Dealing with Loss Aged 14

By Ella Hodson.

As most 14-year-olds are, I was an obnoxious and selfish teenager by the time I hit that age. I had just started home-bleaching my hair, and getting some male attention from my peers was boosting my already large ego.

After the bleach came the scissors, and after the scissors came the box of dark brown hair dye, in my efforts to become the embodiment of Alex Turner’s (then recent) ex girlfriend Alexa Chung. I started listening to The Smiths, and generally became a pest of the indie-twitter form (my twitter handle was @arcticxel at one point, ugh).

After the hair dye, attempts to become Chung and the discovery of Morrissey, came the death of a close friend.

Losing a friend in general is a shitty thing to happen. When you’re just about to turn 15 though, it really hits you hard.

I remember the day I found out as if it was yesterday, it plays in slow motion in my mind at least twice a week. I had just finished my lunch in the canteen, probably some of Mandy Gould’s chicken pie followed by chocolate concrete, and I got a phone call from my older sister, in 6th form at the time, telling me to come “up top” because she had something to tell me. When I saw her, I knew it was serious, my parents had just split up at the time and I thought something drastic had happened with them, I was never expecting what was to come.

First, let me tell you a few things about Leo.

We started talking to each other when we were both put in bottom set maths, the class was quite large at the time, but we ended up sitting together.

I have always been quite mature for my age, and so was he, he was smart and funny and knew that things were happening in the world outside the Caistor Grammar realm.

So it was year 8, we started BBMing each other (remember BBM?) and we would talk about everything and anything, literally. He flattered me, said that I “moved in my own way” like the girl from The Kooks song. His birthday was 2 days after mine, making our bond, somehow closer - “both Aries!” I would say.

He could see more to me than the crazy, loud, tall girl I had the reputation of being. Asking me about my life and my relationship with my parents and sisters. He looked out for me more than he looked out for himself, and my selfish ass took that wholly for granted.

We had some of the same music taste which made it easier for us to chat, we would talk about Harry Potter and The XX, take the piss out of our fellow classmates under our breath and pretend to be the outcasts in the corner. We never really were outcasts, we spoke to everyone, gave everyone a chance, but felt like the outcasts because of our maturity.

When the smaller maths class was created, me and him sat together, we would play footsy and he would scribble on my exercise book to annoy me. He read books, actual books! He had cool hair, and he was gorgeous. He said that we would be together when he grew - I have been 5’9” ever since I can remember... and he ... was not - and that we would stay together forever. But at the end of it all, he was my first best friend of the opposite sex. He made me feel comfortable.

You may be thinking, yeah but you were 13/14? You can’t have been serious when you were saying these things. Even if they weren’t serious, their validity still stands.

Some of the best things that Leo did for me were buying me a t-shirt from Camden market that had cats on, sending me a letter on my 14th birthday (after he had left Caistor Grammar) saying all the things I could do now I was 14, along with the mixtape he made me, with some of my favourite songs, and a couple of his thrown in. He called me a princess once which was hilarious, he borrowed my copy of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and left notes in it for me to read, about how much the book meant to him and how much it meant to him that i leant him it. He once sat with me at a 13th birthday party and we were texting about how much he wanted to find a girl who was like him, loved books and music, and hated 13 year olds. I guess one of the best things was that he saw through my facade of being loud and obnoxious and saw it as being vulnerable and lost. A cliche, but I still do this so I guess he had me spot on.

In many ways we were the opposite. He had had a lot of troubles, been a victim in some extraordinarily awful things, and didn’t know how to handle them. So had I, but I had learnt to deal with them and not let them bother me.

Overall, I was an optimist and he was a pessimist.

So yeah, we were close. He once told me he only liked me and Michael (to be up there with Michael was to be up there with the elite, so I was pretty happy about that).

Now I’m not saying he was all good, no one is, he could make people feel like absolute shit, said the wrong thing constantly and would annoy me to the end of the earth. Ultimately why he was such a polarising character and why no one knew how to react when he got expelled, or even when he committed suicide.

Some may say his expulsion from the school was the beginning of the end, and the reasons for it -innocent in my eyes- led him to destruction.

