As I look out from my bedroom window, I feel the warm air of a sunny spring Sunday afternoon.
I can hear the hustle and bustle of the bumblebees feasting on the rosemary flowers from its abundant bush in my back garden.
As I stare at the magical rape seed exuberant yellow carpet depicting the perfect image of beauty this season displays, I hear myself asking: How come I am in disharmony with the beauty that surrounds me?
I turn inward and ‘see’ a dark, chaotic, sad and lonely inner world. The brightness of the external accentuates my pain even more. I feel I am reaching the depth of my despair…
I shut the curtains and I drop to my knees…
“God or whatever force is in ‘charge’ here, I’m done! I can’t go on like this any longer! Please just pull the plug because I can’t do this anymore! I have nothing left to give, PLEASE, PLEASE just come and get me out of here! It is too damn hard! WTF is this all about anyhow?? Surely life is not meant to be this way! How come my life is showing up like this? Why am I so lonely? Why have I been forsaken? What have I done to have to go through this? Why do I feel like DYING??? Why do I hurt so bad? What am I doing here anyway? I have had enough! I don’t want to live like this. If I take this bunch of pills, can all this be done quickly? God if you can hear me PLEASE HELP ME!”
At that precise moment, I hear my five-year-old son calling: ‘Mummy, mummy, are you there?’
I immediately sat up from where I had been squirming on the floor like a worm struggling aimlessly to find any sense or meaning to carry on when the sharpest and clearest question made me jump and truly listen. ‘Are you just going to give up or are you going to dig deep so you can find all the power and all the treasures right inside of you to turn all of this around? In that very instant, I chose to do whatever it takes to get myself back to being a well-functioning human being and take good care of my son. I decide to take responsibility for my health and well-being. I knew the answer wasn’t in ‘giving up’ The answer cannot be death. The answer was not in killing my body. I had to face my pain and my suffering. Do whatever it takes to come to terms with life events and experiences so that I could heal.
The question I clearly heard was this:
Who is going to take care of your son if you are gone? You have a five-year-old, innocent child who depends on you and you are thinking of quitting?
Whoa! That was one of the biggest slaps I had experienced that jolted me up from a hypnotic ‘poor me’ victimhood state of living my life constantly feeling sorry for being lonely in a strange and cold country over two thousand miles from my family, my friends, the sunshine and all that had been familiar to me. To suddenly see me as a lone parent broken-hearted woman with absolutely no one to help me. Yes, I am struggling with depression. Yes, I am alone doing my best to be everything for my son since it’s just the two of us all the time.
No grandparents. No aunties or uncles nearby. No cousins. They are all in Brasil! And I am stuck here. Depressed and alone. Such a strange culture. People seem so afraid to connect. Ten years since I left Brazil and still have not made any meaningful connection with anyone. I have this feeling that people generally stay away from me because I am too deep and can’t just talk about the weather. I question things and I tend to share my emotions but had to learn not to. We seem to have been conditioned to suppress them instead. At least in the ‘British’ culture that I found myself living my life in for the past ten years.
I grew up with a very large extended family and felt supported by everyone involved. I didn’t know it at the time but today I can see that my family was my community. My tribe. And I felt safe and secured being around them. I felt loved and I felt I belonged.
I had such a sweet and happy childhood and now, I am alone. And my son is alone! It was just me, my son and his father whom I separated from in very distressing and traumatic circumstances.
I arrived in Newport, South Wales, Great Britain on 4th October 1989 newlywed to my Welsh Prince. I left all my family and childhood friends in Brasil and today I have NOBODY who actually cares. My family back in Brasil have absolutely no clue what I have been going through. How could they? They know what has happened but they have no idea of how badly I am suffering. It is pretty much just me, my son, my work and our cat Max. Wait a minute… Was I thinking of abandoning my pet too??
As a mother alone it is my duty to make sure I am well enough to be present for my child and take care of all his needs during his important developmental stages in his formative years. However, in order for me to be able to be the best caregiver, role model and provider for my child, it is ESSENTIAL that I take care of all my needs first and foremost!
That’s it! I make a decision, there and then, to heal myself. I beg that very same God or God force just seconds ago to ‘extinguish my light’ to please help me in showing the best way to achieve that. I need to heal my body. To heal my emotions. To heal my SOUL.
I commit to doing whatever it took to deal with my personal challenges, my traumas, and my emotional pain to heal my physical vessel. My sacred body! I didn’t know then what I know now of course but the decision was the very first step towards my healing journey.
So now I need a path to get there. A map of sorts. I trust the Universe will show me the signposts as She has always done. I have always followed the signs. Following the signs is what got me to where I am today as I feel myself neck-deep in sorrow, frustration, sadness and grief.
