Gary Speed's suicide at the age of 42 is a shocking tragedy.
A retired professional sportsman with a young family, with no financial worries and with a promising career as an international manager apparently taking his life just four weeks before Christmas at his family home is simply awful.
We can only sympathise with his family, his friends, colleagues and the many people in the football world who he has left behind.
And his death is all the more shocking for the fact he was on Football Focus yesterday lunchtime, seemingly happy and talking positively about his future.
Making sense of the death is all the harder because it is appears it was suicide.
I don't know Gary Speed and I don't know what was in his mind this morning when he apparently took his own life.
But I lost my uncle in exactly the same way nine years ago and fully understand the mess of unanswered questions this kind of act leaves behind.
Bizarrely, in Norwich City circles, my uncle Alan took his life in May 2002, the Monday after Norwich had lost the play-off final to Birmingham.
I'll say at this point that he wasn't a Norwich fan and his death had nothing to do with football.
I'd driven to the game in Cardiff with my girlfriend at the time and a friend and, as depressed as we were after a long drive back to Norfolk having lost to Birmingham on penalties, those feelings were soon put into perspective the following day.
After I'd been at work I came home to a phone call from my mum telling me my uncle had hanged himself a few hours earlier. He was 63.
Suddenly my family looked for questions and answers.
I'd heard from my mum that he'd been "depressed" for a few weeks, but that was it. He'd been out on the Sunday with my auntie and they'd had Sunday lunch.
Tellingly, my auntie recalled after the suicide that she remembered seeing a length of rope in the back of his car on the Sunday.
A day later she came home from work and found that length of rope around my uncle's neck.
At the funeral, she was a mess. Everyone was a mess. It seemed so wrong that we'd all taken time to gather for a funeral for someone who actually wanted to be dead.
All that feeling of love for him was tainted by the complete shambles he'd left behind in a split second decision. He'd left behind a wife, his mother, his children, grandchildren and potential retirement in a year or two when all that hard work would have paid off and he would have perhaps had time to get help.
People talked about him being selfish and that is what suicide is, but it's an illness, a condition, a decline into a world were rational becomes irrational and that can happen at an alarmingly strict pace.
My uncle had worked in a technical industry for many many years and was good at his job, but in the light of changing technology he felt under immense pressure to learn new skills and to make changes to his working life.
And, for whatever reason, he felt he couldn't handle it.
We knew he had a form of depression, but we didn't know the extent of it. And that is what suicide is. A slow-burning lingering sense of doubts that can gather at great pace until time, circumstance and conditions mean there is no other way. Rationality vanishes and a black fog covers all other options. What may have been a laughable possible option suddenly becomes the only option.
I feel for Gary Speed. I feel for whoever found him this morning. My auntie never got over that sight and although she has a new partner, I am sure she sees her husband's lifeless body in her head every day.
We can only try and appreciate what was going on in Gary Speed's head this morning and try and understand what he was going through. But in my experience of dealing with a family suicide, you never really know the extent of it.
The only positive thing is that Gary is at peace now. He's got there in a violent and shocking way and he will be missed by thousands and thousands of people, but tonight he's finally in the place he wants to be in.
Rest in peace
Gary Speed
1969-2011
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