We will never know
Martin Cathcart Frödén
[Trigger warning: this essay discusses the suicide of a family member. If you feel your mental health could be affected by the content, we advise you read no further]
This might be the hardest text I have ever written. And I am not sure I should be working on this at all, but if anything this is the best possible circle to be sharing in, and if I believe in writing as a method for dealing with life, as I often say I do, then maybe I should push out into this. I will resist the urge to present something too polished or structured. And as my thoughts go back over the more recent events and over the many years preceding these, they are circular in nature.
A hundred years ago my brother should probably have been admitted to a Bedlam, to a ‘total’ institution. Fifty years ago too, with other means of restraints I suppose. Maybe pills, maybe electrical power. A little over a year ago he, in an especially manic episode, drove from Stockholm to Bologna, in a series of breaking or rented cars, at the height of the Covid pandemic, at higher and higher speeds. In Bologna, after episodes we are still struggling to understand, he was forcibly detained, for his safety and that of others after a series of destructive descents. In one sense he never returned home. He very briefly returned to Stockholm, but only to end his life.
I realise this is probably sharing too much, and I am not usually very open about my private life. I am married, I have three children, I work, I write etc, but I am not likely to turn myself inside out on socials or indeed in my own writing. I made a pretty solemn promise to myself in the aftermath of my brother’s death that I would get better at sharing the ups and downs of life. That mental health, and in his and my case, men’s mental health, should not remain something unspoken, or something that can be fixed with a pint and some shouting at some form of organised sport.
My own immediate response was of course to speak to my other siblings, and parents, but also to write letters to a handful of friends. This slow response to a very quick set of events sort of surprised me, and also not. I wrote these letters where I had to, for others and for myself, explain the situation, sum up my brother in a few pages, his young self, and his more recent 32-year-old self. The self that in the shape we had known him had just left us.
My brother was a large character both in body and in mind. He loved the sea, and he loved people. And when he didn’t love people, he still loved the sea. And cars. And hatching plans that would sometimes work out and sometimes really not. From being just a kid, to a sort of wild teenager, and maturing into an adult, where the rest of us maybe thought he would find his niche, his feet, or as my youngest daughter calls it, his ‘pod’, he was increasingly uncomfortable in almost all settings, but would every now and then surprise us with being the centre of attention and enjoying it. He had a good job, had a girlfriend, had all the middle-class things and more. Friends and trips, hopes and dreams.
This is hard. And if you feel like not reading on, that’s fine. I swithered between making my response to this a more academic, or at least an oblique/arty one, or something more raw, and this manner won out. Not because it’s the best, not because this will turn into a piece I am especially proud of, but because it is the sort of voice I am not used to broadcasting. Because this is the hardest, and for me scariest, way to respond. Maybe the prompt of ‘Writing the Asylum’ was just what I needed, not necessarily what I wanted. And here I am. If nothing else, maybe this project will for some people normalise talking about the things in life that are tricky, and most often hidden, and perhaps more so in Insta/Covid/etc times.
Sorry for oversharing, but this might be the place for it. The facts, as they were: this past summer my younger brother took his own life after a long battle with mental health issues. This was of course very hard for the whole family, and unexpected. He had by then spent a long time in an Italian institution, much like a modern day Gartnavel, an asylum in many ways, though much better than in 19th century days. There’s a lot of grief here.
A few days later: This is still a text I don’t want to write. A text I don’t want to think about sketch out edit re-think go over re-imagine pore over ask friends about or make better. There’s usually some trepidation when it comes to writing. This wavering is often overcome by adding caffeine, the distance walked equalling some excitement, but not today. The creative usually comes up against some sort of deadline, either an external one or an internal one, and so also here. I’ve made a promise, and I will write some words, but only because I feel it’s better than keeping the piece, which is less a piece and more a ramble, inside. Not because I am keen to fill the page, which is the opposite of how things usually are, but because it’s hard. And maybe writing should also be hard.
