What happens when your abuser kills himself?

It was a sunny autumn evening in northern Scotland and there were bed sheets draped over the washing lines in the communal garden. Siri, 40, had friends round, and they talked and shared drinks and snacks as their children played contentedly on the grass. Life had been busy and stressful recently, and she was grateful for the momentary peace and the time with people close to her. But then her phone rang. 

“I’ll never forget it,” she says now. “The washing line had created these sorts of rooms out of sheets and I remember just grasping through them, trying to find a small space where I could be on my own and just be like: what?” 

Shrouded by the sheets, sun dappling through as they rippled in the breeze, Siri stood numb as a police officer delivered the news bluntly down the phone. Her ex-partner, the father of her young children, was dead. He had taken his own life in what had once been their family home. 

Even now, the period following the call is a blur. But somehow, Siri recalls, she found herself standing outside her flat waiting for a lift to the scene, her children rushed inside by a neighbour and her friend placing a steadying hand on her chest. 

“I don’t really remember everything now, but I do remember I said to her: ‘Please don’t tell anyone, but I’m so relieved.’”

Siri and her ex had been together for seven years when they separated shortly before his death. It was only in the last few that she had come to understand it as an abusive relationship. 

Things started as they so often do: he was older, professionally successful in a similar field to Siri’s, and there was something “magnetic” about him. There was also, she came to realise, a darkness beneath the surface. A tragic bereavement in his past had left him struggling with his mental health, something which immediately evoked sympathy in Siri and made him seem a deeper and more sensitive person, qualities she was drawn to. At the beginning of their relationship, he would often turn up uninvited to her home or events she was attending, or bombard her with messages — behaviour she now views as stalking, but found flattering in those hazy early days of a new relationship.