben stands. It took about an hour.

“You should go by tube,” James said. “It would only take you fifty minutes. You’d be in the office faster.”

“But the bus gets me there door-to-door,” I replied. “I don’t have to change lines or wait around. And an hour is fine.”

I loved my bus journeys. I always got a seat, often on the upper deck, which filled me with childlike glee. I read, and frequently managed to get through an entire novel each week—something I’ve rarely achieved since. It was the last millennium: pre-internet, pre-mobile phones. That hour belonged entirely to me. It was one of the best parts of my day.

I couldn’t see the appeal of squeezing into a Tube carriage, standing on perilously narrow platforms, spending time underground, all for the reward of arriving at work a little sooner. My bosses didn’t expect me there earlier, nor did they expect me to stay later. So who, exactly, would that extra efficiency have served? Not me.

I also loved being above ground. Seeing the trees go by. Catching glimpses of the River Thames. Watching people on the streets—fleeting views into lives I would never know. London felt different from the top deck, even on flat, grey days.

In my youthful imagination, London’s vehicles were animals. Double-decker buses were elephants: regal, steady, visible and visionary, carrying many of us safely and patiently through the city. The Tube seemed more like an earthworm—efficient, essential, burrowing blindly underground with speed and purpose. Both elephants and earthworms matter in the great web of life. But even back then, I knew which one I wanted to ride.

James and I never found agreement about how to travel to work. He valued speed; I valued simplicity. Eventually, he gave up trying to understand my reasoning and said, quite simply:

“You’ll never be successful if you take the bus to work.”

He meant it. In his mind, this was practical, big-brotherly advice. Time, speed and efficiency mattered. Spending more time at work signalled dedication—and that mattered too, even if I reminded him I was “only” a sandwich-year student.

Baffled, I challenged him. “Define success.”

“Money,” he replied, without hesitation.

“Well,” I said, “I see it differently. For me, success isn’t about money.”

Even at the age of twenty, I knew that much. The language of “meaning” and “service” would come later, but I already understood that my sense of success—whether in work or in life as a whole—would include learning, contribution, and personal satisfaction. None of these is measurable from the outside.

James, by contrast, was drawn to things that could be measured. Income. Role. Status. Cities lived in. Lifestyle. He set targets and met them. Indeed, he surpassed them. Around that time, he said confidently, “I want to earn thirty thousand pounds by the time I’m thirty.” He sailed past that goal, moving to Asia and working in the financial sector. Of course, he worked hard. He was admired. He provided for others. He shone. His life looked impressive to anyone standing on the outside.

And yet—how fragile it also seemed to be at times.

For much of my adult life, I could see how tightly James’s sense of self and worth were bound to what was recognised and rewarded externally. Work wasn’t simply something he did; it was how he measured himself. Achievement didn’t seem to be associated with satisfaction or contribution so much as with titles, bonuses, and visible indicators of success.

For a long time, those structures held. They carried him forward, gave shape and momentum to his life, and worked well for years, even decades. But when they began to wobble—through redundancy, approaching retirement, or simply relentless ageing—the ground beneath them revealed their fault lines.

Then, when his marriage of more than thirty years ended suddenly and brutally, without the vital dialogue that is required for any ending to be assimilated, he was thrown into profound existential distress.

Endings are always hard, even when they are necessary. They ask us to loosen our grip on identities we’ve grown into. Identities that we have grown to love. They disrupt the stories we tell about who we are and where we are going. But some endings carry a particular terror—when the thing that ends is also the thing that has held our sense of self-worth in place. When work, role, or relationship has housed meaning, belonging, and worth, its loss feels less like deep grief and more like absolute dissolution.

I don’t know why James chose to take his life. I am sure I will never understand. What I can glimpse is how devastating it must have been to face multiple endings at once—work shifting, marriage collapsing, a deeply desired future evaporating.

None of this is to suggest that James was superficial or misguided. He was determined, ambitious, energetic, generous, charming, persuasive, and loving. He was also deeply defended, and far more fragile than he appeared. He lived his life on foundations that seemed solid until they no longer were.

When I look at these photographs now, I see no warning signs. I never do when I look at photos of my dead loved ones. I see a confident young man, alive to the vast possibilities of life, enjoying being seen, already committed to a specific idea of success—one that might have left too little room for slowing down, turning around, or asking what else might matter when ascent was no longer possible.

I am not suggesting that different values would have saved my brother. Nor am I judging anyone who orients their life around achievement, recognition, or quantitative measures of success. I am simply trying to fathom how someone so capable, so full of potential and life, could find himself facing such profound existential distress when the structures that had held his life together toppled.

Everything ends.
Careers end. Roles end. Relationships end. Even the stories we tell ourselves about who we are eventually loosen their hold.

What I so often come back to is how we best live knowing everything is always ending.

We cannot prevent endings, so what, if anything, remains as so much of our lives falls away?
What of value is still within us, core to who we are, when life asks us to let go of all that we love, all that seems to matter?
When life rips the ground from beneath us, tears people away from us, and we are left with nowhere to stand, what remains?

I don’t know. But it has to be something of sufficient value that we still choose to breathe for another minute, another hour, another day.

 

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James,

I love you.

I loved you when we were in our first decade of life, had just moved to Brussels, and you ensured I found my way around that enormous school and got to the right class on time.

I loved you when we were teenagers, and you let me listen to, and even record, your ELO, Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen albums.

I loved our more egalitarian friendship when we were in our early twenties and living together, or close by, in London, arguing about buses and tubes, about success and what mattered in life.

I loved you across the decades, even when I didn’t understand your choices, even when your life was so different to mine, even when our chances of meeting up were so reduced for reasons I never understood. I loved you even when you and your wife made decisions hurtful to my family and me.

I loved you still.  

I see how hard you worked, for love and for success. How much you tried to build a life that would protect you all, hold you steady, make you feel safe, valued, and real. And I see how devastating it was when everything you strove for fell apart.

You were always so much more than your job, your assets, your achievements, and your marriage.

You were my brother—funny, infuriating, charismatic, generous, complex, and loving. Your genuine presence had so much more value for me than anything else.

I wish you could have felt that deeply and really rested in that simplest of truths.

Go gently, my big brother.

With love,
Your biggest little sister,
Emma