Death of an Idealist by John Ayres-Smith

His semi-clothed body was still, lifeless and curled around in a foetal position on the dishevelled bed. He was not breathing, although his eyes stared as though fixated on a shocking scene misleading one into thinking he was still alive but he was undoubtedly deceased.

Most family members had an idea that one day he would do what he had referred to so often – suicide, so although Julia was shocked, she was not surprised.

She thought, no point in doing CPR, no rush to call anyone, let alone 999 – her medical background meant that she knew this was a corpse and had been for a day or more.

She carefully, with a sense of finality, gently closed his eyelids and he, indeed, now appeared at peace.

As she arose from her kneeling beside the bed, she observed a handwritten A4 sheet of paper and she recognised Mark’s signature at the bottom of the page. – A suicide note?

She half wanted to leave it there, undisturbed, along with his mortal remains but she thought … someone will read it and cry and she even considered screwing up the note, destroying it but that would be her anger taking over.

She walked to the window, gazed in a trance not seeing what was before her but gradually descending into a reminiscence of two weeks earlier when she and Mark were hugging tightly, both in tears, squeezing as tight as their muscles could achieve. She recalled him sobbing out the words …

“I can’t do this anymore. I have nothing. I am no one.”

No longer could she recall her own words – she just remembered her pleadings, her attempts to tell him he had a life and that he could and should live it.

As she daydreamed, her brother’s dead body a few feet away, she re-ran his life over the last few years…

Julia never liked Mark’s latest wife. She was manipulative – very good at it – so much so that Mark was an easy target and she worked at keeping the identifiers well away, so she, Julia, was kept at arm’s length. In the last few months after the couple split-up, Mark dossed at his sister’s on and off – generally off when he had met someone that was prepared to listen to his woes over what were probably one-to-three-night stands when he was in receipt of sex and solace from kind women that wanted to hear why such an intelligent, seemingly good and certainly good-looking, kind man was homeless and kept breaking down so uncontrollably.

When he returned to his sister, he would have stories of a new love … but then another … and another. Trouble was he still loved her – the mother of his three children and the controller of his life and their lives. Suzanne was “the thin controller”.

These kids were still little, and since the split, Suzanne had brainwashed them so superbly that never again would they respect their father, preferring to stay engulfed in the sea of lies and negativity where Mark was concerned and over the years Suzanne masterfully engineered a ‘brick wall’ separating him from his children whom for some time he had not seen.

Mark’s siblings knew it was destroying him but they had their lives. It was only Julia, his elder sister that cared enough to try to support him however she could.

Her own relationship with her husband was suffering in that he, Peter, had had enough of these “pointless support vigils” as he termed them – every time Mark came to stay.

All Peter could say is “you are wasting your time – he’s a dead loss”.

That thought shook her, as she turned at looked over at Mark’s dead body.

She sobbed and fumbled around for a tissue, walking out into the bathroom.

Suddenly a loud thud emitted from behind her. She ran into the other room and found Mark’s body sprawled on the floor: she gasped.

 

To be continued …