You are here: Home > Letter to Dr Harwood - 28th January 1997   Go Back

Letter to Dr Harwood - 28th January 1997

Dr Daniel Harwood
Research Senior Registrar
University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry Warneford Hospital
OXFORD 0X3 7JX

Dear Dr Harwood

STUDY: UNEXPECTED DEATHS OF OLDER PEOPLE
 
By coincidence or design, perhaps, I received your request to participate in your study into unexpected deaths in older people on the anniversary of my father's suicide: but please do not think that I have been in great distress since, on the contrary, I would be most interested to meet you. At the outset may I point out that during its passage through the Coroner's Office my address got somewhat mangled so please correct your records by reference to the address at the top of this letter.

I have sent a copy of your letter and enclosures to my sister, Ann Elflein, who is married to a German and resident in Germany and we have discussed the purport of the letter together on the telephone. She also wishes to meet you but we felt that the brief reply slip was inadequate as we wished to communicate more fully with you at the outset so that, perhaps, you could be pre-prepared with some information before meeting: in fact we-both agree that we could write a book about our father but I will not embark on that just at present!

My sister is coming to England on 17 February 1997 and returns to Germany on Wednesday 26 February 1997.  I travel from Plymouth to Maidenhead on Sunday 23 February 1997 and return to Plymouth on Wednesday 26 February 1997 (having only 3 days leave left for this financial year). It is still acceptable for us to pay Maidenhead and District Housing Association for the use of the guest room at Norris House when we wish to visit our, and our parents' friends, in Maidenhead. My sister and I feel it would be most appropriate for us all to meet up with us at our father's most recent home and in the town where he had bee resident for most of his adult life. I am afraid we can only suggest the afternoon of Monday 24 February 1997 - perhaps at 2:00pm - for this meeting. On Tuesday we must be up in Belmont Lodge in Chigwell to be with our maternal Auntie Gert on her 89th birthday and, as you will see from the above schedule of dates, we are not at Maidenhead together on any other day. If this date is absolutely hopeless for you then I just mention that we will both be up in the Home Counties direction around 10 May 1997 for a school reunion.

I will briefly inform you that both my sister and I are Registered Nurses and Midwives (but without any specific Psychiatric training) although my sister has not practiced since she married Walter in 1963 and I have not practiced since 1986. I left the Special Care Baby Unit in Plymouth because I felt the technology was overreaching me and I now work in the Neurosurgical Department as a Medical Secretary. Of course, although we might perhaps have received some understanding from our chosen profession - about life, death distress and the mourning process - it is inevitable that children will experience sooner or later the death of their parents (hopefully not predeceasing them) and then and only then can this experience be met on a personal basis whatever ones preconceptions.

My sister has three children: Martin aged 33, Stefanie aged 30 and Johannes aged 20. The whole family have a close association with the Lutheran Church. Since her family have grown up Ann has helped run a Senior Citizens Group: I fancy she is more understanding of the psyche of the older generation and perhaps is just a kinder person than me and likes to do the right thing by people.

I, on the other hand, have remained single; Ron was about for 15 years but we parted without acrimony and I have no children and guard my personal solitude carefully. I used to attend the Nurses' Christian Union Meetings to heckle. To avoid sitting on the fence I call myself an atheist but I’m not iterating this label into the teeth of people with whom I might disagree just as a brickbat - which I consider was my father's stance on religion. I mention our difference in religious tenets to explain, that my father's religious funeral service, which was conducted by the Salvation Army, was arranged and attended by my sister but not by myself (and I did not attend my mother’s either).

I will now pick out particular points from your letter: firstly the statement "finding out about your father as a person . . . ", I hope I have not completely overwhelmed you but I felt that I would like to send you copies of various documents appertaining to my father’s activities and to events around the time of his death. My father started his "Campaign Against Evil" possibly before I left school but he was certainly well entrenched in the 1960s. He became a member of the Freedom Association, the inception of which sprung out of the Grunwick dispute. Both my sister and I were, by this time, geographically removed from our parents’ home but I (because I was living so much nearer and had no family commitments) saw them more frequently. Ann and I have frequently mulled over the reasons for his Campaign. I personally feel that my father had certain inadequacies in his personality which progressed to almost obsessive ritualisation of asserting that his opinions and actions were right in order to maintain his self-esteem. There is no doubt that his judgment was frequently disparaged to the point of ridicule by our emotionally demanding mother: he managed to cope with devoted care for her after her stroke at the age of 75 until she died aged 82 - after which my sister and I got to know our father all over again as he was not hidden behind this overwhelming woman.

