The funeral director called. It was afternoon and I was in bed. He wanted to know how things were going, three weeks after the death of my twenty-four year old sister.
“I’m fine,” I said, partly because I was trying to avoid a pep talk, partly because I wanted to spare him the honest answer. “I go for a walk every day.”
“Very good,” said the funeral director. “You should think like that, your sister wouldn’t have wanted you lying in bed feeling sad either.”
My sister lay in bed depressed for years, until she couldn’t cope anymore and she took her own life.
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t help anyone.”
He asked if I had picked up any work yet. I didn’t have that. Five weeks later, an editor-in-chief asked if I could write an article for his magazine. Stumbling, I said that I wasn’t ready yet.
“It was also a short time ago,” he said. “A month now?”
“Two months.”
Although fortunately he left it at that, I wondered whether I would be able to write that piece after two more months, or after six months. It didn’t feel like things were getting any better. Rather, it was getting a little worse, as if the realization was drilling itself deeper into my consciousness every day.
Somewhere between the telephone conversations with the funeral director and the editor-in-chief, my parents and I spoke to a woman whose nineteen-year-old daughter had also ended her life. She had come to us because she had seen us laying flowers at a statue called Silent Struggle. We had first seen that enormous statue of a crouched person in a hoodie with a ‘1’ on it, traveling through the Netherlands, a few weeks earlier. We happened to cross it on the A8, on the way to the funeral home where my sister lay. That day, it turned out, the statue was transported from Gorinchem to Hoorn.
The week after we saw it on the highway, I came across it as an image in an article about the increasing number of suicides among young people in the Netherlands (an average of 25 per month in 2023). The image draws attention to this, the ‘1’ is there because suicide is the number one cause of death for people under thirty.
My mother wanted to add a photo of my sister to the statue, as many others had done, including the woman we spoke to. She had looked for the statue in different cities. Her daughter was gone for a year.
“How are you now?” my father asked.
She gave the honest answer. “Not so good,” she said. “Bad.”
The next time I saw the image was on the eight o’clock news. It stood on a new square, in a new city. There was a young woman walking around who had been suicidal but who, the voice-over said, was doing “much better now.” The images were interspersed with an expert from the 113 Foundation who said that suicidal people need “a listening ear”.
I thought about the countless ways my parents had tried to reach my sister, about the desperation and powerlessness on both sides. I thought of an article in which a professor of psychiatry explained how mental health care has become a revenue model, how mental health institutions try to earn as much money as possible with standard treatments.
I thought of PsyQ, the mental health institution where my sister was receiving treatment and which, according to the same professor, is aimed at “quickly serving large groups of people with protocolled processes.” The protocolized processes did not help, and finally hope was gone.
The dozens of photo frames came into view, I saw the nineteen-year-old girl whose name I knew. I saw my sister. So long, so unhappy in her room and now suddenly here, big on my screen.
You can talk about suicide on the national helpline 113 Suicide Prevention. Telephone 0800-0113 or www.113.nl.
Tessa Sparreboom is a Dutch specialist and former editor of ‘Propria Cures’.