In writing letters to loved ones, part of what I re-remembered was about being in the present moment. All the small things I take for granted and that I am able to extract so much joy out of. Like him I am amazed by the sea, a cup of coffee, a cycle somewhere new, a pootle in a kayak, a new song, an ice cream at just the right moment. I realise I am sounding like a child here, but we are all the person we were when we left nursery, it’s just that we weigh more and are allowed to borrow more money now. Mental health issues can of course not be ‘fixed’ by a scoop of vanilla, but for me it is vital that when I feel myself sliding into a less than self-generous mood, that I can focus on small, achievable things. Easy is not bad, easy is good. This as an academic, as a person, is hard. As a parent, looking at how amazing small things, new socks, a snorkel, a rhyme made up on the fly, friends saying silly things for hours on end, is easier. If you have kids around you, cherish them. If you are able to ‘borrow’ some from a friend or a sibling, do it, spoil them. Also this will forever make you a saint in the parent’s book, and maybe they too can go and do a simple thing. I digress. This whole piece is a digression. That’s fine. That’s part of what I am exploring.
In a sense I am also trying to go against my natural impulses in working conceptually. I am really not trying to sound smart, but in my writing there is a great deal of notes on napkins, in notebooks, of putting these sentences into the computer, of rearranging these like a broken Tetris, until the mess appears to be a whole image. Like for everyone in various ways I presume. I am trying to edit less here, to maybe work straight from the cuff, to do the opposite of what I am used to. Some of my working methods I am really happy about, and some I suppose I just do because that’s how I’ve made things work in the past.
The tangential is obvious by now. This is not an archival piece about Gartnavel. Not a celebration of history. This piece is however something I would never have written, let alone shared, had it not been for the generous invitation to take part, and the idea that the asylum still holds power today, regardless of name changes. That for almost a year last year my younger brother was in an Italian asylum. Perhaps with a different name, and with a different approach from those in the past, but in essence not allowed to leave unsupervised, and heavily medicated, all his practical and some of his emotional needs taken care of by the institution.
Thanks for reading, thanks for letting me take up space, telling you about my brother on who life weighed too heavily. A man who was incredibly happy when he was happy, the most inspired and motivated person you can imagine, and when not happy, incredibly unhappy, withdrawn, sleepy, prone to physical and hurtful fighting with those who cared for him the most, and with those who he loved the most, but who he also found impossible. There’s a fine line between spontaneity and recklessness, between feeling blue and falling into a crevasse, and he would always cross these lines, while the rest of us in the family could do little but watch. Or hear about the escapades retroactively.
I still can’t believe that the little boy who would race around the house in his pedal car is no longer here. That things went this wrong, and that we will never be able to pinpoint when they did or what we could have done differently. That the slow landslide of mental illness that he experienced finally took him.
This hurts to write, and obviously the idea that my brother Jakob is either never going to see this Earth again or that he is peeking over my shoulder as I write this, is too hard to think about, so most of the time I don’t. Right now I am.
Martin Cathcart Frödén’s first novel Devil Take the Hindmost was published in 2016, winning the Dundee International Book Prize, and his first poetry collection Light and Other Observations was published by the National Trust for Scotland while Poet in Residence in 2018. His most recent book A Circular Argument was published in 2021 and is a hybrid form novel/creative nonfiction. His short fiction has won awards including BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. He is represented by Underline Literary Agency, Scotland.
Martin holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (Creative Writing), with support from the Glasgow School of Art (Architecture) and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (Criminology), and he is currently a senior lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of Studies at Malmö University, Sweden, where he lives with his wife and three kiddos.
