'He was the smiling, beautiful brother I relied on. Then he was gone.'

After her mother’s death from cancer when she was 13, Tara Lal clung to her elder brother Adam for support. But four years later, he committed suicide.  This is an edited extract from her book Standing on My Brothers Shoulders, published by Simon and Schuster. 

Adam was beautiful with chocolate-brown skin, straight shiny hair and a chiselled jaw.

He was tall and there was not an ounce of surplus fat on his body.

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He was blessed with a brilliant brain but he was also highly sensitive, a deep thinker with a questioning mind. At 18 he spent his Christmas working for the homeless. He relentlessly questioned life and the essence of happiness, particularly during his travels in India on his gap year.

After Mum died I had hoped that such loss would bring our family together. Instead we fragmented in our own individual grief.  I searched for a rock, anything stable to help me keep my head above water, and found Adam. I clung to him. We didn’t talk about Mum, we simply loved and cared for one another. We shared a unique bond. Only my brother understood.

As children, we used to play a game that involved one of us climbing on to the other’s shoulders. We trusted each other implicitly; not once did either of us allow the other to fall. Now it was as if, floating in our own spheres of grief, we each held on to a small branch, which connected us and prevented us floating entirely alone.

It was no surprise when Adam was made head boy at school and even less of one that he never told us.

He was a straight-A student, gifted in everything he did, but his drive and perfectionism came at a cost.

Our mother wrote a letter to each of us before she died. My brother’s letter added to his burden, something she could never have foreseen when she wrote it.

Adam read these words often and he held them close, just as I did the letter our mother wrote to me.

The message was clear: he must fulfil her expectations; he must go to Oxbridge; he must be responsible and give to the community; he must help Dad and look after his sister. Mum had unwittingly passed a poisoned chalice to her son, full of her own hopes and dreams. She had written the letter in good faith, pouring out the love of a mother for her child. But she had planted a seed of unimaginable pressure which coloured his life.

Adam was granted a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to study chemistry, just as Mum and Dad had wanted. He remained indifferent, humble in his achievements, unsure of his direction.  He took a gap year, travelling to France to learn French and later to India. I missed my big bro terribly.

I was still at school, my elder sister Jo was at university and it was just Dad and me in the house. No one knew of Adam’s inner turmoil. He kept it hidden. People saw only the vibrant, caring, compassionate Adam, the boy who had halted his ascent of a mountain on a school trip in the Himalayas to go back and render assistance to his teacher, helping this man to conquer the summit that had defeated him in previous years; the boy who steadfastly cared for his sister and his friends. This was the Adam that those close to him saw.

Only the writing in his diary betrayed the dichotomy between the face he showed to the world and the conflicted internal Adam. He arrived home from India a few days after his 20th birthday. I had missed him dreadfully and was counting the days to his return.

When he walked in I was shocked. It wasn’t only the traditional Indian clothes he was wearing that made him look like a stranger; his face looked hollow-eyed and ashen. Two weeks later he started at Balliol.  Adam had never wanted to go to Oxford. The elitism didn’t sit comfortably with him.  I had tried to persuade him that he could choose a different university, that he didn’t have to follow the path Mum and Dad had laid out for him, but he saw going to Oxford as his duty.

India had heightened his discomfort. Immersed in the suffering and hardship of life there, he could not reconcile his fortunate life with the millions of poverty-stricken lives in India. He now sat desolate at his desk in his college room, in one of the most prestigious learning institutions in the world. Images of India kept flashing through his mind as he stared out of his window to the quad below, his mind racing, flipping between the injustice in the world and the chemistry essay in front of him. Only alcohol seemed to numb the confusion and temper the flashes of frightening darkness.

In November, Adam came home for the weekend. He’d had that pale, strained, blank look about him. We had gone for a run together. He talked about trying to change courses, about not knowing what he wanted or what was wrong with him. He spoke about quitting Oxford, about feeling down.

I’d never seen him like that. He was consumed with the idea that he wasn’t as good as everyone thought he was. I did my best: I told him to exercise and to leave Oxford. He could have the rest of the year off and then go to Edinburgh University. He kept telling me it was OK and not to worry, but I wasn’t so sure. He was a faint shadow of the Adam I knew.

The phone ringing intruded into my dreams. I stirred, vaguely wondering who could be calling at this time. Then I heard the familiar trudge of my dad’s footsteps as he climbed the stairs. He knocked on my bedroom door. I glanced at the clock. It was 2.16am.

‘It’s Adam. He’s had an accident.’ His voice stuttered. ‘He’s in hospital… I…I have to go to Oxford.’

‘What do you mean, he’s had an accident? Is he OK?’

