Poorna Bell has a way with words that manages to be hysterically funny one minute and achingly lyrical the next. It’s a magic that makes it possible to keep turning the pages despite the devastation that unfolds between the covers.
Poorna was working as a London-based travel journalist when a friend set her up on a blind date with a Kiwi called Rob whom she could hardly understand on the phone beyond the words ‘Friday’ and ‘sushi’.
It was the start of something beautiful and not long into their relationship, Rob confessed he had something to tell her: he had a history of depression. He assured her it was nothing and she knew so little about depression, “he might as well have told me he had athlete’s foot.”
Poorna Bell has a way with words that manages to be hysterically funny one minute and achingly lyrical the next. It’s a magic that makes it possible to keep turning the pages despite the devastation that unfolds between the covers.
Poorna was working as a London-based travel journalist when a friend set her up on a blind date with a Kiwi called Rob whom she could hardly understand on the phone beyond the words ‘Friday’ and ‘sushi’.
It was the start of something beautiful and not long into their relationship, Rob confessed he had something to tell her: he had a history of depression. He assured her it was nothing and she knew so little about depression, “he might as well have told me he had athlete’s foot.”
It wasn’t until after they were married that Poorna discovered something about her new husband that broke her heart. He was a heroin addict.
Rob’s drug habit was, she came to realise, her “nature-loving, brain-the-size-of-a-planet” husband’s way of self-medicating. It didn’t stop her loving him. But love doesn’t always win the fight. In 2015, on a visit home to New Zealand to see his family, he took his life.
In the aftermath Poorna discovered that the nature of Rob’s death somehow undermined the legitimacy of her grief. “It was very apparent that a death by suicide was viewed as shameful; that even talking about it was not acceptable.”
Rather than “sanitise” her grief, she wrote a blog, and through it, she came in contact with people who reached out in compassion and others who had walked a similar path to Rob.
In Chase the Rainbow, Poorna explores the issues and the stigma surrounding depression and suicide even more deeply.
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