A Year to the Day

It's a year to the day since my bright, brilliant, beautiful but troubled and difficult daughter, Madeleine Francesca took her own life by taking an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 21 and studying at St Andrews University in Scotland.

She suffered from Asperger's syndrome as she had done all her life and every single day was a struggle for her although outwardly, to her friends and tutors, she was always kind, helpful, happy and brilliant. The life and soul of any group she was involved with - from fellow students to the drama society; strangers she met in bookshops and on long train journeys.

She was my little girl.

And while we disagreed about many (probably most) things in life and when she was old enough to have a view, politically as well and we had some humdingers over the years, she latterly relished the 'discussions' we had, almost all of which descended into rows, so much so that we were banned from holding discussions at all when she was home from Uni. God but I miss that so much.

They say time is a great healer and I know this to be true because it has enabled me to 'get over' the deaths of several family members and school-friends over the years.

But as far as Maddy is concerned, Time hasn't made so much as a dent on the grief and pain that I feel.

I ache for her every day. Almost anything - the sight of an awkward gawky young girl wearing 'outrageous' clothes or big DM boots, trying to find her identity - can have me in bits. I feel an almost unstoppable urge to go to the girl and say 'You look fantastic, well done'. I don't of course, I'd probably be arrested if I did. I just quietly cry instead.

Last week I was in Waitrose and found myself looking at the vegetarian section (Maddy was vegetarian and sometime vegan) and I just lost it. Funny how tofu can make you cry not just when it appears on your plate.

Generally I'm not a weak person, I'm quite robust, optimistic, I try to see the funny side of every situation. I don't take myself too seriously. And these traits have thankfully not changed. My default setting is still a a smile and a positive outlook.

But sometimes, when Maddy comes into my mind, it gets quite hard to be positive about anything. And she's on my mind a lot of the time.

Today I went to the green burial place at Ketton in Rutland where Maddy is buried and had my first ever PBJB sandwich (Peanut Butter Jam and Banana) which were Maddy's favourite. It was truly disgusting.  The grave, which is in a beautiful, peaceful, rural setting has changed over the past year of course...

There were hundreds of people, from all over the world at her funeral and many came back to our little country-village hall where she - and we - had spent so many happy hours on stage or attending various groups during her childhood and where we remembered and celebrated her life with many many friends of hers and ours.

St Salvator's Hall St Andrews, taken the day after Maddy's memorial service, with the Northern Lights.

We also attended a wonderful, beautiful and moving memorial service for her in St Andrews in Saint Salvator's Chapel which is one of the most beautiful and atmospheric religious buildings I've ever been in, surrounded by tutors, her fellow students, Donald the University Chaplain who has been fantastic and the VP of the University, such was the respect and esteem in which she was held there.

In recent months the mound of earth that was raised when she was buried has sunk back to its original level. So it's now a flat and level part of the field with just a plaque to identify the place where she lies. So she has returned to nature, which is what she wanted to happen if her body couldn't be donated to scientific research (which was not possible in the circumstances); but to me it also feels like she's gone.

I would have given anything, on the day she died, to bring her back. To hold her. To make her warm, to keep her warm and have her home safe.  To tell her everything was going to be OK. To tell her that I love her. I had to identify the body at the Nine Wells hospital in Dundee where they couldn't save her. I wanted to swap her life for mine. I still do.

I ache for her. All the bloody time. Time cannot heal this one. In fact it's actually getting worse.

It's not anger. It's not feeling sorry for myself (although there is certainly some of that involved of course). It's just sadness and loss. Missing her so much. I know she had a terrible time, was in mental agony on a daily basis and, in the end she couldn't carry on with that. And I know she's at peace now. I know that it was only a matter of time before we would get the telephone call. We had years of her pain, her self harm, eating disorders, gender issues and mental illness.

But I miss her so much. And I feel her loss to the world very acutely. She had a flawed but brilliant mind, a photographic memory, a towering intellect - she turned down Oxford to go to St Andrews. She would have been great at whatever she did, had she been able to cope with herself. She would have made a contribution to the world that dullards like me can only dream about and watch others with admiration.

She helped so many people - was an ambassador for the BEAT eating disorder charity for whom she presented and addressed halls with hundreds of people in them, around the UK. She helped her shy fellow students to fit in at St Andrews and come out of their shells (I had several notes of grief and sympathy from parents of such students after her death) and yet she couldn't help herself.

She had so many 'looks' or 're-inventions' and she loved playing characters in am-drams or manga events, because, it seems she preferred to be anyone other than herself - and it breaks my heart to know that.

She left a note which explained lots of things and banned me from speaking at the funeral. Not that I'd have been able to get more than two words out before breaking down. Many people would have been upset by this - and many were on my behalf - but it made me smile. It was just like her. She had to have the last word where I was concerned. And sadly, she did

Anne found another set of instructions later among Maddy's effects, with instructions about who was not to be invited to the funeral and more details etc. I learnt of this with some trepidation, expecting the worst - Maddy could be quite cruel to me at times if she was in a dark mood.

She said, in her instruction note: 'Dad, you are so invited'.

We did most things together as  family when Maddy was growing up - annual family holidays usually to the med but sometimes elsewhere. And she and I did some stuff just the two of us - we went to Rome for a weekend where we saw John-Paul II (when he was deformed and clearly very ill towards the end of his life). Although Maddy was an atheist, she respected him and was glad to have seen him and experienced all the bloody elbowing nuns that got on the buses afterwards.

I also took her, every year for, what was it? Six years, to our local Waterstones in Market Harborough to buy the next Harry Potter book when it was released at Midnight - and she always dressed up, another of her characters!

She also went to Ecuador with the school when she was a teenager - an unfit, skinny-but-flabby, not-eating-properly teenager. Three months out from the trip she said, 'I'm going to get to the top of Cotopaxi'. And three months later after her fitness regime, she was one of only a handful of students to make it, and the only girl. She also helped to build a school for local kids in Ecuador on that trip.

Anyway Maddy, these are just becoming incoherent ramblings. When I say that time hasn't made a dent on my grief, the opposite is true. I wrote about your death when it happened and was relatively clear and erudite. Now this has gotten (one of your mid-Atlantic words that feels right somehow) much bigger, to the point where I'm finding it difficult to express myself clearly any more.

You know I love you and I always will. And you know by now whether you were wrong about God and all that. I hope you were. Because if you were you'll have some bloody big explaining to do when I get there. Which won't be long - and anyway, it's unlikely I'll be coming to the same place!

Sleep well my darling child. I read on a war grave in France, when I was a kid the following quotation: 'To live on in the hearts of those you love, is not to die.' I've never forgotten it nor ever written it down.

If it is true, Maddy, and I think it is, then you are in the rudest of health.

I love you.

Dad xxx

Madeleine Francesca Conway. 01.12.1993 - 09.11.2015



Previous blogs here:

My daughter died yesterday morning

We'd like you to identify the body

Patch poem

Some random stuff. I hadn't seen some of these tweets until today.