Part 2: Interpreting my son through a foreign language

In an essay, On the feeling of immortality in youth, the eighteenth century literary critic William Hazlitt wrote that “no young man believes he will ever die”. Clearly, at the young age of 21, our son had believed he would die, for here is his note. Perhaps what he had written is a will, in which he imagined a future where we would need to respond to his absence.

This note is more about life than death, and I have come to call it an “anti- suicide note”. Yet writing this now I find myself stuck: I am at a tension point where data and theory do not fit together: My son had suicidal ideation, yet in this note he avers he does not believe in suicide. His death would seem not to have been a suicide, but an accident – or was it? I remained suspended on this tension point a long time. Interpretation, I read in Frank’s (2010) Letting stories breathe, cannot be rushed.

One day I showed his note to a close friend. After studying it for a while, she turned to me, brandishing the note.

You realise this means you are off the hook? she says. What do you mean, “off the hook”? I ask.

Well. It means you are not to blame – and that you can’t be to blame. Me …? To blame …? The idea is a shock to me. I had never considered myself guilty. I am left strangely confused about an exoneration I had not sought in the first place.

Most people look at the parents when something like this happens, she explains.

Something like this… Is this, was this, how people were perceiving me/us? I had completely failed to see myself in that light. I had not felt as if I were the object

of speculation or condemnation. Perhaps in the midst of the turmoil of simply trying to cope I had been blind to the opprobrium of others.

During my research I found my friend’s explanation to be borne out by Hinshaw (2005, p. 724) who describes the silence and distancing society accords to families with a mental disturbance in their midst was commonplace for much of the past century, and persists in some social relationships today, where parents are often blamed for the mental illness of their children.

Seikkula and Olson (2003) point out that the prevailing psycho-educational family systems approach to psychiatric care, in our Western culture, normally places the cause of psychosis at the foot of the family, and it is as if backs are turned on the family. Therapy for the client is centred on repairing the family structure, often seen to be the cause of the client’s problems (Seikkula & Olson, 2003, pp. 405, 506).

I had been aware of a supercilious attitude at times in professional or service contexts, something that went beyond a personal manner and realise now it might have been a crude form of apportioning blame. In the heat of our battle as a family I believe we had all been too shell-shocked to pay much attention to how some were treating us. We ourselves were not the “object of therapeutic action” and were largely left out of the therapeutic process. I saw a psychotherapist at the time of my son’s death, who had helped me as an individual, but not as any part of our “family system”. Psychologists and psychiatrists who treated our son did not see any other family members.

By contrast, in the pioneering Finnish “Open Dialogue” treatment method for psychiatric crises described by Seikkula and Olson (2003, pp. 406-407) both the family and the psychotic patient are involved as competent partners; the focus of treatment meetings moves away from debate about the family structure and towards

ways of building dialogue between people. There is “a constellation”, an “observing system” (p. 407) that is not impatient to get answers or to get diagnoses. A kind of “slow psychiatry”? Where I had been continually asking myself, what can I do, what can I do, wanting action even while I knew instinctively that action, solution, cures, were impossible in the current circumstances, Open Dialogue by contrast is

characterised by its tolerance of uncertainty. It does not seek to impatiently answer the What must I do? refrain. Instead, it follows Martin Buber’s “all real living is meeting” (Buber, 1970) (Friedman, 2002, p. 33) and the German poet Rilke’s advice: Live your way into the answer. Writing this now (and living my way into the answer) I learn about the “mystery of the not-yet-said” which lies at the heart of the Open Dialogue technique of dealing with psychosis (M. E. Olson, 2015, p. 6).

5.2.1 The finding

Here,

leafing through stone-quiet papers, I freeze in the 8 am birdsong morning.

No fog-horn traffic noise or school-song children today, just daffodils

pinned to spiked leaves and sea light, far away.2

The process of interpreting my son’s death begins and ends with the

documents described below, and yet it also continues in our own beings, as it were, in an ongoing way, as we piece together a story of how his life had taken on the shape it had, and what the meaning of his life held for we who survive.

For some years I had avoided revisiting this particular data in the Pandora’s box that contained the mysteries about our son.

The territory is not quite as difficult as I had imagined it would be. This is partly because of the respectful language used in the Swiss-German documents and the careful translation we were given.

The documents had seemed to take forever to arrive from Switzerland. My knowledge of German is literary – I could not accurately translate the scientific “medico-legal” reports when they eventually arrived.