Suddenly ten years have passed since Clio brought the congregation to tears singing Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ at my wedding, and my husband is waking me with terrible news shining through his phone. Clio’s suicide, reported last week, made minor headlines – never a tabloid-friendly celebrity, the impact she had had always been on the fringes. Clio’s suicide note, released three days later, however, seems to have split the country wide open. I’m aware that even by writing about that note I’m contravening all the suggested ethics rules around reporting suicides, but the details have been so widely circulated by now that it’s impossible not to write about Clio without discussing it.

Clio’s note suggested that, after a lifetime of activism, actually killing herself was the only way a woman, especially an older woman, would actually be listened to in this public arena of jeering and opprobrium that exists now instead of civil discourse. It’s manifestly not true – one has only to look at the ages of female MPs, mostly Clio’s peers, or the happily increasing number of female political journalists making good and salient points about our current political crisis on a daily basis – but that anybody could come to feel that, and actually go forward with their action, suggests a serious crisis in the ways we communicate with each other these days. It’s one of the main reasons why I feel that, in this case, the causes Clio claimed for her suicide should be examined. We need to be looking at this.

Then there were the cynics who scoffed at her even in death. To them, I can only say that the person who pulled an injured stranger out of a tangle of bodies and chaos and protected her for five hours is exactly the person who would think to lay down herself as a final protest against what she described as ‘a country sleepwalking into fascism’. No, of course you shouldn’t kill yourself over Brexit, or the treatment of asylum seekers. Stay alive and keep fighting if it means that much to you. But Clio felt things more intensely and keenly than the rest of us seem to; and that intensity motivated her actions. She managed to hold on to her moral code while all around were losing theirs; never filtered anything through a layer of irony in order to block life out.