To heaven and back: don’t die… live on!

In all reviews any bias should be stated up-front: I am personally thanked in the book for a project I ran that helped ‘motivate’ the author (well over ten years ago), although I had no idea of such a credit until reading the book. I met the author and remember asking him, in the usual male disability ‘banter’: ‘What is wrong with you’? The answer was ‘an accident’. It was not until reading this book that I learnt that it was in fact due to an attempted suicide on Thursday 3rd of September 1987 when Paul was 18 years old. Globally there are around 800,000 suicides per year (Walters, 2023); in Wolverhampton, between 2019 and 2022, 53 people died by suicide, a little under the average for its population (Wolverhampton.gov.uk 2024).

The book is not a sociological, academic, based book; nor does it align itself with another academic discipline. It is a straight autobiography of someone who was ‘normal’ and who became severely impaired at the age of 18 after an attempt to take his own life. It covers the author’s ‘normal’ period, his coma, and his subsequent rehabilitation and experience of disability. These periods are not written in a purely chronological form but are intertwined as the life story progresses.

They occur almost as comparison points to try and understand why one would attempt to take one’s own life when 18 years old. The story unfolds through mapping the ‘incidents of a life’ that has so much potential but crumbles in fear and anxiety and the lost hopes of love in a dreamer; a dreamer who could have been, should have been, and wanted to be so much more than his background allowed him to be. It is a true tale, a snapshot, of a working-class boy trapped by class, masculinity and even worse, normality that transformed him via the terrors of fear and anxiety into a young, teenage, alcoholic, and occasional drug user, desperate for his life to be more than it was or could be. The author’s feeling is clear; that his was, prior to his attempt to take his own life, a life limited by a failure to take his opportunities leading to extreme despair and regret.

Paul was in a coma for 12 days after attempting to take his own life and during those 12 days he travelled through time, universes and dimension meeting superheroes, evil enemies and visited more parochial earth-based periods and places (1924, Germany and Northern Ireland), and other worlds inhabited by ‘angels’ and ‘aliens’, due to his acquired brain injury. A significant portion of the book details Paul’s experience of a ‘coma’. This would be ideal reading for those who work with, or know, those in a coma: all the author’s fears, anxieties, hates and loves (often somewhat, logically for a young male working class man, highly sexualised) are all detailed and rooted in his cultural loves: comics, movies, music, and television. The author indicates that his life was limited by failure, but a major factor was his own insecurities and lack of confidence in his abilities because of negativity and undiagnosed mental health/illness—a poignant story. The reality is that the human mind, in a coma or not, is a magnifically powerful tool, especially when turned on you in the hysteria of palpable trauma; here we are allowed glimpses of Paul’s comatic travels, both glorious and terrifying journeys.

The best parts of the book, as a working-class child myself (even though I was a ‘congenital’), are the vignettes of a happy childhood, or the search for a happy childhood, in a poor town with high unemployment or, at best, manual, dirty, work with limited pay or opportunities to progress because of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s economic revolution. Paul grew up in Bilston, now part of Wolverhampton, where almost everybody worked, or had family who worked, in the steelworks until it shut. As one local history website put it: ‘the closure of the steel works in 1979 was one of the heaviest blows ever to strike Bilston’ (Sharman 2024). The recollections of life in various factories in Bilston, that the author worked in as a teenager, in the mid-1980s, is a glorious evocation of a life of grime, and exploitation; this reminiscence alone is worth the read, and is likely to be of especial interest to cultural historians.

Paul’s life, obviously a sensitive child (perhaps on the spectrum), is riddled with anxiety and fear about all around him: school, friends, love, knowledge, family, and his place in the world. Paul shows how the desire to be popular leads him to abandon his true loves of education (science and art) and life itself and escape into alcohol. Paul’s stories are the stories of so many children who become men in communities of limited employment opportunities and oppressive working-class practices: the fear, the reality, knowing that violence is just around the corner, woven with matters of aspiration, motorcars, lust, and money. Paul captures this tapestry rather magnificently, not in a sociological examination but in the purity of the telling of the ‘incidents of life’ growing up in a working-class community. It is much the better for not being ‘sociological’ but rather a personal narrative told in a simple, powerful, truthful manner that culminates in a taste of death that overtook life, through a suicide attempt.

There is no single cause I feel in Paul’s rationale or attempting to take his own life but a catalogue of realities that came to define a moment that could only be understood, or contextualised, retrospectively once he came out of his coma and began life as a wheelchair user with speech limitations. Paul reveals the trials (the realities of rehabilitation), the tribulations (the physical limitations that he once took for granted), as well as the love, the support and meaning given to his life through the love of his family, his community, and his town. Paul loves his community. The book is not an attack on the working-class, despite the ways in which the conditions shaping such communities played a significant part in his, and so many others’ suicides.

The book brims with the love of life rooted in love, or the desire to see love, the struggles to experience love and to feel love. The love of a cycle trip to Wales, the thrill of a shared love, the love of seeing physics and science experiments, the love of beauty, the love of another human being. It is the betrayals of such loves that, for this reviewer, is at the heart of Paul’s exploration in his life story and the reasons he sought to die, and then to live. It is the recognition that love may be betrayed today but may be fulfilled tomorrow (as it was for Paul in his post coma years), a theme driven home by his inclusion of the heart-breaking loss of his 14-year-old nephew to suicide just after the birth of Paul’s own daughter in 2012. As someone who has thought of suicide nearly every day of his life, I understood Paul’s feeling, thoughts, and responses. Equally, like Paul, I feel so much more needs to be done to support suicide prevention work. This book goes a long way to supporting this and explaining its many dimensions. ‘To Heaven and Back: Don’t Die… Live On!’ should be, in my view, part of the secondary school national curriculum.

The book, when looked at as whole both culturally and sociologically, is a warning, especially as poverty grows, anti-social behaviours spread and governments increasingly let communities die, that suicide prevention is now needed more than ever. The book indicates, through its reality not its intent, that suicide will probably become an even more significant reality in the lives of many communities and families. As such, it is a must read for academics exploring the issue of education, of communities, of communal behaviours, and all those working in suicide prevention.

I recently sat in a shop for a month for an exhibition around suicide prevention. A young man came in and saw an artwork by Miro Griffiths that simply had the text ‘Just Living Is A Revolutionary Act’. The young man loved it: he said it was to become his mantra to try and keep on living. Hope exists and it is a revolution: just like living.

Paul Darke
[email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).