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New information on Nicholas Hughes

The media blitzkrieg surrounding the suicide of Nicholas Hughes has led many to immediately connect it to his mother's suicide in 1963. Ben Hoyle at The Times authored "Death of Ted Hughes 'drove his son Nicholas towards suicide'", a follow-up article to his March 23 news-breaking story.

In this article, he quotes one of Nicholas Hughes's oldest friends, Joe Saxton, in which Saxton's opinion is that it was the death of Ted Hughes - and not that of Sylvia Plath's - that had a direct relationship to Nicholas' mental health troubles, and ultimately his suicide.

While it is certainly more plausible for this to be the "cause" but unfortunately with suicide it is really all a mystery. Which in part has fuelled the conversity for almost five decades surrounding Sylvia Plath's death. Cancer and other causes of death are readily explainable and, to a certain degree, understandable. Suicide is the exact opposite. It is a private decision made for private reasons and no matter whether a note was left or not, Nicholas' reasons were his reasons there is not much more we can say about that. We want to be able to name something - place blame, whatever - in the absence of something concrete or tangible - like a tumor. But it really just makes us all look a bit desparate. I'm not a medical doctor and don't put much stock in psychobabble, but nothing everything is explainable and that is ok.

Mr. Saxton spoke with another friend of Nicholas's in Alaska and, according to the Hoyle article Nicholas was in a rough patch and "he just fell through the cracks in one brief moment". This is actually closer to Sylvia Plath's suicide, as anyone who has studied her final weeks well knows. Plath moved to London in December 1962 and was very busy fixing up her flat, making plans and commitments, seeing friends, and writing really wonderful prose and poetry. And then comes that weekend when she could no longer cope, and she, too, "fell through the cracks in one brief moment".

Ted Hughes, in letters to Keith Sagar, blamed the drug that Plath was put on for her suicide. Of all the theories and rationalizations for Plath suicide, this may fit more than anything else. It is quite possibly the only thing that "changed" in the last week or so of her life. If Nicholas, too, experienced adverse reactions to anti-depressant medication it could also have had an influence on the decision he made on March 16. What a hypocrite I am, trying to explain it!

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