1 April 1991. Around 8.20pm. Like any evening, we're watching The Cosby Show on M6 in our PJs. Something felt weird, like if we knew. The phone rings. Mum cries. It all happens fast, but almost in slow motion. Dad's finally done it. After several failed attempts, he took his own life. He jumped from the window of his fourth floor hospital bedroom.
The day before, dad had said to mum and my oldest sister, Nathalie that everything would be better, we'd start from scratch. Did he know then that he would do it? Did he know that our lives would change forever and, maybe, for the best? We will never know what he meant, but I'd like to discover what sort of man he was.
I was 11 when dad died. He had been ill for more than four years. Mum said he started to change when I was four. At that point, he'd lost the job he'd loved in a laboratory. From then, it just went slowly downhill until he was institutionalised when I was seven. I wasn't allowed to go inside the clinic neither the hospital he was in through the four years which made it hard. It made it hard to comprehend what was happening. I think I was angry at times. My mind has tried to erase that time as much as possible from my memory, but bits come back from time to time.
Most of the times I'd wait for him to come outside, he'd be in his joggers, looking like a veg. It wasn't my dad. It was a semblance of him. For years, I blamed the institutions, the tablets, the family who didn't come to visit and didn't do anything. But who could?
Dad did want to be interned. He had asked mum to be institutionalised. He probably had realised that she couldn't cope with him and us (the three girls) and so needed some help from somebody external. Not an outgoing person, he became more and more reclusive. He'd read a lot. He became closer to God.
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