Ian Cunningham had always believed that his birth was somehow connected to his mother's death, but whatever happened, it seemed to be an unspoken family secret.
Only as an adult, with a family of his own, did Ian discover who his mother really was and why she died.
Ian Cunningham will never forget how he felt when he opened that box on his 18th birthday.
"It was like a religious experience," says Ian. "Very powerful - that was the first time I saw a photograph of her, the first time I saw anything."
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The box had been gathering dust in the attic for 15 years, ever since the woman whose belongings were carefully packed inside died - Ian's mum, Irene.
Inside were photos from Irna's wedding from the early XNUMXs, as well as a plastic figure of the bride and groom with which the wedding cake was decorated.
Then a wooden music box, under the lid of which, above the satin-covered compartment where Irene kept her jewelry, a ballerina in a ballet dress was spinning.
There was also the make-up and beautification kit that Ijrin used to keep on the dressing table, and the brushes still contained strands of her hair.
In the box, Ian also found a diary in which his mother began to write notes about the life of her first-born son. She wrote down his date of birth and eye color - but most of the notebook remained blank.
"It was like the pages of an untold story," says Ian. "I had to fill that empty space."
Don, Ian's father, was 18 when he met Irene, at a dance in the Locarno Hall, Coventry.
"And then we agreed to meet next week under the clock at the bus station," says Don.
The couple went to the cinema and after that they saw each other regularly. Don worked in Dunlop, Coventry, in a bicycle brake plant, while Irene, a year older than him, worked in a textile factory in Nuneaton, sewing trouser slits.
Like other girls, she would sometimes bring her own material to work to sew clothes for herself on the side.
She later transferred to a Hinckley hosiery firm, Floods, where she would slip pantyhose onto a Plexiglas leg and straighten them before they went further down the conveyor belt.
"Together we didn't even have a dime," Don recalls.
"Inflation was running rampant so we didn't go out much, but there was a pub not far from the route we walked and we'd sit there with one drink all night as we were saving up for the wedding."
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Don and Irene got married a few years later - just as the UK economy had completely died down - and two years later they were expecting their first child.
"When she got pregnant, Irene was happy," says Don. "We were both very happy."
But soon after Ian's birth, in January 1976, everything went downhill.
Irene confided in her best friend that she was hallucinating while recovering from giving birth in the hospital, and when she brought her son home, she couldn't sleep, started writing strange notes, and told her mother, "I'm not Irene, you know, I Irene's very spirit."
Don took Irene to a doctor, who diagnosed postpartum depression. In accordance with the law, Ijrin was taken to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital, where she was sedated and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
"And not long after that she went into a catatonic stupor," says Don.
Ijrin was immobile and completely uncommunicative for a while, almost as if she was in a coma.
When she came to her senses, her personality changed - she became paranoid, withdrawn and used to stare into space, but every now and then she would sit up on the bed and eat a packet of biscuits.
"I was desperate," says Don. "But I had to look after Ian, work and visit Irene in the evenings - I just had to get on with life."
Family and neighbors rallied to help him with the baby while Irene was in the hospital - a time when, as Don recalls, he had "no idea" what was going on with his wife's health and what treatment she was receiving. .
"It was a different world - doctors didn't give you information and nobody told you what drugs the patients were on, or why," he says.
"No one explained to me what catatonic stupor means, and at that time there was no internet where you could check it. My life consisted of going to the hospital every night and just sitting next to someone who was completely uncommunicative."
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Irene spent nine months in the hospital, but then followed a period of about 18 months of happy life at home with her young son and husband. She took Ian to the park and to cafeterias, and on walks to visit friends.
But at some point Irene became manic. She didn't stop talking, day and night, and soon they had to take her to the hospital again.
"I just didn't understand why it was happening again when she seemed so happy to be with me and Ian," says Don.
One morning in late October, about three months later, the phone rang while Don was working in an office upstairs at the Dunlop factory. It was Tom, Don's brother. He brought terrible news. Irene was dead.
At the hospital, Don was asked to identify the woman's body. They told him little other than that her heart had failed - he didn't get a clear explanation of what happened to her and why.
"I was 28 years old and my life was falling apart," says Don. "I didn't know what to do, left alone with a small child. How was I going to get my life together?"
Growing up, Ian was often plagued by nightmares about his mother's death, in which he would see himself running down a hospital corridor from a fire.
He still remembers those dreams vividly, as well as the sense of loss that lingered in him long after his mother's face faded from his memory.
But whenever he tried to talk to his father about his mother, it always seemed to get on his nerves - Don would immediately burst into tears and Ian would decide not to push.
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And apart from his grandmother - with whom he occasionally talked about Irene - no one else wanted to talk about her. So Ian grew up not knowing what she really was like.
About a year after Irene's death, Don met Judith, who later became his wife. Judith and Ian became very close very quickly - "almost like biological mother and son", says Don.
But Ian never spoke to his new mother about Irene, and he remembers how he cried when she went to the hospital to give birth to his half-sister - he was afraid that Judith, like Irene, wouldn't come back from there.
Over the years, Don has lost touch with much of Irene's family and most of their former neighbors and friends. Come to think of it, he's not sure why he didn't talk to his son about Irene more—he was trying to cope the best he could.
"What could we possibly know at so many years? I do not know. It's very difficult to decide when to tell someone about something like that," says Don.
"When you're building a new life, you don't want to keep going back to what was - you focus on being a family together."
And so it wasn't until Ian's 18th birthday that Don brought a box of Irene's things out of the attic in front of him for the first time.