So when my sister told me the news, all I said was “no”

“No”

“No, no”

“This can’t be”

“You’re lying, it’s not true”

“He’s lying to you, he’s still alive.”

All through tears that showed that I believed it deep down.

The person I had been close to, who knew me, saw me, had left me and I didn’t help.

Coping with his death was hard. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to react. I was 14 after all, and no one close to me had died.

My mum caught wind of it and she came to school to see me, she saw how pale I was and gave me a hug. She asked if I wanted to go home, but I wanted to stay in Mrs Buck’s room with Bryony, Michael and Ellie. It felt safe in that room, sitting and talking about memories of Leo, how stupid yet great he was. A fond memory of him retrieving a ball from the roof. I kept thinking about how I should have helped.

A day before his death, Leo sent me a text.

He told me he was sad, I hadn’t spoken to him in a long while - I had blocked him off social media after he said some mean comments to me on twitter, but we always did this. I would have unblocked him a couple of months later.

I replied to him, and there was no response.

This gave me, as I suppose it would most people, an immense feeling of guilt. I should have just called him, I should have spammed him until he replied. He had told me he was going to do it many times before, but I never thought he would do it.

As a 14 year old, this guilt consumed me, I laid in bed, thinking about getting a text back from him, saying all of this was a joke.

I am constantly thinking about other people’s feelings, I may not seem like it - I come off quite narcissistic I think - but I was constantly feeling like I shouldn’t be feeling the way I did. Other people were closer to him, his friends from his new school saw him every day, his girlfriend was there until the very end, his parents were the worst off. I thought I didn’t have the right to be upset. I messaged his mum, his girlfriend, took to twitter to chat to his friends from his new school, to make sure everyone was okay, find out how they were feeling.

The day and the days that followed constantly haunt me. I organised something like a vigil, if you will. I saw it as a defiance against the school who expelled him. We all stood in a garden the school had built, placed flowers and paid our respects.

I put it on Facebook that I was doing this, there was a big turn out. All those people, all those people who would have helped him if he just reached out. There I was, crying into my sisters arms again, rain coming down.

Sounds like something from a film eh?

His funeral was him, David Bowie played, tears were shed, I stole some tea and that was that.

I’ve never really come to terms with his suicide, because we were so young and the fact he thought he couldn’t be helped, even at that age, is disturbing to me to this day.

Some advice I got on the day of his death has helped through some loss in my life, it was from my sister’s partner, he came into my room - and this was probably the first time he’d ever been nice to me - and said “hey el, your friend wouldn’t want you to be sitting in bed in the dark would he? He would want you to be happy, so you just have to think of the good memories.”

That helped me to be really strong, still helps me to be strong. It helped me through the death of my dog, the passing of my granddad.

It helped me to deal with losing someone so young.

I’ve never really spoken out about how close I was to Leo and I don’t think anyone realised it. I’ve never spoken about how I felt at the time of his death, and I rarely ever speak about it now because of the risk of putting a downer on things.

But I still feel sad, and helpless and angry. It’s those toxic emotions that make me feel anger on the anniversary of his death, angry at everyone who didn’t help him, gave up on him, angry at myself for those things, and angry at him for even thinking that suicide was the only way out.

All year round I’m thinking of him, in a positive and productive way. But the 2 weeks following the anniversary of his death are hard. Every year since it happened. I think about what could have been if he had replied that day, if I hadn’t blocked him on social media, if he hadn’t got expelled from school, if he didn’t have terrible things happen to him, if he didn’t have depression at such a young age.

My year at school has been affected by this no end, and I bet every single one of them has a story of Leo, good or bad. He had a certain knack to make an impact on your life.

2014 was a shit year for me, but looking back it gave me a massive lesson in life. Always be nice to people, you never know what the hell is going on.

My heart aches with love for him, longing for a text from him, so I could tell him I was sorry.

A short note: I don’t know whether I should have written this, but it’s cathartic for me, I’ve never spoken out about it. So thanks for reading my stream of consciousness on the subject. A snippet into how I dealt with it at a young age, and how I cope with it now. I hope you’ve never had to deal with something like this, and please message me if you feel helpless or alone. I don’t want anyone to feel like Leo did, you are loved.