 Hello and welcome back. Today I'm going to be doing a book review. I hope to do these relatively often. I love books and I find them a really useful tool in my work and when I find a good book I really like to share it before placing it on my perfectly colour coordinated bookshelves, which people often ask about and I think people think I do it just to look pretty and they do look pretty but it's also because it's the only way I can ever find things. I can never think of the title or the author. I can just think, oh it's green. Anyhow the book I'm going to be reviewing today is a tough read. It's called Things John Didn't Know About and it's published by Jessica Kingsley Publishing. It's written by a lady called Sue Henderson who has worked for 25 years as a social worker and who lost her husband to suicide 15 years ago and it's a mix of a very personal experience. She shares very openly the time that she and her family have gone through since the death of her husband as well as really drawing on kind of best practice and the research around grief and bereavement and managing that and also thinking about practical things like how to work with the school, how to talk to your child about death and bereavement. I'm going to read a few different bits from the book to give you a bit of a flavour for it. I'll display the contents now so I'll get some PDFs from the publishers and we'll put those up so you can see them nice and clearly. So yeah and this isn't a sales pitch it's just a book that I think is quite unique and would be useful for a lot of the people who are interested in my channel. So it's primarily being marketed at people who are in this situation so parents who have lost a partner to suicide but actually I think it is so much more widely useful than that. I think this would be useful if you were working in a school and you had a young person in the school who had lost a parent to suicide. I think it would be useful if you were within the wider family so the grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles you know anyone where there's been a loss through suicide. I think it's also quite useful to read. It's one of those methods. I found it hard but really useful to read as a parent who has attempted suicide. Seeing the impact that John's suicide had on his family and the ways in which the ripples were felt for many years and so deeply has really I think helped me. It'll be a resource I will draw on myself if I come to difficult times again. So yeah if you feel suicide or ever and you're a parent I think this is a really useful thing to add to your armory to help you realise that even when you think your family might be better off without you that you know would help you to question that. And then more widely I think it would be useful for people like GP, social workers, anyone who might be coming into contact with families in this circumstance. Not least because you might want to read it so that you can recommend it. There's not a huge amount of really good solid support for people out there in this situation. There are lots of charities and there is some kind of official guides and things. But this is so special because it's written as a first-person account and granted Sue's story is just Sue's story but she has worked so hard to create a really useful resource here. So it starts off with the scenario and you begin you know you get thrown straight in there with thinking how awful this must have felt. John my husband took his own life at the age of 35. He left for work at 730 as usual. He kissed me and our two children as usual. He told me he loved me which was not usual but that didn't occur to me until later. At 1030 two police officers came to the door. I was changing our baby son's nappy. He was 19 days old. Our daughter who was 27 months old was with our childminder. I left the baby on the changing table to get the door. My first thought was that the police were there in connection with the speeding ticket. John had picked up three days previously. So I knew from their faces and the fact that there were two of them and that they would have known my husband would be at work and the creeping dread then filled me as I realized all of this in an instant that wasn't what they were there for. And this kind of narrative, this kind of storytelling and sort of memoir type writing is maintained throughout this as Sue looks back over the 15 years and she looks very candidly at the highs as well as the lows. She does break off points to look at things like the theories of grief and things like that and then it's told not quite so much in that first person although then she'll talk through how those applied to her. Another useful extract so this is from chapter two which is a crash course in widowed single parenting which is probably something that none of us ever wish to go through and actually this is something that also makes me realize another useful target audience for this book is not just those who've been widowed by suicide and although some of the stuff in here is very specific to that actually I think this would also be a really useful resource to someone who was widowed in any way as a parent and was left raising the children without their their partner who had died. So yes in those earliest weeks and months I did do it and found a way to make the time pass with lots of help from other people but the long haul was around the corner and if I thought the early stages were challenging there was much worse to come. For a long time I wanted to run away or get in the car and drive without stopping not to get away from the children nothing so specific just a nebulous but overwhelming urge to be in this to not be responsible for everything to not have to keep coping with it all the time but I knew I wouldn't because it wasn't an option. Confoundingly there were huge amounts of joy mixed