Trigger Warning: this piece references suicide, death, grief and loss

Today is 1st May, which in France means Labour Day, Fête du Travail. It is also my Granny May’s birthday. She was born in 1909 and is no longer alive. Duh. It is also my partner Medjool’s dad’s birthday. He was born in 1933, and one could argue might still be alive, but he is not.

May is also the month in which my youngest brother, Edward, was born in 1969, and my eldest brother, James, was born in 1964. Both should be alive too, by my reckoning, but are not, for reasons that are still too incomprehensible to write about in detail. Edward would turn 57, and James would turn 62 later this month, but Edward will never be beyond 46, and James will never be beyond 61.

I have just read the second Inquest Bundle, a document presented to the Coroner, a thick wodge of a document, containing more information than I ever thought possible about someone I know and love, seeking to explain how and why he died. It is a brave report, and much more comprehensive than the initial one I read about a month ago, now including communications and details that attempt to complete the picture around the circumstances of his death. And yet, having read the almost one hundred pages, it all feels so incomplete. I have more questions than answers. I am more unsettled than becalmed.

I know well this part of me that reaches for answers. I think we all have it, to a lesser or greater degree. But it is not a part that is easily satisfied, particularly when faced with anything remotely human, relational or systemic. I can understand why three plus four equals seven, but I cannot, and perhaps should not, understand why someone capable, competent and well-supported might take their life, even if utterly disoriented following a sudden and brutal marriage breakdown, even if profoundly sleep-deprived for weeks.

Except, of course, I can.

I too sleep poorly. I have nights where I do not catch a wink. Last week, after being pulled into a mess that was not mine to sort out, I could not sleep at all. I sat on the edge of the bed wanting to scream, and if I had been alone, I probably would have done so, but I was in an apartment, with my partner nearby and neighbours on the other side of the walls, and so the scream stayed inside.

I can understand my brother, even if I still fundamentally do not understand. The statements, the details, the scribbled goodbye notes, the character portraits, the lists of objects and medications found, the post-mortem report, all of it begs more questions. It is an itch that cannot be soothed by scratching, because no amount of information is going to resolve the dissonance, the unquiet, the deep disturbance of it all. The mind will always want answers, even though it is really the heart that is the organ needing relief, and the heart will never be soothed with data.

I wrote to my family before I began reading:

“I am about to read through the latest James Inquest Bundle. I have found some language that helps me understand why it all feels so hollow — that I want to understand James’s inside, what was going on on the inside, and the Inquest Bundle will only ever show some of what was going on on the outside. It is always going to feel inconclusive, lacking, unsatisfactory.”

And so it proves. The itch has not been soothed. It is redder and more raw than it was before I started reading. There is nothing that can tell me what it was like to be him in those final days or hours, and so while the report fills some of the space with data, the space of unknowing only grows larger.

I find myself thinking of negative capability, that capacity to be with uncertainty, with mystery, with not-knowing, without rushing towards resolution, and I notice again how different it feels in lived experience from how it sounds in theory. Because now it is less a poetic idea and more a visceral practice of noticing the reaching and, somehow, not following it, not because the answers are not wanted, but because even when they come, they do not do what we hope they will do.

My mother wants to understand too, and like me has more questions, and like me she is left with the same gaping hole, the absence, the ache, the persistent not-knowing that no amount of information in a report will ever fill.

I miss my elder brother James terribly, not because we were in frequent contact, as we were not, but because as a sibling he has always been part of the landscape of my life, a steady and unquestioned presence, someone who existed in the world alongside me, and now he does not. May has arrived as it always does, bringing with it his birthday and becoming yet another place in the calendar marked not by celebration but by absence.

Receiving answers is not always comforting, and staying with questions is deeply discombobulating, and yet this is the work that is asked of us, not to resolve what cannot be resolved, but to live alongside it, to bear the weight of what we do not and perhaps cannot ever fully understand, and to keep being with what is, regardless.

Photo – September 2009 – a rare photo of the five siblings – two of whom, Edward and James, are no longer alive. Photo taken on the occasion of our mother’s 70th birthday, celebrated in Chamonix.