Amy's story

Amy's story is part of our 'Stories After Suicide' series, which share the experiences of participants in our Support After Suicide bereavement programs.

My mum died last year and I’ve been pretty messed up ever since. It was a couple of weeks after my 14th birthday. I’d been with my dad for the weekend, with my two brothers, Lachie and Sam. We got home on the Sunday afternoon and found her in her bedroom. It was horrible. I still have the picture of it in my head, sometimes I feel like I’m losing it; I just want the picture to go away. It’s hard to remember her without seeing how she was that day.

It’s so confusing. How could she have done this? People say things like that; how could she leave her children to find her, like she’s a terrible mother. I hate it when they say things like that, she wasn’t terrible, but sometimes I wonder how she could have left us. And how she could have left me.

Sometimes we were really close and could talk about girl stuff and other times we had big fights so I think maybe she wanted to get away from me. Dad says this isn’t true, that she’d been unhappy for a long time, but he would say that.

They divorced a couple of years ago and mum was sad. She’d say things sometimes like ‘my life is over’, ‘no-one else will want me’. But we wanted her, we loved her. And we need her. It feels so bad sometimes, I miss her so much. Sometimes I can’t see how I’m going to live without her.

We were living with mum and when she died we had to go and live with our dad and his new wife, Sandy. That was hard. We had to move away from the house where we lived with her. Sandy tries too hard. She’s trying to make things OK, but she gets pissed off when we talk about mum, so we don’t. I’ve got a photo of mum by my bed and I wear one of her rings.

I see mum’s sister, Auntie Jill. She’s so upset about mum, but I can talk to her about a lot of things.

My friends don’t get it, but I still like hanging out with them. I can forget about everything for a while. My school work is bad. I can’t concentrate and I feel angry and worried a lot about everything. Sometimes I think about hurting myself as well. This is scary; I can’t tell dad. But the school counsellor is good. I can go and see him whenever I like and he helps me feel OK. I’d like to know some other people my age that this has happened to and the counsellor’s going to organise this for me which will be good.