Our week in Hell

Last Thursday night J (my 13 years old stepson) comes back from school and bit subdued. Nothing abnormal, he might be tired, but unusually he is quiet, not grumpy and/or resentful which is his usual MO. After a bit of fine tooled mummy’s touch, H, my partner, manage to get him to talk: the lad had his first GF dump him by the medium of her older sister delivering the news to him.
One other lad having overheard the whole thing looked at J and made a sarcastic comment, at which point J saw red and floored the guy with one punch to the face, jumped the guy and pummelled him a bit more on the ground!!! After being peeled away from his victim by 2 of the guy’s mates, J was facing 3 adversaries and sent them all packing!
J is now home, in tears, heartbroken and fearing that the school will hear of the fracas and punish him. We comfort him the best we can re: the break-up and tell him off for the fight, explaining him that he should never let his emotions get the best of him like that, while feeling secretly pleased as he had been victim of a bad bullying campaign a couple years ago and it is quite welcome for him to realise he can handle himself and needs not be a victim always.
Friday morning, we pack J to school, under instruction to apologise to his victim and not to get to sanguine if/when talking with the (ex) GF.

10 minutes later the phone rings and as she answers, I could see my partner turning white and her face decomposing. J’s dad is on the line, informing us that his wife K has committed suicide, leaving behind her J’s 8 month old sister. This is when we step into nightmare reality. K’s best friend lives a street away from ours, so we have to find her house, knock at the door and inform the poor girl that her best friend is no more.

This broke my heart.

We then go back home, regain our composure and drive to school to inform J that his stepmom, from whom he is rather close, has taken her own life. From then on, we go to J’s dad, learn that K hanged herself looking at the baby, leaving A (J’s dad) to find her as he came back from work. Together with A’s brother who has driven from London, we help A set up bedroom for him and baby in the spare room, has the bed room is a scene of crime and he does not want to use it anyway.

Then it is the business of passing the information around, finding a Japanese speaker (K’s Japanese) who can call Osaka to inform K’s family, calling the coroner, waiting for the result of the police inquiry, etc. K’s taking her life comes as a total surprise to everyone. Her best mate, her husband, J, no one saw it coming. We know she had a bad depressive event back home in Japan some time ago, and she had some worries with visas and was finding it hard to cope with some part of the NHS bureaucracy, but nothing too bad. The poor woman was obviously suffering from post natal depression and hid everything from everyone, until it was too much to take.

What a waste.

We can only find comfort in the fact that she did not take her daughter with her , and that the baby is so young she does not have to suffer from it at the moment.

Fast forward to Wednesday.

I went to fetch K’s family from Heathrow on Sunday and the body has been released. The funeral will be held Thursday morning and H and I have spend most of our time supporting A with his daughter, making sure he feeds her well, and that her needs are met. Baby R is so beautiful and full of smiles and giggles; her presence is the only thing keeping most of us sane.

We have volunteered to write and print the order of service on the family PC and bring 50 copies to the ceremony on Thursday morning. As everything is under control and I really feel like it, I go to band practice. After a good practice, I catch up with the lads, we start discussing our Scottish mini tour when my phone call. H voice is shaking with emotion and I can barely hear her. She’s outside our house with J and WE’VE BEEN BURGLED. The house has been ransacked and she’s heard some noise upstairs (this tuned out to be our very frightened cat) so she’s waiting for the police outside our front door. I jump in my car and drive home, arriving before the police (going all Dukes of Hazard, according to H and J who heard my tyres shrieking 2 streets away).

H was almost catatonic. The woman is resilient, incredibly resilient, but I really thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown. After a quick tour of the house to find what is missing (Xbox 360, PS3, laptop, camera, Opinel knife, most of those things the lad’s), we secured the place with the help of the coppers and drove to a friend for the evening. There, H stayed for 2 hours ‘sitting’ in a chair, her head between her knees, a fag in one hand (she’d stopped 5 weeks ago) and unable to answer me more than by grunts. She has no memories of that. At about 1 am, with H having regained some form of composure we finally drive back home, clear a space in our bed room and lay a makeshift bed for J in the side of ours (we haven't done that for years) and once he is asleep we start working at the family computer (which was too old and rubbish to go missing) to do that order of service. It is 5 am by the time we go to bed. I fall asleep as one but H cannot. As we drive to the funeral, I have slept 3 hours, H 45 minutes.

The ceremony was beautiful, while I always want to punch Christian priests at funeral, and am an atheist, I found the Buddhist monk very helpful. While we are there, H’s aunt, who I have called to the rescue, makes a great job at tidying the house.

Friday morning, we go to A’s home to say goodbyes and give some presents to K’s parents. Watching that woman in tears driven away to the airport with her daughter’s ashes in her case, having just met her granddaughter, it broke me.

Here we are, it is Monday, J is back at school, and me at work, H is taking a couple of days off to cool down. This Sunday we took baby R away to visit some friends so J and his dad could built a bonfire and have some time together. J’s dad was ‘properly’ smiling for the first time since all that happened. We have a new back door and will buy a new PS3. I now know how resilient we are as a family, but I know how close we came to our breaking points.

The timing of the break in made us realise that it is only material. Stuff is stuff and does not matter (I am saying that, but they did not touch the record collection). I really do not think we could have taken much more, as individuals and as a family.

What a bitch of a week.