When I was fourteen years old, my best friend Sophie committed suicide in 2016 – she was missing for about twelve hours before she was found hanging from a tree in the woods on the outskirts of our town by a man walking his dog, who then called the Police. She was 13 years old. I was at school when my friend Amy phoned me and told me to sit down – she then told me that Sophie had died, less than 45 minutes after she found out herself. The teachers at my school then pulled me out of my lesson and I was taken to a room with two Police officers, who told me themselves and sent me home. It was all over the newspapers, the television, and social media, and there was no escape from the fact that she had killed herself. The next week, I returned to school, and my teachers told me that I needed to catch up from where I had been away – all of my classmates stared at me and some even asked questions, especially about how she died or if I knew that she was going to kill herself. Some vile people poked fun about the fact that she had self harmed in the past and said that it was all an attention-seeking scam.
Since Sophie died, I have been up, and I have been down. 7 months after her death, when her inquest took place, my friends, her family and I were thrown into despair when The Daily Mail wrote about her – they exaggerated the fact that she was bisexual by making it the first word in their headline, and they said that it was the fault of her friends that she killed herself. They then pinned the blame on her mum, who died when she was three, and they also said that it was her girlfriend’s fault that she went and killed herself. I don’t think anybody should receive newspaper abuse – and we, as teenagers, shouldn’t have had adults blame us for her death when we were still trying to get to grips with it all.
We had Sophie’s one year memorial in the middle of June, and we all wrote letters – I consider myself incredibly lucky that I can say that I was not only her friend or classmate, but her best friend, and I am very privileged to have memories that I will cherish forever with a beautiful and kind friend I will forever hold within my heart. I hope that she’s finally happy and that she isn’t in pain anymore, and I desperately hope that she finds her mum.
