Mum can’t fathom why
With future plans and loving family, death made no sense
“IT felt like my soul had been ripped out of my chest.”
As hard as she tried, Gina Geraghty could not feel happiness as she looked into the eyes of her first grandchild.
It didn’t make sense. Little Isla was beautiful and healthy. Perfect.
But the hangover of what happened just two days earlier was breaking Mrs Geraghty’s heart – and it still does.
“I looked at the baby and it was confusing,” Mrs Geraghty remembers. “It was every dramatic emotion. My world was so perfect but so empty.”
Her son Tristan had committed suicide on Sunday, November 1 in the family’s Arundel home while his loved ones were at a barbecue.
There was no hint. No signs he was in trouble, and no calls for help. While eating sausage sandwiches and laughing at family jokes, they had no idea the Runaway Bay rugby league junior was locked in his bedroom up the road at rock bottom.
“If I had have known something was wrong I would have stayed home that day,” Mrs Geraghty says nine months on.
“I would have told him I loved him over and over.”
Tristan had come off night shift at Vanity Nightclub in Surfers Paradise, where he’d managed to save thousands of dollars over the year that would help him buy his first car.
His pregnant sister Shantelle, 26, came home early from the lunch because she felt sick.
She found her baby brother on the floor two hours after they said “I love youse”.
“My husband (Steve) got the phone call only a few minutes after Shantelle left and I knew straight away something was wrong by the look on his face,” Mrs Geraghty says.
“I broke road rules. I needed to get home to my son.
“I could see by the scratches on his neck that he instantly regretted what he had done. He had tried to stop it from happening. That’s the hardest thing for me to think about.
“He just had a momentary lapse. He wasn’t thinking of me or all the love around him because if he was, he wouldn’t have done what he did. “He was disconnected from reality and tried to come back from it. And that scares me every day.” Mrs Geraghty asks herself the same question daily – why? Tristan had plans. He couldn’t wait to be an uncle to his sister’s now ninemonth-old daughter, Isla.
He wanted good grades at Aquinas College, and had goals to get his electrical trade.
He had rich pickings of best friends, with more than 20 mates lying on the front lawn for hours the night he died. Each one of them howling.
He yearned to travel every nook of Europe.
He was even prepared to give up footy because he knew he had to make a life for himself outside of the game.
All of life’s most exciting treasures gutted by a simple moment of self doubt.
Mrs Geraghty, who has set up a memorial to Tristan in her loungeroom, constantly thinks about the man her son was about to become.
“His wife would’ve been very lucky,” she says through tears. “He would’ve been a good dad too because he’s such a gentleman, so caring and so smart.
“It’s tough, but I’m just trying to remember the good memories with him.
“When I think about how much I miss his presence around the home and I can feel myself getting upset, I just try to smile knowing we had such special times together.
“When the paramedics were trying to revive him, I reached a point where I said ‘just let him go, let him be in peace’, and that’s what I still tell myself. He’s here, he’ll always be in my heart.”
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