My best friend spoke at my 21st birthday party and three weeks later, I spoke at her funeral.
Her suicide was a shock that splintered my life, the devastation rippling through hundreds of lives in an intricate, tragic cobweb, moving like smoke up a highway. We were at university, living on campus in college, a year and a half into what was meant to be the time of our lives.
She had struggled with depression for some time, although the stigma she felt around her illness was such that most people didn’t know. She felt huge, compounding shame around her perceived ‘weakness’ – she was a perfectionist, and battled daily to keep things under control. Most people didn’t know how hard she worked to be the bright spark she was known as.