Oh, the g r i e f…
Grief can literally engulf one’s soul. Grief is cruel, intense, dense and dark! Really, really dark… I will touch on grief again but first, I need to take you back in time once more to another Sunday. A dreary, damp and sinister winter’s night:
I’m rocking back and forth in the corner of my bedroom’s floor near the wardrobe and the wall that leads to the alleyway into the back garden. I can hardly grasp what has just happened. It’s like my spirit has left my body and my body is on auto-pilot just rocking to avoid the feeling of paralysis fearing I would get stuck there. Like, in a comma. I fight against hearing the sounds that are arising from the outside now by putting my hands over my ears but the deafening sound of a dead body being carried by the two officers who had just a few moments ago, knocked on my front door, invaded and intensified those few seconds that took for the officers to take the body bag through the short corridor and into their van. (this paragraph needs a good edit. Not in the space right now)
I am consumed with those seconds as they felt as if the moment lingered for an eternity. All the while, I can’t feel my body. I can only hear the dreadful muffled sound. I jump out of my skin when the police lady that stayed in the lounge at the flat, knocks on my bedroom door announcing I would have to accompany them to the hospital’s morgue. It takes me a while to register what she was asking me. I don’t respond. Hoping she would leave me alone. She knocks again and this time opens the door gently asking permission to come in.
She offers me a cup of tea and suggests I put on some clothes as I need to go to the hospital to identify the body. I hear her words but I make no attempt to acknowledge what she has just said. My soul still seems to be floating outside of me as my body seems lifeless. The lady officer helps me off the floor and sits me at the edge of the bed I had shared with Roger for the past three months. I don’t have it in me to even thank her. In my mind, I am somewhere else. I refuse to believe what they are telling me. It must be a dream. I must be dreaming. Yes, this has to be a nightmare. I will soon wake up and see Roger sleeping next to me. I find comfort in hiding behind my wishful thoughts and keep telling myself that it’s just a bad dream – it’s just a bad dream – it’s just a bad dream…
Next thing I know, I am walking a long wide corridor of what seemed to be a hospital leading to its morgue. I notice the sign as it jumped out in an attempt to warn me of what was about to happen. We go past the chapel and I take a brief moment to catch my breath and gather any residue of strength I might be able to tap into as I am guided towards the worst experience of my entire life!
“Mrs Keen – one of the male officers says, as he gives me a briefing of what I am supposed to do – we are going to show you the face of the person laying under that white sheet. All you need to do is tell us if you know who that person was. Let me know when you are ready. We are all here for you Mrs Keen.”
I manage to nod my head signalling I am as ready as I could ever be. He goes into the room which has a big glass panel and motions towards the body and lifts the sheet. One quick glance and I feel the life leaving my body again and I faint. When I come to, I am at the chapel and I am asked if I recognised the person’s face. “Yes – I tell the officer – yes, that is Roger!”
Nine years later, back in my bedroom overlooking the rape seed field, the farms and the lambs, I am holding my son very dear and tight telling him how much I love him and how much he means to me. I make a promise to myself that I would take good care of my own health and well-being and would NEVER EVER wish my life away as I had just done a few moments earlier that day!
Roger was only 38 years old when he hung himself in our back garden! I was 28 and had no idea my husband was suffering so much that he chose to end his life so tragically and prematurely. You see, Roger did a very good job hiding his pain with the charming, joyful, charismatic persona he had. He was the most flamboyant and jovial man I had ever met. An excellent dancer and the kind of person who would bring cheerfulness to any party. I had no idea Roger was suffering from depression. How could I? We had only been married for 14 months! I don’t think even Roger knew what was going on. He knew how to use his drink only too well to keep his denial going. Numbing the pain, as I too misused for a lot of years!
But here is the thing, I believe what ‘killed’ Roger was the lack of self-awareness and the lack of emotional literacy. If Roger knew who and what he truly was, he would have been able to look at his experiences and use them as lessons to propel him forward in his self-actualisation journey. So the reason I am writing this book is to share with you what I have discovered about suicide and what self-awareness has to do with eliminating this dreadful phenomenon from our lives. I may sound way over the top for some but I truly believe once one learns about who and what we truly are then there is no way a being would be driven to harm themselves let alone kill their sacred bodies!
So let me journey back over the past 33 years to give you context for the message, a powerful message and thought-provoking information with ideas I believe you will find may resonate with you deeper than you think, throughout reading the pages of my forthcoming book.
Please subscribe to keep updated on other snippets of my forthcoming book Sacred Body, Divine Soul: From the brink of suicide to acknowledging my sovereignty.
Eliana Keen ©️2022
Insightful towards a deeper message I'm sure.
I fully believe in the power of sharing our story, our truth, our lived experience in the hope of helping others. I'm so very sorry for the loss of your husband and father of your child. Grief is a process but mixed with this level of complexity it's hardly surprising it affected your own mood. My heart is reaching out to you in this intro though I feel the end of this book will demonstrate a more positive dimension than it's beginning. Nevertheless I'm sorry that you had to go through this to learn these lessons 🫶🏼
A very powerful moving account well articulated, I do indentify with having to draw on resources one doesnt even know are there until you reach that place, and how if one believes in a spiritual dimension to life, then as you say, just "killing the body", is no solution to the existential question . You show amazing strength and resilience on so many counts!