Caroline King’s 19-year-old daughter committed suicide last year. She tells Ruth Campbell why she is determined some good should come out of the tragedy

“ANNA will be 21 next year,” says Caroline King. She pauses before correcting herself: “Anna would have been 21 next year.” It is difficult to talk about her daughter in the past tense, when she is so much alive inside her still.

From the comical voice messages from Anna she has on her phone, to the mirror above the fireplace where she used to leave little notes saying ‘I love you’ and the Shania Twain song they used to listen to together, Caroline is constantly surrounded by reminders of her funny, intelligent and popular daughter.

Anna committed suicide just over a year ago when she was 19 years old. Caroline discovered her body in the flat Anna had recently moved into in Middlesbrough, where she was on a lighting and sound technician apprenticeship at Middlesbrough College Theatre. “I miss her so much,” says Caroline. Some days are better than others and there are times when she feels overwhelmed by grief. But still, she says, she is determined to try to help other youngsters who might be struggling as Anna was.

Caroline feels particularly strongly that health professionals should be able to do more when parents are concerned but teenagers are reluctant to accept help. She is also fundraising for a young suicide prevention charity and eating disorder charity and stresses there is support available: “Being a teenager can be a dark and difficult time. But there are ways through it. You can be helped.” Caroline wants to ensure some good will come out of Anna’s death. “She lived her life to the full and it can’t have been for nothing,” she says.

She describes her daughter as a ‘technical whizz kid’ who produced the leavers’ prom video at her school and loved making short films and writing screenplays. “If you gave her a quote from the TV series Friends, she could tell you what episode it came from. She was sharp as a razor and could come up with a witty comment at the snap of a finger,” says Caroline. “If the money we raise just stops one person from doing what Anna did, it will be worth it.”

It was Christmas 2013 when Caroline noticed Anna was looking thin and later discovered she had been binge eating and vomiting. After months of denial, Anna finally admitted she had a problem. But, due to issues of patient confidentiality, Caroline had no say in Anna’s health care and felt frustrated when she contacted their family doctor for help.

“Unless I had Anna’s permission, they couldn’t do anything. As a parent, I felt helpless. She wasn’t a child. But she wasn’t really an adult. One day they are 15 and a child, and the next they are 16 and treated like an adult. But they will always be your child. If Anna had a broken leg and I rang up, they would have been able to get onto it. But because it is a mental health issue, they can’t.”

Anna had always been stubbornly independent, says Caroline and resisted any intervention, believing she could sort things out herself. Eventually she told Caroline she was seeing a counsellor in Middlesbrough. When Caroline questioned this, Anna invited her to accompany her to the next session if she didn’t believe her. “She was clever and told people what they wanted to hear. With hindsight, she was testing me, of course. So I told her I trusted her.

“She was a complex character. She could be manipulative and controlling, which is often the case with those suffering from eating disorders. We were close but our relationship could be very volatile. I would say things and get a lot of anger back. Mental health issues are difficult to talk about. She would say: ‘Leave me alone, it’s my life.’ She was quite a strong person and could argue black was white.”

Caroline says other adults should share concerns with parents if they feel something is wrong. “For Anna, the eating issues were symptomatic of how she was feeling, contrasting with the brave front she showed others. As a parent, you’re often too close and don’t often see what’s in front of you. Maybe my mistake was not to have challenged her enough.”

In the period immediately before Anna’s death she was quite a good weight, says Caroline, and was doing well on her course, which she loved. She had even received a commendation for helping save a friend’s life when she had an epileptic fit. “She was larger than life. You wouldn’t have believed she was struggling.”

Earlier that evening she had been out go-karting with friends and sent Caroline, who has dyed purple hair, a text around 10.30pm, just a few hours before her death, saying. ‘I love you my cute purple monster. I am going to sleep now’. That was her pet name for me. I sent a text back saying I loved her too and would speak to her tomorrow.”

Although there were no outward signs she was suicidal, when the college contacted Caroline next morning to say Anna hadn’t turned up and wasn’t responding to her phone, she felt something was wrong.

“I knew I had to get there,” says Caroline, who was working as an adult careers advisor in Catterick. A colleague drove her to Anna’s flat, where she climbed through the window and saw the charred remains of Anna’s journal in the sink. “I knew then, I just knew,” she says. “I don’t know why it had to be that day. I think she was in so much pain, she suddenly found it too much. She had left videos and letters, she left under her own terms.”

Caroline recalls three-year-old Anna, in a stand-off with her dad Andrew, from whom Caroline separated ten years ago, announcing she was going to slam her bedroom door. After repeatedly being told she had better not, Anna announced: “I am going to slam my door, and the moment is now,” banging it with all the force she could muster. It’s a story that sums up her character, says Caroline, laughing between tears: “She always did things in her own time, in her own way.”

In the months after Anna’s death, Caroline admits she was running away from things. She returned to work after a couple of weeks but left after six months. “I was driving to work in tears and driving back in tears. It wasn’t healthy.” Caroline found a part-time job with a local charity instead. “It means that, some days, I have to make myself go out and do things. But I have lost who I am in many ways.”

When one of Anna’s friends took part in a sponsored run in memory of Anna in May this year, Caroline felt inspired to do something. She and a number of friends and family cycled 54 miles from London to Brighton in September, raising £11,322 for the Papyrus and Beat charities. “I have met so many people who have been touched by similar problems and I think it’s really important to do some good," she says. "It’s hard, because I have always been a very private person, but I have to embrace it.”

Anna’s friends are still sharing videos of Anna and films they made together which Caroline had never seen before. She feels she needs to start writing down dates and details of events. “At times I really worry I might forget who Anna was. But of course I won’t.”

Caroline hasn’t decided what she is doing for Christmas yet. Her son, 22-year-old chef Tom, will be working and she has had lots of offers from family and friends, but she may just go away on her own. She and Anna moved into the Victorian terraced house in Ripon where she still lives just a few years ago, less than a week before Christmas. “The living room was full of unpacked boxes, everything was in a state.”

But when Caroline came home from work on Christmas Eve, Anna had cleared out the boxes and filled the living room with fairy lights. “It was lovely," says Caroline. "That’s the sort of thing you always remember."

www.justgiving.com/CarolineTKing1 (Papyrus)

www.justgiving.com/CarolineTKing (Beat)

www.papyrus-uk.org

www.b-eat.co.uk