A married couple in Romania have taken their own lives after losing their son to cancer.
The couple, who have not been named, were found close to the body of their nine-year-old boy, Cristian Dimitris Arava, in their family apartment in the city of Constanta.
The heartbreaking deaths reportedly happened just after Cristian passed away. It was neigbours who found the couple, who were both aged 46.
According to prosecutor Sadic Zafer, it appeared both the woman and the man killed themselves in the same way. Her body was laid next to her child’s and covered with a blanket.
The man was found in the kitchen.
Shortly after their son passed away, his parents wrote a 13-page farewell letter. According to investigators, it spoke of how the parents dealt with the stress, grief and heartache, which began when their son was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
In a blog post written seven years ago, Cristian’s mum wrote:
I felt like I was dying myself when I heard the diagnosis. I can’t express the pain that two parents feel when finding such terrible news about their child. He was only two years old.
Unfortunately, Cristian’s condition grew worse as time went on. Hope for the young boy started to fall away as the tumour continued to grow, and surgeons eventually said that surgery would be impossible.
The blog post closed with:
Our only hope that Cristian is a lucky child and the tumour will stop growing is now shattered. The thought that every moment could be fatal, it drives me crazy.
Suicide takes more lives than all forms of violence, including homicide, terrorism, armed conflict and executions, UNILAD reported on World Suicide Day last year.
According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was 2015’s second-leading cause of death in the US for 15- to 24-year-olds, behind unintentional injury, with 5,491 people in that age range alone taking their own lives. 4,359 were males, while 1,132 were females.
According to the Office For National Statistics (ONS), there were 6,507 suicides registered in the UK in 2018.
Of the registered deaths, three-quarters (4,903) were men. In the UK, Scotland had the highest suicide rate, with 16.1 deaths per every 100,000 persons (784 deaths).
The ONS report also says the most common method of suicide in the UK was hanging, accounting for 59.4% of all suicides among males and 45% of all suicides among females.
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues and want to speak to someone in confidence, please don’t suffer alone. Call Samaritans for free on their anonymous 24-hour phone line on 116 123.
After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.