Help Anyssa Keep Home After Husband's Suicide

My sister, Anyssa Neumann, lost her husband of eight years, Alastair Putt, to suicide last summer and now risks losing her home. In December 2021, Alastair awoke to the sound of a stolen car slamming into their house—the second crash in three years—displacing them yet again and triggering a mental health crisis that escalated rapidly. Only after he was hospitalized did Anyssa learn that he had invested—and lost—a large sum of money intended for a mortgage. Nine months after the crash, Alastair took his own life.

Anyssa has until October 31 to pay off the £80,000 debt Alastair incurred ($100,000). Without your help, she will lose her home.

For the past year, Anyssa has tried ceaselessly to address this debt, to work with the bank, to rally experts and lawyers to her side, hoping to never have to ask for help. Despite all her efforts, the bank is calling Alastair’s loan due.

My family and I are urgently asking for help to prevent yet another traumatic loss. We are up against the clock. Every cent will go toward paying off this mortgage; even the smallest donations will help relieve this crippling burden and keep the bank at bay. Thank you for reading her story and lending your support.

How It Unfolded

Not one, but two car crashes. And a council that refuses to put up a barrier: On January 11, 2019, a car crashed into Anyssa and Alastair's house in London, displacing them for eight weeks while repairs were underway. Immediately, Anyssa and Alastair went to battle to have bollards installed. The governing council (Bromley) refused. Less than three years later, on December 12, 2021, another car (this one stolen) smashed into their house. The perpetrators fled the scene and were never caught. Because this second collision caused significant structural damage, the house was uninhabitable for sixteen months.

As musicians, Alastair and Anyssa lost not only their home but also their workspace. Alastair was a profoundly talented professional composer, choral tenor, and classical guitarist, and the house doubled as his office. The same goes for Anyssa, an American concert pianist and musicologist. The collision threw their careers into disarray.

Displacement, a pandemic, lockdowns, and a mental health crisis: After months of lockdown isolation and no work, Alastair began struggling with his mental health, and being forced from his home a second time triggered a mental breakdown. On January 21, 2022, he started spiraling. Over the following eight months, Anyssa did everything in her power to get him treatment, including leaving her university job, but his condition deteriorated rapidly until he was sectioned (forcibly admitted) and hospitalized. (See timeline of events.) On August 12, 2022, just five weeks after being discharged, Alastair took his own life. Anyssa has been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.

Now, she is frantically trying to save their home.

Alarming admission, financial disaster, bank’s demand: With his mental health slowly declining during lockdown, Alastair did not add Anyssa's name to a mortgage he took out for a possible house in Sweden, where Anyssa was working. When COVID restrictions thwarted their attempts to buy a house, instead of returning the money, Alastair invested it. Then the market plummeted, and he lost nearly all of it. Only after being sectioned did Alastair tell Anyssa what he had done.

Although Anyssa has petitioned the bank to add her name to the mortgage and sought legal help, Nationwide Bank is demanding that Anyssa pay off the entire balance of £78,571.41 (plus a monthly interest of £90.88) by October 31, 2023. Her request for an extension has gone unanswered. If she does not raise this sum by the deadline, Nationwide will start legal proceedings to evict her from her home of ten years. Anyssa is currently living off savings that will soon run out, and no bank or firm will lend money to a freelance musician whose income fluctuates. To make matters worse, Alastair had no life insurance, mortgage insurance, or pension. So unless Anyssa raises £80k in the next two months, she will be displaced for a third time, this time permanently, with nowhere to go, and, as of now, no job prospects.

Inadequate insurance, stalled repairs, below market value: Because Alastair bought the house before they were married, Anyssa did not know until after the second car crash that the amount the house was insured for was woefully inadequate.

The small Victorian cottage is a listed building, meaning the structure holds special architectural or historic interest. This status made the repairs especially convoluted and expensive, as materials had to exactly match the original construction.

Rebuilding the destroyed kitchen dragged on until late March 2023, grinding to a halt with every new obstacle. Not only did Bromley Council delay approving the construction but contractors realized the stonework was too damaged to be reused and had to order new, specially fabricated masonry. When the external structure, roof, and kitchen were finally restored, no insurance money remained for further internal repairs or relandscaping. So Anyssa rolled up her sleeves, rallied some friends, and tackled as much as she could herself, sanding, stripping, and painting for weeks.

But there is more work to be done. Both bathrooms are full of broken tiles, stubborn mold, leaking pipes, and splitting walls. The backyard, flooded for months because of the Bromley Council’s inaction on three broken pipes, needs to be relandscaped. The battered wood floors (casualties of the crash and the construction) and water-damaged walls (casualties of the damaged roof) have yet to be addressed. Interior walls and doors need repair. In a forced sale in its current condition, the house would sell well below its market value. Bromley Council’s refusal to install road protection depreciates the value further.

A forced sale would provide the money needed to repay the bank, but the amount left over would not be enough for Anyssa to find another house—enormously difficult in ordinary circumstances but even more so for a grieving widow. As a concert pianist, she cannot move into a flat. She needs a house that allows her to practice without disturbing others—either a detached house or a terraced house with a garden in which she could build a practice studio. She would not be able to afford a detached house in London (or anywhere else), if any detached houses are even to be found, and even semi-detached and terraced houses will be out of reach.

This house is now all that she has left, the one anchor to a career and life upended, the last thing that she hasn’t lost—yet.

Uncertainty among the ruins and a request for help: Anyssa went on unpaid leave from her postdoc at Uppsala University when Alastair's illness took a turn for the worse. After he died, she was granted bereavement leave. She has since resumed her job part-time, but her contract ends on October 15. Although she has applied for multiple jobs in the UK, she currently has no work beyond October, adding financial and career precarity to her many other challenges.

Among those challenges has been covering numerous unforeseen expenses resulting from her husband's tragic death, including funeral, cremation, and cemetery costs as well as costs for attorneys, accountants, and Alastair’s taxes—costs that have totaled more than £25,000 ($31,000). Most of these she has been able to pay with the last of their savings. She has also exhausted all avenues of charity and is deeply grateful for the financial support she has received from the Royal Society of Musicians, her family in the US, and Alastair’s family in the UK.

Anyssa and Alastair together: Alastair and Anyssa met in February 2013 while both holding artist residencies at the Banff Centre in Canada; he was working on composition commissions from the London Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and she was practicing for the 2013 Bach Competition in Würzburg. Although a native of California, Anyssa had already studied in New York, Berlin, Oxford, and Montreal and had moved to London in 2011 to start a PhD. Alastair grew up in London and had settled back there after university, so despite their far-flung meeting in the snowy forests of the Rocky Mountains, their relationship was able to grow naturally in London, and they married in June 2015. None of us could ever have imaged that 9 ½ years later, it would end in incomprehensible tragedy.

Anyssa alone: As a freelance artist, Anyssa has spent years building her career and establishing herself in the UK. At this difficult time, staying in a place where she is part of a community of colleagues is paramount to her recovery, offering her the best chance of work, of support.

Although Anyssa has soldiered on in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide, we have seen the tremendous toll it has taken on her mental and physical health. The challenges seem insurmountable, the future without hope. For any of us to be forced from our home through no fault of our own—even without suffering the devastating loss of a loved one—asks more of us than we can bear on our own. And that is why I am asking you to help my sister keep her house.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for any amount you can give. The smallest donation makes the biggest difference. And please share Anyssa’s story far and wide!

If you know Anyssa personally, you may donate to her directly, and I will update the progress meter to include your gift.