Together they dusted her off and went through the photos and memories that told the story of the woman Ian no longer remembered.
Ian took the diary about himself, but the rest of the box was then repacked, carried up the ladder and returned to its place. And no one said anything more about Irene.
In the middle of his third decade, Ian got married and became a father. When his oldest daughter reached the age he was when his mother died, he decided it was time to fill in some gaps in what he knew about Irene.
"When you have a child at that age, an almost three-year-old, you realize that you are a well-rounded and emotional human being, and more and more I wondered what happened to Irene and how much of an impact it had on me," he says.
"I wanted to shine a little more light on her and celebrate her as a person - but first I had to find out who she was, because I didn't really know anything about her."
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For the first time since his eighteenth birthday, Ian asked his father to bring a box down from the attic. He then placed an advertisement in the Nuneaton Telegraph asking for people who knew his mother to contact him, and put up posters on poles.
Over time, he found Ijrin's closest friends, her school friends, relatives, former neighbors and former colleagues, who all shared with him stories about the Ijrin they knew and showed him photos.
"There were loads of photographs, bits and pieces of my mother, scattered around in other people's houses," says Ian. "She was still alive in other people's minds - that's what I wanted to collect."
People would tell Ian how much he looked like Irene and sometimes it would be too hard for him to look at pictures of her.
But through the pages of other people's photo albums, through the letters they kept all those years and the memories they shared with him, Ian created a detailed picture of a quiet, gentle girl with a penchant for art, who was always smiling.
She was the local carnival queen who, growing up, loved to dance on Friday and Saturday nights and go to Margate to sunbathe on the beach and see the theater there.
"Until I was eighteen, I didn't see a single photo of my mother, and even then I only saw the ones in the box.
"There weren't many of them and she didn't feel well on many of them. Seeing her as a young, vibrant, colorful person having fun brought her back to life. I had very little information, but I really imagined her having a good time and I felt an extraordinary connection to the person I made her to be."
But Ian still didn't get answers to many questions. He had always been tormented by the thought that he was somehow responsible for what happened to his mom.
Don never fully understood why Irene died either, and the stories of the people Ian found who knew Irene didn't add up.
It took him more than two years, but after a long search and an even longer wait for permission, Ian finally managed to get access to Irene's medical records.
"And when I opened it I found answers to many questions inside," he says.
Some people said that Irene had a difficult birth, others that her heart stopped beating - but the data indicated a normal birth.
"I don't think at the time anyone really understood what happened," says Ian. "And people had a harder time talking about mental health back then - it's still considered a shame."
Ian showed his mother's findings to doctors who helped him and his father figure out what was most likely going on with Irene at the time.
"This description very clearly suggests postpartum psychosis, with episodes of what we now call bipolar disorder," says Dr Alan Gregoire, a National Health Service consultant specializing in maternal and infant psychiatry.
"About one in 500 women get it after giving birth."
Postpartum psychosis
- Postpartum psychosis is a rare but serious mental illness that can affect a woman shortly after childbirth
- Symptoms usually appear suddenly, during the first two weeks after childbirth, but it is possible that they can last for several weeks.
- These may include: hallucinations; delusions (beliefs that are unlikely to be true); manic mood (when a person talks and thinks too much or too fast); the feeling that you are "floating" or that you are "on top of the world", depression; withdrawal or tearfulness, lack of energy; loss of appetite; agitation; feeling confused; unusual behavior
- Most women with postpartum psychosis require hospital treatment
National Health Service: Postpartum psychosis
Another doctor told Ian that the antipsychotics prescribed to Irene were devastating to her heart, and that the "heroic doses" they were giving her could have killed her.
"But that's hard to pin down now," says Ian. "If you read between the lines, she was sedated the night before [she was found dead] because she was restless and noisy, and that could mean anything."
Having gained a vivid picture of Irene as a girl and the woman she had grown into, it was extremely painful for Ian to read about how traumatic her time in hospital had been.
But among the doctor's notes he also found transcripts of the mother's conversations with the medical staff.
"It was nice to read her voice," he says. "She said she loved her husband and she liked the boy - I didn't really get a love, but I got a 'like' and I was glad to read that."
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Although they avoided talking about Irene for almost 40 years, Ian and his father are now much more open with each other.
"It was necessary to have that conversation, which was very beneficial for both of us," says Ian.
"I have a better understanding of what my father was going through and maybe he just didn't know how to talk about it."
Don is also relieved to finally have a better understanding of what happened to his wife.
“I couldn't tell him because I didn't know anything,” he says. ."
The box of Irene's belongings, which had been sitting untouched in Don's attic for years, is now in Ian's house.
The gilded beauty kit, wedding charms and ballerina music box are still safe under the lid.
From time to time, Ian and his daughters peek inside and look through things that once belonged to the girls' grandmother, who they never had the chance to meet, and talk about Irene and why she's not around to see them grow up.
"It's good when you can subtly introduce those themes, as it's important for children to learn about mental health," says Ian.
When Ian was growing up, no pictures of Irene were prominent in the house, but Ian's eldest daughter keeps a picture of her grandmother in her bedroom, and a portrait of Ian's mother and father, taken in the XNUMXs, sits on his desk.
"I feel like I've developed a relationship with Irene now, she's not something that's talked about in the house anymore," says Ian.
"I got a 'like' on her medical record, but the people I found told me how much she loved me, and that meant a lot to me."
Photos provided by Ian Cunningham, except where otherwise noted.
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