in with the exhaustion and relentlessness I felt strong and proud at times when things were going well for the three of us when we were having fun doing things together although that was always tainted by a wish that John could be sharing it all with us but whenever the children did something funny or clever I think wow they're mine and the gorgeousness of that wave of love always made up for the harder stuff so this is kind of in the earlier days and who goes on to kind of explore those sorts of ups and downs of parenting and she is you know very open and honest that yeah this was you know there were good bits there were bad bits there were in between bits much as there is for anyone but obviously you know she's facing somewhat different issues than others might um on page 45 there's a really um I think one of the most useful bits in the whole book which is a list called um again I'll put this up as a PDF but top tips for keeping it together I won't read the full content but I'll read the subhead so you can get an idea for the kind of feel for what she's saying so set achievable goals and plans number two you don't have to be perfect number three spend time with your children individually number four deal with troublesome toddler behavior number five get organized number six ask friends or family for help if you can number seven ignore the midnight voices number eight keep things simple for the children and number nine take stock and again many of those would be great advice for any parent in any scenario but of course Sue then goes on to look at this through the eyes of a parent buried by suicide and how she used this um this chapter also includes advice to friends um and looks at how you kind of um would work with the school as well um and Sue thinks variously through the book about what's the narrative that you should be sharing with the children what's appropriate to share what's not and at what age and stage you should be having different conversations um sometimes it is a very difficult read um particularly when Sue's reflecting on John not being there um but she's quite pragmatic and doesn't you know she gets to a point through her research that she doesn't really feel that things could have been different and I think one of the things that can be really difficult is endlessly going back over and thinking what should we have done differently how could this have turned out a different way um I found this passage really moving I wonder whether if John had known what his family's lives would end up being he'd made a different decision if he could have seen what it's like for the children without their dad if he had known I hadn't ended up meeting someone else to share my life with if he could have seen his parents and brothers pain most of the time though I don't really think he would have done anything differently because what I understand about suicide is that there's little rational thought involved for the person at the time it seems like the clearest decision and for john I absolutely believe he thought it was the right decision and the best one for us I know it wasn't but for him who couldn't see a solution to whatever intractable problems he felt he was facing it was the only way to resolve them and I think it's quite remarkable actually that Sue is able to step back and look at things from her husband's point of view in that way um but it does also bring to the fore you know uh the different people who are affected over the time by his death um and does make you yeah understand a bit more about the ripples um that are the effect of suicide um the final bit I want to share with you is actually written by John's son so um it was part of an essay so it says it's part of a story submitted as um as part of a higher english portfolio um and this kind of gives you a bit of an idea of things from the point of view of the child and a child who's gone through many years without their father and reflecting on life without their father um and this is just a little bit of it for a long time I felt betrayed I felt betrayed by a person who was no longer there betrayed by a bit longer blame all my life I have been told that my dad loved me unconditionally and always yet he left me he walked out of the front door one morning and said goodbye to me knowing that he was never coming back I felt that he had abandoned me and it's it's yeah so long and the short I think it's a beautiful book it's a heart-wrenching book it's a book that draws on 25 years of social work experience it's a book that draws on 15 years of as life as a parent buried by suicide it's a book that draws on the ups and the downs of day-to-day life living with a part of you missing every day um and I think it's an important book to know about to share um and I would highly recommend it but just make sure that you have the Kleenex ready if you sit down to read it um thank you to Sue Henderson for writing it um if people are interested to know more about the book and about the author I could try to arrange a q and a with her I don't know her but I could get in touch with her via the publishers so if that's something that you might be interested in then let me know and let me know if you have any specific questions on this topic that we could use as part of a q and a if there's a demand for it then I'm very very happy to make that happen um okay so thanks for watching um and I will review more books in future and if you like this you find it helpful please take a moment to give it a thumbs up leave comments down below if you would like to have you know the q and a questions for the author if you have other questions or comments or just want to let us know that you found this helpful um and of course as ever if you would like to be kept up to date with my other videos please subscribe um I hope this is helpful and I will see you again soon bye bye