When my mum died, I was 49 and living in a spiritual community at Findhorn in northeast Scotland, a place where the response to the question \u201cHow are you?\u201d was almost never, \u201cI\u2019m fine. How are you?\u201d. Instead, people actually told you how they were and it was in this atmosphere that I had a series of incredible, heart-opening, belief-altering conversations that were sometimes so intense that I had to retreat to my home and go back to bed. There were, of course, others there who didn\u2019t really want to hear about it. And there were still others who used what had happened as their opportunity to tell me either about their times of suicidal ideation, or of their experiences of losing someone to suicide.<\/p>\n
It was a great surprise to me that on the day after Mum\u2019s death, I had the utterly counterintuitive thought: well done. I didn\u2019t want to think that. She hadn\u2019t done well. She\u2019d disappointed us all. She\u2019d chosen to leave, to give up on her life, to give up on her role in regard to me: she\u2019d had enough of being my mother. How could she? How could she do that? How could she do that to me? But alongside such thoughts, ones of the well done sort kept coming. Quicker and more often too, until I came to realise that it was selfishness for me to want my poor, suffering mother around still, just so that I would not have to deal with her loss.<\/p>\n
I came to see that she had had a good life, had achieved so much that she\u2019d wanted to, had fitted in so much. The fact that she\u2019d spent the last year and a bit of her life dealing with various pains helped me to see that she had, in fact, made what seemed to her like a completely rational decision. And being the determined person she was \u2013 a character trait that I had always admired in her in other circumstances \u2013 she ended it all.<\/p>\n
What followed was a series of thank yous to my mum: Thank you for choosing Dad. Thank you for giving me life. Thank you for your unconditional love. I noted these down, on old envelopes, on scraps of paper and in notebooks. Most days at least one more thank you would drop in and these feelings of gratitude softened the grief I was beginning to allow, gently bringing it forth with the help of the therapist I had been seeing for some years now; incredibly, he disclosed that he\u2019d lost his mother to suicide as well.<\/p>\n
As time passed, there were all the standard postmortem staging posts: the funeral, the interment of the ashes, the memorial service, and in Mum\u2019s case, because of death by suicide, an inquest too. Each of them helped me further to accept what had happened, but I still felt I needed something more, something all of my own. So I created a ritual. I gathered all the various pieces of paper with thank yous and counted them up: there were by now more than 70. I wrote out more of them until I got to 78 \u2013 Mum\u2019s age when she died \u2013 and over three days around the winter solstice, I used them and the river Findhorn, the sea into which it ran and the cleansing power of fire, to honour not just her life, but her death, and the way of it, too.<\/p>\n
![\"James](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/VBUXTWRQ5NAHPHSHYRVIEEHJ7M.jpg\")
Writer and performer James Pretlove <\/p>\n
At the time, I was between writing projects and decided to expand each of the thank yous into a short written piece. Interweaving the background of what had happened to me since her death, I soon had a memoir. Thinking it would be a great help for others, I looked for a literary agent who would help me get it out into the world and I met one block after another. Desperate, I took the very unusual-for-me step of seeing a psychic. She told me that my guides and hers on the other side said that I wasn\u2019t going to get Mum\u2019s story out into the world in the way that I imagined. Told me it was time to stop hiding behind the computer screen and find a way to deliver it in-person. Face to face. On a stage.<\/p>\n
I freaked out.<\/p>\n
Hiding behind a computer screen was why I had become a writer. And yet the day after seeing the psychic, with a flush of blood to my cheeks, I remembered that 30 years earlier, at just 19 years old, I had wanted to become an actor and had three increasingly hopeless auditions culminating in one where I became catatonic in the middle of a dance studio as Lycra and leg-warmered theatre-school kids whirled and jet\u00e9ed with great enthusiasm all around me.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0A teenage suicide in the US might prove a tipping point for AI regulationOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n