The death of his brother by suicide and the lack of support he received afterwards led Ian Waller to set up his own group. Sarah Foster meets him.

STOMACH churning, wishing he could turn back – and yet knowing, inexplicably, that he could not – Ian Waller faced his brother’s flat. There was not a sound from within; no pad of footsteps answered his knock, and so, with escalating dread, he broke a window and forced his way in. The stench of death was overpowering – a cloying smell that remains with Ian even to this day – but then he was oblivious; his senses paralysed. His brother had hanged himself, and it was Ian’s excruciating fate to find the body.

Sitting at home, an ordinary place in the heart of Washington, near Sunderland, Ian recounts the story with humbling candour. It’s been 15 years since his brother, Tyrone Waller, took his life and time has healed – though far from easily. The journey Ian has been on, from dark despair to the sense of hope he feels today, prompted him to contact SOBS (Survivors Of Bereavement by Suicide).

“I got diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and had counselling – that was through my GP.

That helped with the images but it didn’t help me cope with Tyrone’s death – the fact that he killed himself,”

explains Ian, 48, a father-of-two.

“After that my GP sent me to Cruse Bereavement Services and I felt when I got there that I stuck out like a sore thumb because the people there had lost their grannies to cancer and people to illness and accident and it just wasn’t for me. I was like a square peg in a round hole. I must have gone to about half a dozen private counselling sessions but for all the counselling that I’d had I didn’t feel any further forward.”

FRUSTRATED at his lack of progress – and still feeling overwhelmed by grief – Ian contacted Jenny Cleary, who runs the York branch of SOBS, a national organisation. It was as if a weight had been lifted.

“It was like being let out of my own prison,” he says. “I felt like I’d met someone who truly understood how I felt. She made me feel normal again. I went to a group that she ran and never said anything, but I felt like I wasn’t going mad. She put me back on a path to recovery.”

Until that point, Ian had been crippled by anger and guilt, feeling that he was partly to blame for his brother’s suicide. They had run a fireplace business together – Traditions, in Sunderland – then Ian had gone to work in America for six months. On his return, he found things altered.

“He’d moved into bigger premises and it just didn’t work,” says Ian.

“The business was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was too much, too soon. The fireplace side of the business was working well, but he had kitchens and bathrooms in this place and was just way out of his depth.”

On top of this, Tyrone’s marriage was falling apart and when the business failed, he lost his home. He was living in the flat in Rickleton, Washington, when he first let on to Ian that he wasn’t coping.

“It was my daughter’s christening and he was supposed to be the godfather and he came to me the day before and said ‘Ian, I won’t be there tomorrow.

I don’t feel like being around people’,” he explains. “I said ‘don’t worry about it. I’ll come and speak to you after the christening’, and I went round the same day, but when I knocked there was no reply. I went round the following morning and one of the neighbours said he’d gone away. That’s what he told his neighbours, anyway.”

At first, Ian was not unduly worried – Tyrone had gone away before; to Holland for three weeks – and he just felt his brother needed time to get his head straight. It wasn’t until he severed contact with his children, then nine and two, that alarm bells really started ringing.

“Five weeks had gone by and I was really worried about him by then,”

says Ian. “I managed to find out the name of the solicitor who was dealing with the divorce and he’d been ringing and writing to my brother for weeks because he’d missed court dates for access to his kids. That’s when I knew there was something wrong.”

Ian, a warehouse supervisor, drove straight to the flat. The sight that met him does not bear thinking about. “He’d left me with an image that’s imprinted with me forever,” he says chillingly. “I still have that image – it’s like a photograph that can’t be erased.”

No note had been left; there had been no need. Tyrone was just 34.

Shell-shocked and in turmoil, Ian made his way home. “My wife said I went out and bought a huge jigsaw puzzle and sat and stared at it for weeks on end without speaking,” he says. “Hindsight is a lovely word, but I wish I’d never gone in. When I saw him hanging there, I couldn’t take it in. He was just unrecognisable. I didn’t even think it was him.”

As if he didn’t feel bad enough, when Ian broke the news to his parents and two brothers, his father blamed him: if he hadn’t gone away, this wouldn’t have happened. It was devastating at the time, but now he feels he understands. “It was just lashing out, really,” he says. “Years down the road, you rationalise.”

Having started to recover, Ian felt there must be others in his position – those for whom generic counselling was no help. He embarked on a diploma in counselling, specialising in suicide bereavement, and undertook further training with the Men’s Health Trust, then nearly five years ago, set up a North-East branch of SOBS. It has since closed because of a lack of finding, but the national organisation is still running.

Ian believes that only specialist counselling can really help those bereaved by suicide. “The group gives them a chance to cope with their grief and realise that there are people to support them because they have the empathy and understanding because they have been through it themselves,” he says. “I don’t think you ever get over a suicide, but the group is there to show people that you can live with it and you can cope with it.”

As far as Ian is concerned, the truly dark time has now passed. Life isn’t easy – he still has bad days and anniversaries are just as painful – but he feels that his grief is under control. He tries to be philosophical about his experience. “My wife went and wrote the car off the other week and I said ‘never mind, it’s only a car’, and she said ‘Ian, a few years ago you would never have said that’,”

he says. “Tyrone’s death taught me a lot.”

■ Ring the national SOBS helpline, 0870-241-3337 or visit uksobs.org.uk