Born in the shadow of death....

So i should be logging on here to happily announce to my world that Cookie is here, alive and kicking and letting me know about the realities of having a 4 person family. However she's not. I am 40 weeks at the moment but still no sign. If i get to 42 i have a ceasarian booked ready. She's not even born and a sanction has been put in place, 'come or 'i'll come and get you'.

So my reason for writing now? Lovely died. She was 32, married and had more friends than.... average. But she committed suicide on Friday.

It's been hard to take. I've never experienced suicide before, i've never experienced the annoyance of knowing that if an individual had of done something different i wouldn't be in this pain right now. And that a deliberate and premeditated act to kill herself was capable of being part of Lovely's personality.

I've been REALLY struggling to reconcile the Lovely i knew, with someone who would take their life in a dramatic manner. Only a few hours before she died we were texting each other an inane conversation about Cookie. I call her Lovely as she would describe everyone as Lovely, if she said something even vaguely negative about someone,and often blatantly true, she would apologise, and say 'that sounded horrible, what i meant was...' and put it in a really nice way that couldn't even offend the person she was talking about.

I understand that she might not have told me that she felt suicidal as i am so pregnant, and i knew that she was 'down' but when did down turn into so depressed it is hard to recognise my friend amongst it all? Do you have to be clinically depressed to make the choice it is better to be dead than live anymore? Is poor mental health a convenient label for anyone who acts contrary to how society dictates we should?

Last night i looked up death by hanging on the internet and it really helped. It gave me not only the gory details so i can create a film in my head of Lovely's last few minutes, but also some very general comments about why people choose this form of suicide. And i think it's helped.

The Department of Health and Aged Care of Australia calls suicide by hanging a "particularly confronting display of resistance, defiance, individual control and accusatory blame"; it is "a rebuke and statement of uncaring relations, unmet needs, personal anguish, and emotional payback". Lovely conformed, she stood up for all the homeless people she worked with, she fought for asylum seekers with mental health problems rights, she was an avid support of amnesty international and would hold events for them, but when it came to her personal life she struggled to stand up for herself, she struggled to overthrow the middle-class values she was bought up in, stiff upper lip, don't complain and get on with it. It currently helps me to think that she was lucid and rational in her last actions, that eventually she got to breaking point and decided that enough was enough, she would be making a stand, a massive 'FUCK YOU' to the world.

I'm not saying she was justified, and i'm sure soon I will begin to feel cross with her for choosing to make this statement than to live it out and make the changes she wanted to see happen, and remain my friend and companion. But it helps me to consider her an active participant, not a victim of something else taking over her. As you can tell I have a very primitive understanding of mental health. Although I'm not convinced that mental health plays a massive role in this. Am I being naïve?

RIP Lovely.