The night I lost my dad to suicide

I’m going to tell you about the night I’ll never forget. It was 2nd February 2010, a Tuesday. I’d just returned from a month in Spain with two friends. We went to Madrid, Granada & Seville to take flamenco classes at several dance schools, after 10 years of dancing. When I was there and I’d call home, I knew in my gut something wasn’t right. We arrived home on Saturday 30th January, 2010. I could tell my dad was going through a bout of severe depression. He’d been through this before, we survived it. He survived it. I had no idea what was coming, but I always feared the worst. He waited for me to come home, but he’d planned it.

Dad would say to my brother, “I was blind and now I see,” but wouldn’t say what he meant. He was such a closed book. My dad said to me, “I love you my Vicki,” the Monday before he died, before I left for work. I felt sick in my gut. The tone, sadness in his eyes, but you still put the worst out of your mind. In hindsight, my mum noticed my dad sorting his papers in his drawers and even the back of a scrap piece of paper where he wrote his note. 

Tuesday started like any other day. While I was at work, my dad took the car for a service and pruned the vine in the backyard. He also left his note on the cage of our pet galah at the time. He knew that my mum wouldn’t see the note until about 5pm when it was time to settle Cookie for the night. My last memory of my dad was opening the back door to pick up the garbage bag to take to the bin. Then he said to my mum he was going to the neighbour’s house a few doors down to clear the mailbox and feed their cat. He always did this for them when they were on vacation. He told her he wouldn’t be long. He never came back.

When my mum saw the note and read it, she showed my brother who came to my room and read it to me. It was the worst fear and feeling of helplessness I ever felt at the time. It was a note that said not to hold a funeral for him, but cremate & scatter his ashes in the ocean. In the Greek Orthodox tradition, a person never gets cremated, only buried. This was a message of feeling worthless, we’re better off without him. I can’t remember what else, and I’d rather not. All of us went into a panic. Any logical thinking of where we’d find him went out the window and was replaced with distress. My mum and brother called the police.

I couldn’t bring myself to sit there in my panic. In my state, drowning in tears, I got in my car and drove around searching the streets for him, all the way to Ramsgate beach. I don’t know why and the beach isn’t a walking distance. My dad and I used to spend time talking and walking along the promenade there. This time I was there running up and down in sheer distress. I probably looked like what many might call, a raving lunatic, to people on the beach. Obviously, I wasn’t. What people perceive and judge and what the real story is are two different things. Let this be a lesson in humanity.

I returned home. God must have had an angel protecting me, because in the state I was in, I shouldn’t have been driving. I was distressed, tears streaming like Niagara Falls, I couldn’t focus clearly. I felt shocked, helpless, such despair like I’ve never felt. Perhaps God helped my dad with preventing us finding him. Had we been thinking clearly, it was obvious where my dad would be. At home, I sat in my parent’s bedroom, in the dark, looking out onto the street. I felt numb and helpless, just waiting, not knowing what to do. My mum and brother were in the kitchen, talking with the two police officers, translating the note into English. They went through the day, every chore or errand my dad did. And then he went to our neighbours’ house, to clear the letter box and feed the cat. The police had their lead for the next step. It’s here that the end began.

I kept sitting in the dark in my parents’ bedroom. It was at the moment my brother said, “There’s an ambulance. Something’s happened.” He saw an ambulance arrive, but with no siren. That’s when I went hysterical. No siren screamed the worst. We asked the police officer what’s happened. He said he didn’t  know yet. I think he waited for the paramedics to confirm what we feared most. I don’t know how my mum managed to present such a strong front for the sake of her children. She grabbed each of us by the hand and said, “No matter what happens, we’re going to be OK.” When the two police officers said my father had passed away, my body went completely numb from the sudden shock. Everything from then was like I was having an out of body experience. I guess denial kicked in, not to mention the commotion that started from here on, first with the neighbours. 

I was in a daze but I do remember this. Most didn’t help us, not even a glass of water. They added to our grief and pain instead. I’d rather have been alone and it definitely wasn’t a time for being alone. I relived the trauma with the Greek Orthodox church community in July 2017, but this time I released so much suppressed anger, grief, trauma, pain, tears. I already felt isolated, alone and afraid. And, yet again, I was judged, bullied, gossiped about and discriminated, down by my manager and up by a colleague I now supervised. And again, I was left without support.

I would talk to the campus minister about it. God tests all of us to really challenge us to be true to our word. How could ministry at my university employer, abandon me, leaving me to suffer systemic abuse alone, when they condemned this very experience, in my history? That neglect could have cost a life. No reasonable attempt has been made by university leaders, to reverse the damage and indignity they recklessly caused, and help me get back to my job. They must be ordered to do what’s legally right by regulators and law enforcers. And be replaced with ethical leaders.

I’ve had enough experience with psychopaths and narcissists growing up. There was no way I could let a corporate psychopath (the national manager of employment relations and SAFETY fits the profile) at the university, make it a mission (not the university’s mission), to destroy me from her seventh month at the university. But no one gave me a helping hand or protected me.

Going back to that tragic night, only one neighbour supported me emotionally that night, a childhood friend. She stayed with me and took the day off work the following day and helped us plan the funeral. When a sudden shock like this befalls you, you’re not prepared for organising formalities. My family called a priest. They asked him to just call a funeral business to get it done. Big mistake. When I learned it was Acropolis Funerals, I had a gut feeling we were in for more pain and betrayal.