Books:
A Circular Argument:
https://www.akademibokhandeln.se/bok/a-circular-argument/9781800713857/
Light and Other Observations:
https://www.bokus.com/bok/9780244731809/light-and-other-observations/
Devil Take the Hindmost
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Hindmost-Martin-Cathcart-Froden/
We will never know
Martin Cathcart Frödén
[Trigger warning: this essay discusses the suicide of a family member. If you feel your mental health could be affected by the content, we advise you read no further]
This might be the hardest text I have ever written. And I am not sure I should be working on this at all, but if anything this is the best possible circle to be sharing in, and if I believe in writing as a method for dealing with life, as I often say I do, then maybe I should push out into this. I will resist the urge to present something too polished or structured. And as my thoughts go back over the more recent events and over the many years preceding these, they are circular in nature.
A hundred years ago my brother should probably have been admitted to a Bedlam, to a ‘total’ institution. Fifty years ago too, with other means of restraints I suppose. Maybe pills, maybe electrical power. A little over a year ago he, in an especially manic episode, drove from Stockholm to Bologna, in a series of breaking or rented cars, at the height of the Covid pandemic, at higher and higher speeds. In Bologna, after episodes we are still struggling to understand, he was forcibly detained, for his safety and that of others after a series of destructive descents. In one sense he never returned home. He very briefly returned to Stockholm, but only to end his life.
I realise this is probably sharing too much, and I am not usually very open about my private life. I am married, I have three children, I work, I write etc, but I am not likely to turn myself inside out on socials or indeed in my own writing. I made a pretty solemn promise to myself in the aftermath of my brother’s death that I would get better at sharing the ups and downs of life. That mental health, and in his and my case, men’s mental health, should not remain something unspoken, or something that can be fixed with a pint and some shouting at some form of organised sport.
My own immediate response was of course to speak to my other siblings, and parents, but also to write letters to a handful of friends. This slow response to a very quick set of events sort of surprised me, and also not. I wrote these letters where I had to, for others and for myself, explain the situation, sum up my brother in a few pages, his young self, and his more recent 32-year-old self. The self that in the shape we had known him had just left us.
My brother was a large character both in body and in mind. He loved the sea, and he loved people. And when he didn’t love people, he still loved the sea. And cars. And hatching plans that would sometimes work out and sometimes really not. From being just a kid, to a sort of wild teenager, and maturing into an adult, where the rest of us maybe thought he would find his niche, his feet, or as my youngest daughter calls it, his ‘pod’, he was increasingly uncomfortable in almost all settings, but would every now and then surprise us with being the centre of attention and enjoying it. He had a good job, had a girlfriend, had all the middle-class things and more. Friends and trips, hopes and dreams.
This is hard. And if you feel like not reading on, that’s fine. I swithered between making my response to this a more academic, or at least an oblique/arty one, or something more raw, and this manner won out. Not because it’s the best, not because this will turn into a piece I am especially proud of, but because it is the sort of voice I am not used to broadcasting. Because this is the hardest, and for me scariest, way to respond. Maybe the prompt of ‘Writing the Asylum’ was just what I needed, not necessarily what I wanted. And here I am. If nothing else, maybe this project will for some people normalise talking about the things in life that are tricky, and most often hidden, and perhaps more so in Insta/Covid/etc times.
Sorry for oversharing, but this might be the place for it. The facts, as they were: this past summer my younger brother took his own life after a long battle with mental health issues. This was of course very hard for the whole family, and unexpected. He had by then spent a long time in an Italian institution, much like a modern day Gartnavel, an asylum in many ways, though much better than in 19th century days. There’s a lot of grief here.
A few days later: This is still a text I don’t want to write. A text I don’t want to think about sketch out edit re-think go over re-imagine pore over ask friends about or make better. There’s usually some trepidation when it comes to writing. This wavering is often overcome by adding caffeine, the distance walked equalling some excitement, but not today. The creative usually comes up against some sort of deadline, either an external one or an internal one, and so also here. I’ve made a promise, and I will write some words, but only because I feel it’s better than keeping the piece, which is less a piece and more a ramble, inside. Not because I am keen to fill the page, which is the opposite of how things usually are, but because it’s hard. And maybe writing should also be hard.
