In a new programme on RTE Radio 1 on December 29th, at 4pm, RTÉ broadcaster Brian O’Connell (@oconnellbrian) reflects on the loss of his close friend, musician Brian Carey, to suicide this year. Here Brian talks about that loss and way he decided to make a programme to examine grief….
In April I was in my sitting room when I got the phone call to say one of my closest friends had died. I thought there was some mistake, that the caller, a mutual friend, had mixed me up with someone else. He’d gotten the number wrong maybe or this was some elaborate hoax or prank. Good one. Ha. Ha.
I remember having to sit down on the couch to try and physically take on board the details.
Brian was dead. He was sorry. It looked like, well, you know… There wasn’t much more he could say. The coded unsaid was clear.
Brian and I had been friends for about 17 years. We were both blow-ins to Cork. He from Dublin, me from Ennis, and we shared something of an outsiders’ view of our adopted city. We both became fathers at roughly the same time. We lived together at times, took a holiday together, shared a passion for boxing and Bob Dylan. Over the years, we’d developed our own wink and nod language of delight, our own shorthand, and had jokes that ran for years, pretending often we were old prized fighters ready at any moment to come out of retirement. “I think you’ve still got a little bit left in the basement Briany,” he would say, as I’d shadow box fervently and we’d both break into laughter.
At one point Brian got a dog, and for years after, we pretended he had actually ordered a cat, and every time I called to Brian we’d both look at the dog, this big Labrador, and tell each other the same joke. I’d say: “That really is the funniest looking kitty I’ve ever seen Brian.” And he’d say something like, “well the guy in the rescue centre assured me it was a cat..”
Silly stuff, I know. But jokes only we got.
I knew Brian had depression over the years, he was quite open about it. I knew too last year he struggled during the summer. He phoned me to say he wasn’t in a good place. He was going into the A&E, but he was okay he didn’t need anything and not to worry.
We chatted about it a week later and I always remember him saying to me, “I had to get help, I surprised myself how dark a place I had gotten into.” But he had counselling organised and seemed to be back to his old self soon after. He came to my 40th birthday that summer, and as he always did, brought his guitar and played and sang. Birthdays, weddings, New Year’s Eve, Brian was always there with a guitar. I knew his songs off by heart. Like this one which, when I listen to it now, of course, all I can hear is depression…
“And you know sometimes we can admit
That all the barriers broken down
Just how hard it can get
When the walls we build are too high to climb
And you know sometimes you can escape
When all the days they’re so ordinary
The wind blows hard but who can tell
When there’s every which way to turn
Oh Yeah I know
We’re only running up that hill
Only to find
There’s nothing there…”
Ultimately the hill proved too high for Brian to run up. In the days and weeks after he died the grief hit me in waves. Crashing violently at first, unrelenting, then getting into its own rhythm, ebbing and flowing. I could have done more. I should have done more. Why wasn’t I more present? The day he died I was working very close to his house and it crossed my mind to call up to him. I didn’t. We hadn’t seen each other as much in the weeks before he died. Now I know it’s because he was struggling. I wasn’t alert enough to it. Suicide leaves so many questions, and part of me will always feel guilt. Always feel I could have done more, could have been a better friend, could have saved him…
I’ve often reported on the need to be upfront around issues to do with mental health, and yet here it was hiding in plain sight beside me and I couldn’t see it or didn’t want to see it.
I’d never told Brian I loved him. It’s not a thing Irish male friends did. And yet the grief was so raw, so uncontrollable, it was clear I did. Previous to this the only grief I’d felt was when my grandparents had died, and although that was emotional, they had lived long lives.
Brian was 46. A father to a beautiful daughter I’d known since she was a toddler.
I wanted to talk about grief, to try make sense of this emotion we will all experience.
After the initial days and weeks passed, I remember sitting one day in a coffee shop and thinking grief was actually quite a beautiful thing on one level. It takes you by the hand and shows you how much you really cared for someone. Could grief ever be good, when it was prompted by such a negative?
I’ve made a programme, Life After Loss, which airs on RTE Radio 1 on December 29th at 4pm and in it I try to make sense of grief, and meet with people who’ve developed their own relationship with it. People like Mick Heaney, son of the late Nobel prize winning poet Seamus, and Irish Times writer Laura Kennedy who has written so movingly about the loss of her own mother to cancer. What I’ve learned is that everyone experiences grief differently, and that you have to in a way form your own personal relationship with it, a relationship that allows you to both acknowledge your grief but also to not be weighed down by it.
I’ve learned that as time goes on, it’s not so much the big events that catch you out, such as the birthdays or the Christmas Days, but for me grief can often be hiding in the mundane, the ordinary life events, a song on a radio, or the way someone catches your eye on the street. I’ve learned too never to take friendship for granted again, to be overcautious when it comes to the mental health of those around me, and to be very direct when trying to ascertain whether or not someone may be suicidal.
None of this of course will bring back my friend. I miss him, and I miss our friendship. I miss the shorthand of it, the decades of back references and in-jokes, the feeling of knowing that there was someone on the end of a phone that got you.
One of the quotes that struck me most in recent months was a line in a letter written by Queen Elizabeth II to families of missing victims shortly after 9/11. She said: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” It’s a hell of a price to pay….
You can listen to Brian’s show ‘Life After Loss’ on RTE Radio 1 on December 29th at 4pm – Produced and Presented by Brian O’Connell
Twitter: #lifeafterloss
Help information
If you need help please talk to friends, family, a GP, therapist or one of the free confidential helpline services. For a full list of national mental health services see yourmentalhealth.ie.
- Samaritans 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org
- Pieta House National Suicide Helpline 1800 247 247 or email mary@pieta.ie – (suicide prevention, self-harm, bereavement) or text HELP to 51444 (standard message rates apply)
- Aware 1800 80 48 48 (depression, anxiety)
If living in Ireland you can find accredited therapists in your area here:
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