“There’s never a day goes by that the memory of it doesn’t take my breath away. That scene was like a horror film. I wish there was an operation which could take your memory out and obliterate it from my mind. It’s something I will find hard to forgive Gary for, forever. We were the ones who had to pick up the pieces and what he’d done was grotesque. Everyone asks me why he did it, but I have no answers. And that’s why I will never have any closure. If someone had told me during that day what was going to happen that night I’d have been so shocked I’d have said Gary needed to be in some section unit. But he was his normal self. There was no hint of what would happen.
A letter which Louise never saw up until recently when Gary wrote it at 17, he may of been suffering with out ever speaking out.
Dear Louise,
I don’t really know what to say. I have been thinking about finishing at Leeds, I’ve also been thinking of other things which I won’t say. I’m so depressed. I’m just going to go to sleep now and hope I never wake up. I love you so much, I will always love you.
I don’t know what else to say except you might see me sooner than you think, or otherwise. You never leave my mind, nothing else seems to matter anymore, I love you more than you can imagine.
Gary xxx
“Seeing that was a lightbulb moment for me, in many ways. It answers an awful lot about why he did what he did. It’s not something a normal 17-year-old would write, is it? Or not a well one. It seems to say it all really, when you consider how he ended his life. If he had a mental illness then he probably had it from an early age. Maybe Gary’s problems were a time-bomb waiting to explode. Maybe the mental illness or depression, was always there from an early age and it’s been ruminating all his life. If so, us having Gary until he was 42, was maybe a bonus.
“The letter has made me realise that dark thoughts were there from a young age. Very dark thoughts which he wasn’t able to talk about. Maybe something had happened early on which he had kept to himself. Yes, there was so much love out there for him and that’s why the impact it has left is almost indescribable. It rips apart a large part of you which you can never replace because what happened was unnatural. Sometimes when I see homeless guys on the street I think ‘what is it that keeps them going?’ They have nothing. Gary had everything. That’s when I realise he must have been ill because human nature is all about survival. The irony is that Gary didn’t have a lot of time for people who got depressed when they had so much going for them.”