Trigger Warning – The article below contains sensitive themes related to suicide and grief. Please only read if you feel able. If you need to talk to someone immediately, call the Samaritans on 116 123
For as long as JRN has existed, I have always written a year-opening address to our audience. Initially, that post was read by a handful of devoted followers. Now, I’m fortunate to speak to tens of thousands and usually use this space to talk about what is to come in the year ahead. In 2024 though, I’m going to take a slightly different approach.
On the 4th December 2023, my Mother took her own life. That wasn’t what you were expecting, right?
It’s self-indulgent to use up space on the JRN content calendar to opine on such things, but grief on this scale supersedes all else. My Mother was only a recreational rower – and a fierce friend of ‘The End of the Island’ podcast – so has no lasting legacy on the main stage of the theatre of rowing. She quietly went about her business at Star Club, using precious Tuesday evenings and Sunday mornings to cruise up and down the Ouse with people who rapidly became her closest friends. I’m not about to produce an obituary on her many achievements in the sport. The roller-coaster of emotion that such an event takes you on – wave upon wave of suffocating grief, confusion, anger, strange highs as adrenaline and purpose reasserts itself – means I’ve already covered these topics in extreme depth with my nearest and dearest. What I want to talk about is pain and suffering – but not my own.
When someone takes their own life, it’s hard even for those who have struggled with mental health to understand how someone felt that alone. Life is so full of possibility, of opportunity, of breathtaking experience and people and pleasure, that to remove yourself from the lottery of living feels almost distinct from humanity itself. As a bystander to her suffering, it’s hard to rationalise how a person I loved and looked up to could make such a choice. She never admitted to suffering, never showed an inch of vulnerability, never once acknowledged that strength comes in the plural and not in solitary pursuit.
Mental health is the buzzword of this generation. Every week, we seem to stumble upon a new internal struggle induced by simply being alive. To combat the brain takes true bravery. I can only begin to imagine the struggle she went through in her final few weeks as the path narrowed and the night darkened. My fondest memories of my Mother stem from long summers in our back garden, days spent on some distant riverbank, countless journeys to and from whatever childish pursuit I had chosen whilst a medley of seventies rock and eighties fever rung through the car. To imagine her on the road to self-destruction after so much light is immensely difficult but to imagine her doing that alone, feeling unable to reach out to even her own children, is impossible to comprehend.
And that is where my overarching message comes in. Suffering alone helps no-one, least of all you. It breaks families and burns lives. Speaking from experience, I can promise you that whatever burden you may think you are to your family or friends, the burden of your absence is far greater and stands in perpetuity.
Rowing is a sport that has focused on the physiological over the psychological for some time. The needle is moving as society shifts its outlook but more needs to be done to understand and cater for the immense mental strain a sport of this nature takes on its incumbents. Rowing was an outlet for my Mother, one of the few she had left at the very end, but for so many, it can become a prison of disorder and disarray. The ever-increasing expectation of performance weighs heavy on the mind.
Don’t suffer in silence. Even if rowing is your peace, don’t let off-water struggles overwhelm you. Your community want to hear from you. People, I believe, are innately good – they want to help and they want to be counted when the going gets tough. Reach out and share the load. As the age-old adage goes, a problem shared is a problem halved. Rowers forge bonds in the crucible of suffering and to this day, most of my closest friends are people I spent time with in boats. These are powerful friendships – use them and take heart from the fact that they’re there. Despite her many friends and family – as evidenced by the sheer number of people who attended her funeral and the money raised following her death – my Mother never felt empowered to ask for help. And now she’s not here. That’s hard to accept.
On a cheerier note, I look forward to seeing many of you on a riverbank in the months to come. As a community, we have so much to look forward to and I am excited at the prospect of an Olympic and Paralympic games to crown the very best of our sport. It’s a sad thing that there will be one less person drinking champagne under the blue and white canopy at Henley Royal Regatta this year but wherever my Mother is, I’m sure she’ll be raising a glass to a sport that gave both her and I so much through the years.
Go fast and stay safe.
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