Our father's values and judgments and his ability to express them were undoubtedly more rational and coherent at the beginning of his campaign but, on the whole, Ann and I both "sat on the fence" in order to not further aggravate the irritations arising between our - in our opinion - rather unusual parents. However, as you will see from the enclosures, there is no doubt that our father became a truculent misguided man lacking logical judgment and becoming a bigoted plagiarist and sycophant when it suited him. For many years it was quite pointless trying to have a reasoned discussion with him as he was right and in any event he finally lost the fluency of expression to converse. He became fairly deaf, but - as in many older people - this fluctuated to suit the circumstances and he never coped with a hearing aid.

Obviously he was cognitively deteriorating quite rapidly immediately before his death: the post-mortem showed a degree of hydrocephalus but his coronary arteries were in pristine condition. He had not smoked for about 20 years but his alcohol consumption had caused great concern when he started to drink sherry at 0900 hours whilst caring for mummy - having previously been somewhat abstemious, and whilst still driving. He had only been out on his bicycle the day before his death and always had a walk of about a mile or so every day. He had become much thinner and gaunter in appearance over the latter part of 1995 but his intervention in his own destiny undoubtedly simply hastened death which he saw approaching with abhorrence at reaching the stage of being "sans everything". Considering the state of his coronary arteries he could have lingered on for months if not years - perhaps. This observation takes me on the statement "the reasons . . . for his death". My father had spent some days saying goodbye to his friends: he had been planning his suicide for years. One good friend at the Salvation Army alerted the police (to whom my father was already known) and they came up to Norris house to see him 4 days before his death but he was out. Daddy was a life member of the Euthanasia Society (as was my mother through his influence) but he had been repeatedly told that Euthanasia was not a legal option. I observe that my sister and I had great respect for my father's last act in "doing things his way": we found it quite astonishing that a man so squeamish of physical suffering could make such a courageous act when in such distress and confusion.

This leads me on to my own experiences since his death: and that is people's reaction in general to my matter-of-fact statement that daddy took his own life. Such frankness crosses a social taboo which some people could not take - but people who know me well accepted my frankness and gave me sympathetic emotional support in return.    Obviously the "rightness" or "wrongness" of suicide is something I will continue to contemplate. I have read a book "Contemplating Suicide" (which I saw a critique about in the medical library - but I cannot remember the Author) but I shall continue to wonder. Ann and I were, of course, most concerned about the speed or delay of death by drowning and the sadness of this lonely act but to suggest that, if Euthanasia had been an option this suicide would not have happened, is far too simplistic.

Further to your letter "so that we can try to prevent such deaths . .    ": by now I am sure you are clear that I am relieved that nobody intervened in my father's final act. The documentation you sent to me is couched in most understanding and gentle terms but obviously the phrase "older people" when applied to my father at the age of 88 is not so relevant - as death, by the very nature of life, might be expected to intervene sooner rather than later. I note that your study will have 'a lower age cut-off point of 60, and suicide in a person even 10 years younger than daddy would be well worth preventing. I am aware that clinical depression can all too often be suffered by senior citizens and sufferers must be succoured in their distress. No doubt my father had an overlay of depression at many periods in his life but I do not feel that his act was other than reasonable in his circumstances. I observe that he deliberately died - on 16 January - the anniversary of his wife's death 7 years beforehand - except that he got it wrong in his final confusion because mummy died in the early hours of 17th.

I really feel I have burdened you with enough information; please do not search out my General Practitioner; I will inform him myself about this Study.

Yours sincerely

JH


STUDY: UNEXPECTED DEATHS IN OLDER PEOPLE
List of enclosures with explanations for enclosure with letter to Dr Harwood
       

1.  "Crusade Against Evil" letter from my father to Dr Carey: an example of my father's prolific letter-writing: even though it is dated 1993 it harks back to events many years earlier.