‘I don’t know…I have to go…’

That’s how it was: the instant that changed my life for ever. There is a reason they call it the dead of night. Four years earlier I had been 13 when I had woken in the middle of the night needing to say goodbye to my mother. Now I was 17 and it was Adam.

That afternoon Jo drove me to Oxford. All we knew was that Adam had ‘fallen’ from his window and hit his head. I sat with him, holding his hand. It was limp and cold.

His eyes were swollen, oozing, eerily open just a slit, glistening. Were they tears? I wanted to be alone with him. Only I understood. Just me and him. At last, everyone else left the room.

‘It’s OK, Ad, I understand,’ I whispered. I needed him to know that he was not alone and that I forgave him. I laid my head on his hand, just wanting to be close, just me and my brother touching each other’s souls.

They told me that if Adam woke he might never be the same again. I didn’t care: I just wanted him back at any cost. This couldn’t happen. I couldn’t lose him.

The days ticked by. Friends arrived as the news spread. Then one day, perhaps it was day seven or eight, I was sitting outside the intensive care unit with my aunt Margaret when the heaviness I had carried with me since the night of the phone call began to change into an immense vice, crushing my chest. I could not breathe, I could not cry, I could not move. I went over to my aunt and knelt on the floor at her feet. ‘I need help. I can’t breathe.’

Then a dam burst inside, releasing an unstoppable tsunami of grief. Pulsating howls. Raw pain. In the years that followed I would have many such tidal waves of emotion but never one as hauntingly intense as that.

Dad was adamant that someone had to be held accountable. They did a scan of my brother’s brain. There was no sign of life. Only the tubes kept him breathing. Dad didn’t believe the doctors.

‘Do another one… And another.’

He’s gone, Dad, he’s gone.

After Adam died, Dad and I lived on in the house. It was a shell now, no longer a family home and I hated it.

I looked at photographs of the five of us and I could only see that half were gone.

I started having panic attacks. My heart raced, a cold sweat erupted from my skin. One fear fuelled another until the terror consumed me.

It was as if I had taken on all the anxieties and fears that Adam had borne.

I believe that Adam suffered similarly from panic attacks. In the months after his death I found myself living through so much of the same confusion that he had written about.

Had it not been for my aunt Margaret I would not have survived. I went to Edinburgh and stayed in her home. I sat on her beanbag and we talked.

She had lost her husband suddenly just two years before but still she managed to be a rock for me, for all of us.

She had been one of the few who had recognised Adam’s inner turmoil in the months before his death and she had written to my father outlining her concerns.

She had tried to persuade Adam to see a counsellor but his pride had stood in the way. She loved him deeply and I know that she has battled with guilt ever since. She wasn’t able to save Adam but she saved me.

I’ll always be here for you Ta, Adam had scribbled in his note to me before leaving for Oxford. With the knowledge that he wasn’t came the soul-crushing reality that no one could make that guarantee.

During moments of respite, I tried to study. I would go to Edinburgh University, just as Adam had wished for me. The place he should have gone to himself.

I was painfully aware of how I was no Adam, either academically or personally. I felt inadequate and unable to live up to his abilities.

A chemistry essay had been sitting on his desk at Balliol the night he jumped from the window. The teacher had scrawled on the front, ‘This is possibly one of the finest essays written by a first-year student at Oxford that I have ever read.’

I read all Adam’s diaries. A sentence he had transcribed from a D H Lawrence book caught my eye: TJ ‘he put his hope in her’. TJ was the name he often used for me.

I seized his words, threading them into my soul. I told myself that my brother had passed me a cup, full of his hopes. I grasped it eagerly. I had found my answer, my reason to live.

I would live the life he could not. I would lead a useful, caring life just as my mum had wished.

I would do it for Adam and myself. I didn’t know when I grasped it, how heavy that cup would be.

I used to think that when I achieved some milestone, like going to India, writing letters to my mum and brother or having therapy that the grief would end. As if I could put a full stop to that part of my life so that I could begin the next. There is no end to grief: it is not linear, there is no finish line. We navigate it, as we navigate our lives.

And while there is no end to grief, the same is true of healing, and with healing comes hope.

Now, whenever a wave of grief sweeps over me, I look on it as a chance to peel back another layer so I may get closer to my true self, to what lies within. The time has finally come to let Adam go.

This is an edited extract of 'Standing on My Brother's Shoulders' by Tara Lal.

Tara went to Edinburgh University and studied physiology. She then spent a year travelling and fell in love with Sydney, Australia, and now she lives and works in Woollahra as a firefighter trained in suicide prevention. Now 44, she has finally come to terms with her brother’s death.  You can purchase her book here.