But as the neighbours started coming over that night, one said to my brother that we had an obligation to call my dad’s “family”. WE WERE DAD’S FAMILY! And we honestly didn’t have an obligation toward anyone, especially toward psychos who we knew were going to hurl abuse at us. A phone call was made, so now we were preparing for a second round of horrible shock and pain that night, only an hour after my dad’s body was identified, his glasses, keys and wallet returned to us. All this was so surreal and hard enough.

I have been unwell and overwhelmed with financial distress caused by worker’s compensation fraud, for years. Even when an industry is regulated, it isn’t. I’ve been told Catholic Church Insurance has a bad reputation in the industry. I’m going to make sure that changes too, by more audits to actually comply with worker’s compensation regulations and not with corrupt individuals abusing power.

Light shines on what is hidden in darkness. Now I understand that this wasn’t only about saving my life, but suicide prevention from unmanaged psychosocial hazards of workplace bullying, discrimination and harassment, in the state of NSW. I hope best practice succeeds and is then followed by other states. I persevere.

I have battled a corrupt system (it’s the truth, there’s no other word to describe it), for good to triumph. I’ve battled alone for too long now. I just don’t get paid for the work I do. The reward will be greater if it saves lives, but I have bills and cost of living expenses like everyone. I earned my living honourably and everyone who knows me at the university, knows this. So I ask again, why am I being persecuted? Where’s the application of Catholic Social Teaching principles in my case? I was abandoned and neglected by yet another community I thought I was valued in. Being human, I’m frightened, alone and traumatised by it all.

My dad was a kind and gentle soul. He actually worried this current abuse would happen toward me at the university because of the manager. It’s the first time I had explicitly requested help. I begged, I pleaded. And nothing. Silence, neglect, abandonment. Now I understand why loneliness is a huge killer. This needs to change very soon. Because feeling like no one values you or cares, doesn’t give you a reason for living. I’m talking about people targeted in such a way generally and globally. It’s a global workplace safety issue. It’s a legal obligation.

Going back to my story, an hour after my dad’s death by suicide, his brother-in-law, a priest, turned up. He didn’t respect our pain and grief at all, and just fired scathing comments at us. His comments, for me, were harassment, abuse, intimidation and slander. At best, morally reprehensible. He showed no consideration for the fact that we’d just lost our dad and my mum had just lost her husband of over forty years. He came for one reason only - to inflict more pain and suffering on an already seriously bereaved family, in our home. We had just been told my dad had taken his own life and we were in serious shock, vulnerable and in severe pain. To verbally attack anyone and kick them in the face when they are already down and in a very vulnerable state is really horrible. Why did everyone at the university allow this to happen too, and for so long?

The priest came with an air of arrogance, wanting everyone to kiss his hand, even wearing his clerical collar, as he proceeded to point his finger at us and say we had locked my father in his own home like a prison sentence and we should rejoice with what we’d done, and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to look at us horrible people at the funeral. He had no shame to abuse a family who was fragile and in shock. 

The police officers still there thought he was ministering to a grieving family. He spoke in Greek so they had no idea and no one thought to tell them to get rid of him asap. His phone numbers have been blocked. We had to set boundaries - no toxic attitude or gossip will enter our homes again. The harassment via emails to myself and family by a senior executive in HR, was illegal, including the sick audacity to contact the psychologist who I started seeing for the grief and trauma, from July 2017, without my signed consent or knowledge. This was deliberate, to harass and distress me. I recommend reading the university’s WHS policy, regarding duty of care to ourselves and each other. How long will I have to endure this silent treatment called mobbing, this psychological torture? Not the police, an APVO application, SafeWork NSW, NTEU or my trusted colleagues, did anything to protect me. It’s like an abused woman going to every place that’s meant to help protect her, and they all ignore her plea and even add to the disrespect with more incivility. I suffer trauma now, and everyone’s negligence contributed to it. Read the policies on discrimination and harassment, bullying and complaints management. I can’t anymore. I feel sick.

I keep diverting from that tragic night, because it’s all surreal and traumatic, and it’s all coming from religious institutions. Anyway, my dad’s younger brother came over that night with his new girlfriend. If the shock of my dad’s suicide wasn’t enough, this is what we had an obligation to put up with that night. We had no idea our uncle was with this person, not to mention he had her call the police station for information. Unlike the unethical Greek church community (or the Catholic university at this moment), as if the police would disclose information to anyone other than the immediate family, which happened to be dad’s wife and two children. He even had the audacity to say a few days later, “You might be his kids, but I’m his brother and I love him 5 times more.” A few months later he was on a holiday in the US with the girlfriend. But he loved my dad more than us. You think? His phone number has been blocked.

If horrible relatives on one side of the family weren’t enough, how do I explain my mum’s narcissistic sister? She’s the extreme opposite of my mum. No comparison. My mum has been so generous, hospitable, caring and beautiful to everyone. An entire life. We all had. That aunt had her own arrogant and egotistical agenda that night. Couldn’t she be a support to her sister? It wasn’t a time to give off airs of her own. Her phone number has been blocked.

To be continued… from the day after the tragedy.