In writing letters to loved ones, part of what I re-remembered was about being in the present moment. All the small things I take for granted and that I am able to extract so much joy out of. Like him I am amazed by the sea, a cup of coffee, a cycle somewhere new, a pootle in a kayak, a new song, an ice cream at just the right moment. I realise I am sounding like a child here, but we are all the person we were when we left nursery, it’s just that we weigh more and are allowed to borrow more money now. Mental health issues can of course not be ‘fixed’ by a scoop of vanilla, but for me it is vital that when I feel myself sliding into a less than self-generous mood, that I can focus on small, achievable things. Easy is not bad, easy is good. This as an academic, as a person, is hard. As a parent, looking at how amazing small things, new socks, a snorkel, a rhyme made up on the fly, friends saying silly things for hours on end, is easier. If you have kids around you, cherish them. If you are able to ‘borrow’ some from a friend or a sibling, do it, spoil them. Also this will forever make you a saint in the parent’s book, and maybe they too can go and do a simple thing. I digress. This whole piece is a digression. That’s fine. That’s part of what I am exploring.
In a sense I am also trying to go against my natural impulses in working conceptually. I am really not trying to sound smart, but in my writing there is a great deal of notes on napkins, in notebooks, of putting these sentences into the computer, of rearranging these like a broken Tetris, until the mess appears to be a whole image. Like for everyone in various ways I presume. I am trying to edit less here, to maybe work straight from the cuff, to do the opposite of what I am used to. Some of my working methods I am really happy about, and some I suppose I just do because that’s how I’ve made things work in the past.
The tangential is obvious by now. This is not an archival piece about Gartnavel. Not a celebration of history. This piece is however something I would never have written, let alone shared, had it not been for the generous invitation to take part, and the idea that the asylum still holds power today, regardless of name changes. That for almost a year last year my younger brother was in an Italian asylum. Perhaps with a different name, and with a different approach from those in the past, but in essence not allowed to leave unsupervised, and heavily medicated, all his practical and some of his emotional needs taken care of by the institution.
Thanks for reading, thanks for letting me take up space, telling you about my brother on who life weighed too heavily. A man who was incredibly happy when he was happy, the most inspired and motivated person you can imagine, and when not happy, incredibly unhappy, withdrawn, sleepy, prone to physical and hurtful fighting with those who cared for him the most, and with those who he loved the most, but who he also found impossible. There’s a fine line between spontaneity and recklessness, between feeling blue and falling into a crevasse, and he would always cross these lines, while the rest of us in the family could do little but watch. Or hear about the escapades retroactively.
I still can’t believe that the little boy who would race around the house in his pedal car is no longer here. That things went this wrong, and that we will never be able to pinpoint when they did or what we could have done differently. That the slow landslide of mental illness that he experienced finally took him.
This hurts to write, and obviously the idea that my brother Jakob is either never going to see this Earth again or that he is peeking over my shoulder as I write this, is too hard to think about, so most of the time I don’t. Right now I am.
Martin Cathcart Frödén’s first novel Devil Take the Hindmost was published in 2016, winning the Dundee International Book Prize, and his first poetry collection Light and Other Observations was published by the National Trust for Scotland while Poet in Residence in 2018. His most recent book A Circular Argument was published in 2021 and is a hybrid form novel/creative nonfiction. His short fiction has won awards including BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines. He is represented by Underline Literary Agency, Scotland.
Martin holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow (Creative Writing), with support from the Glasgow School of Art (Architecture) and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (Criminology), and he is currently a senior lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of Studies at Malmö University, Sweden, where he lives with his wife and three kiddos.
Books:
A Circular Argument:
https://www.akademibokhandeln.se/bok/a-circular-argument/9781800713857/
Light and Other Observations:
https://www.bokus.com/bok/9780244731809/light-and-other-observations/
Devil Take the Hindmost
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Hindmost-Martin-Cathcart-Froden/