2.  "Conservation Murdered" document - one of the many which my father got duplicated by the thousand to do a "drop" through the letterboxes of Maidenhead residents. This document was compiled together with a friend, Roy Birmingham, whose PO box daddy used - he only admitted to receiving one reply over many years to this box number when I took him to task for not being honest enough to identify himself on his propaganda. What was more worrying was that these drops were often accompanied by requests for donations of cash (to pay for his paper/duplication/etc) which he had been told by several persons was illegal as he was not acting for a registered Charity. To my knowledge the Police interviewed my father at least 4 times about his activities.

3.  This letter was initially published in the Maidenhead Advertiser Some 3 years before my father started distributing copies - with his "Conservation Murdered". I was particularly concerned for Mr C as he actually wrote to the Maidenhead Advertiser and had a letter printed there disclaiming any knowledge about who was using his letter for such a purpose (but in actual fact there is no copyright on letters published in the press). Whatever one might judge, oneself, as being Mr C's poor judgment in writing the letter in the first place; it was most sad that he received some 40 or so telephone calls and/or letters - some most unpleasant and abusive - just after his wife's death. My father failed to appreciate the distress he had caused to this man because of his (my father's) lack of integrity in not appending his name to his propaganda.

4.  Another letter sent to a Bishop by my father 6 months before his suicide. He failed to appreciate how distressing my sister and I could find such vitriolic rubbish - had we not, of course, already been fully aware of his Intellectual disintegration.

5.  Note from my father to Teresa Williams (Mrs Robins) his Solicitor, together with item 6.

6.  My father's Obituary written by himself: he first presented this document to my sister and I in the Autumn of 1994 because he wished us to sign it and undertake to send it to the Maidenhead Advertiser, which we refused to do. I felt his motive was to maintain his personal conviction and status as a valued member of the Community as, by then, he must have realised that support from other people for his ideas was turning into irritation and contradiction. No amount of reasoning (because my sister and I had already been for some time concerned about his behaviour) would persuade him that this course of action was not appropriate and he found us to be most recalcitrant and unkind daughters. It was only after his death that Teresa Williams gave us back these documents with our signatures forged thereon: mine is written in daddy's writing and my sister's, we believe, in the handwriting of a young woman who occasionally did typing for him. Teresa Williams had, in any case, told my father that she could not act in this matter.

7.  Two pages of a letter which I sent to my sister in Germany approximately 10 days before my father's death and after having visited him from Thursday 28 December 1995 to Sunday 31 December 1995. I feel this will give you a very clear idea of my father's so distressed state as he knew he was "losing it".. I have no doubt that you will learn something about me as well from this letter. (Ref letter: Fortunately, the trip my Sister was planning to take to Turkey was cancelled because she got 'flu.)

8.  "Look in after 7 o/c" first of the final messages left by my father outside the door of his bedsit in Norris House which was written on a torn brown envelope.

9.  "go the bath room" (half of) second of final messages left on table in bedsit written on opened out torn AA envelope.

10.  "I am 'plagued by a gremlin difficult to know which is fact or gremlin's act" third message left on table in bedsit: how appallingly frightened my father must have been.

11.  Newspaper report about Coroner's Inquest on my father's death: the Coroner's Officer was most surprised that this report reached the free paper which is published in that area of Berkshire as he has a tactic to keep the press away from such Inquests. Even though the report is full of errors: his name is spelt incorrectly; Mr Clements' name is spelt incorrectly (he retired in November 1996); the note did not specify "pm" - it was thought my father went into the bathroom at about 6am: all persons my sister and I spoke to felt it best not to request the correction of the errors and the report never appeared in the Maidenhead Advertiser. We were not present at the inquest but put the usual personal announcement in the local paper (via the Undertaker).

12.  Daddy's life story as compiled mainly by my sister to be read out at the funeral service. This life story was, of course, compiled with these long-standing, loyal friends of daddy in mind - who were present in the congregation and some of which were most struck down by his death and its manner. If I convey unfilial affection in this correspondence I fell sure that daddy had this affection in abundance from my sister; we do not think at all that he committed suicide because he was antagonistic towards his daughters who I feel practiced great restraint in not invading his autonomy/ until we really had to say "succour yourself" because of his overall deterioration Into confusion. He took his own life to practice his right and proper autonomy.
 
29 January 1997
 
Print Print