As W.H. Auden once said: “We must love one another or die.”
But how do you come to terms with a mother who strangled her five-yr-old son and then fatally stabbed herself? How do you reconcile a mother’s love that tragically compelled her to take her son’s life and her own?
Japanese national, Nami, 41, was suffering from major depressive disorder, but was undergoing treatment, according to the Coroner’s findings.
Nami sought help at least three days before the tragedy on Nov 14 last year. She was treated for Low mood and anxiety. She told a psychiatrist about her suicide thoughts and feelings of depression. She informed her doctor that she was not sleeping well and was anxious for the past few months. She lost her “appetite, weight and hair”, and “had palpitations for about a week.”
Nami left nothing unsaid about her condition. She even told the psychiatrist “she was stressed about her son... (who was autistic and had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), without revealing the exact reasons.”
And she was not without help. Nami was “immediately referred to the emergency medicine department at Singapore General Hospital, where she was denied being suicidal but said she had been feeling depressed for a year.”
She even assured her private psychiatrist that she won’t harm herself for the sake of her children. She has a younger child and her husband was a businessman. Yet, refusing such a thought, she did admit that she had “one transient, short episode of thinking of ending her life a week prior.”
This were the trail she had left behind, and on that fateful day, on 13 Nov, she also left a suicide note. In the note, she said her medication did not work and told her husband “she was going to take Sotaro with her.”
At the time, her husband was on a business trip to China, and they last spoke on 10 Nov, according to the Coroner’s account.
Here is what happened as reported by Cara Wong.
“According to the maid, in the night of Nov 13, (Nami) read storybooks to her children until they fell asleep. She later texted the maid to tell her that she had taken Sotaro to the hospital as he was “having a fever””.
“However, the police investigation showed that (Nami) had likely strangled Sotaro in the living room using a long elastic band and raffia string.”
“Around 5:40 am, she drove out, with her son’s body covered in a white blanket, to Lorong Sesuai.” And she then fatally stabbed herself “near Bukit Timah Reserve.”
Alas, how do you stop someone whose mind has already made up? The grim narrative haunts me because she left the child who is presumably normal and took the one who is not. But she did not leave him alone. As his mother, she journeyed with him till the end, even if an end premature.
Here, I can only deal with the facts, as I would not even attempt to address the cause. For who truly understands the mind and all its complexities?
Like the mysterious world that lies deep beneath the vast ocean, doctors of the mind are at times merely lifeguards by the beach looking at the endless expanse of a person’s mind not knowing what is pulling that person down, and equally clueless about how far down the unknown depth that grips goes.
A novelist/poet Stevie Smith said: “I was much far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.”
That must been how many people like Nami felt in their mental ocean struggling to stay afloat. I guess at times they wish so much to stop the struggle and sink effortlessly into the deep that calls out to them, thereby allowing the darkness to drown out the pretentious light for the call to save oneself.
Mind you, Nami was not without medical help. She had in fact sought it, and shared her anxiety and transient suicidal thoughts with professionals.
I trust she had a community, even if but a handful. She had her husband, maid, children and even wrote to her brother, “pleading with him to raise her younger son together with his children.”
In every naturally conceivable way, Nami shouldn’t have any reason to cease the struggle and sink in. Yet, her waves from a shadowy distance had sent a mixed signal, one of rescue and the other of letting go. At some point, she had drifted much too far out in her life to ever saw the need to swim back to shore or within visible sight.
Alas, at such rare times, the inevitability of life is its inevitability. And I know, by writing this, I have taken a road very much remote for travelling, entering the dark woods where one is perpetually struggling to existential exhaustion. But I am not one given in to the pretentious light when the struggle seems endless, and the pain unceasing.
When a life or two is gone this way, when the waving stops, and the ocean is still once more, we who stand from afar are always reminded to hold on tight to our loved ones, and to look into their eyes to remind them that we must indeed love one another, or die, and die only when our time is up.
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