![]() ![]() How could it have been good when he’d ended it this way?’ Instead, she agreed to read a poem. How could I stand up in front of all those people and talk about happy times? I felt like all our time together had been a lie. I was carrying so much guilt and blame, believing I must have missed some warning sign. She developed hives: a physical manifestation of her grief.Īsked to speak at Richard’s funeral about their time at university, Tiffany refused. Tiffany would wake at night – her mother sleeping next to her for company – screaming. That numbness would be replaced by raw devastation. ‘It was both strangely anticlimactic, because I’d known for several days it was coming, and also hugely shocking. Later that day, surrounded by family and friends at home, Tiffany received a call saying Richard’s life support had been switched off. Instead, I thought: “I love you”, hoping he could still somehow hear me.’ ‘I kissed him goodbye but still couldn’t find the words to speak aloud. Over the coming days, it became clear Richard was not going to survive and, after he’d been moved to a private room, Tiffany spent her final moments with him. ‘The nurses kept encouraging me to talk to Richard in case he could hear me, but I just couldn’t find the words. She learned that he’d received a letter from the university informing him he’d failed his course and would have to leave. For the next week, she sat by his bedside on an ICU ward. Travelling home by train from Durham, hours after receiving his final text, Tiffany got a call telling her that Richard was in hospital. That decision would prove to be one of the greatest “what ifs” I’d have to live with in the years that followed.’ I wanted to go alone, to clear my head and feel free after such a difficult year. ‘I’d finished my exams, turned 20, and arranged to go to Durham to spend a few days with my friend Anna. Tiffany last saw him a few days before his suicide in June 2008. But did I ever think he was at risk of death? Definitely not.’ Richard told me he’d seen his GP to explain there was a dark cloud weighing on him, but she’d told him to come back in a few weeks if he felt the same way. I was only 19 – this was 2008 and nobody I knew used the words “anxiety” or “depression”. ‘It’s taken a long time to accept that was a normal response and forgive myself. I told him I wanted to help, but didn’t know how. I gave him my version of tough love, telling him he needed to “sort it out” and do something with his life. ‘My response was to avoid his sadness,’ she admits, ‘to avoid feeling trapped in the house we shared, by throwing myself into writing for the student newspaper and my studies. Emotionally low, spending his days in bed, unmotivated when it came to his studies, his mood sank further when his grandfather died. He became, she says, like a ‘weak, flickering lightbulb’. As the months passed, she describes Richard – with whom she was now sharing a student house along with seven friends – as ‘slipping away’ from her. Richard failed his exams so, while Tiffany and their friends progressed to the second year of their degrees, he had to retake his first. It was at the end of the first year that things began to unravel. Tiffany with Richard at Freshers’ week in Bristol, 2006 He was kind and thoughtful, with a strong, soulful laugh I still remember so clearly.’ As we got to know one another, I discovered there was a sensitivity in him too. ‘He was my type: tall and fair,’ she says. The couple met in 2006 during Freshers’ Week at Bristol University, where Tiffany was studying history and Richard computer science. A week later, that life would end, his passing marking the beginning of almost a decade of pain, shame and unanswered questions for Tiffany. It was normal for us to exchange messages like that, so I went back to sleep, messaging him later that day.’īy then Richard, just 20, was in intensive care having been found by his parents, somewhere between life and death. He was leaving the world and he wanted me to know he loved me before he went,’ says Tiffany. Unbeknown to her, the tender words were a goodbye from her boyfriend Richard who, 300 miles away at his family home near Reading, was preparing to take his own life. The text message simply said: ‘I love you.’ Reading it blearily, the morning after a night out, Tiffany Philippou smiled. ‘I was lost in grief, trying to work out who I was now’ ![]()
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