RTE’s Brian O’Connell on the suicide of his best friend,
Brian O’Connell lost his best friend to suicide. We should never be complacent when someone is in a dark place, he tells Niamh Horan
RTE presenter Brian O’Connell and his lifelong friend Brian Carey had a special bond. They enjoyed in-jokes, their own coded language and almost 20 years of shared life experiences.
The day O’Connell got the call to say that his friend was dead, all of that was lost in an instant.
At the age of 46, Brian Carey, singer-song-writer and the father of a 17-yearold girl had taken his own life.
The death of his friend hit O’Connell like a thunderbolt.
“I couldn’t physically get up. There was a feeling of being weighed down, like this thing had its foot on my back. I have heard people describe it as being underwater.
“I remember looking out at the woods in front of our house and the birds were singing in the trees. I thought it was vulgar that the world continued on as if nothing had happened.”
O’Connell first came to public prominence after his powerful account of his battle with alcohol addiction. Now he has chosen to examine another taboo subject — our relationship with grief.
Detailing his own personal loss last April, the one-off Christmas special on loss in all its forms acknowledges that this time of year isn’t necessarily a happy time for everyone.
O’Connell hopes it will help people who are struggling with their own feelings of sadness.
He also shares another powerful message about watching out for loved ones who are suffering from depression. During one of their conversations after Carey had gone through a particularly bad patch, Carey told O’Connell: “I surprised myself how dark a place I had gotten into.”
It was a warning sign that, looking back, O’Connell now wished he had grasped.
“I didn’t ask, ‘What do you mean exactly? Do you mean you were considering suicide?’ If I had the time back I would have been more direct.
“I didn’t know if he wanted to go there so I didn’t go as deep into it with him as I should have.
“We were in touch a lot and I was obviously concerned but he was getting counselling and I felt he was in the hands of professionals.”
Rather than pull back from difficult conversations, O’Connell says he would warn people not to be complacent: “You may think you know the person and you may think it is something the person might never do, but I think you have to imagine that something can take over. The person who died, I don’t recognise. That’s from all the conversations I would have had with him about mental health over the years, I never thought he would do this. That’s the big thing I learned from it. Not to be complacent in any way. Be over-cautious.”
One of the contributors to the documentary is Brian Carey’s daughter, Fia.
O’Connell says one of the most difficult things he has had to do since was write to her on her 17 th birthday.
“I had picked up a card and put off posting it because it was something I would have never done in the past and something Brian would always have done obviously… it just felt like such a shame that all those moments and events in her life to come would not be marked by him and I somehow felt I had to, in a way, mark them for her and there will be a lot more moments like that in the years ahead.”
O’Connell says one of the hardest things to take in is the fact that his friend had fought so hard to live.
“After he died, I was in his house and his bag was there and I could see in his bag, there were self-help books, meditation books, yoga books. He had bought a piano and he was learning it and using it as a form of therapy. He had tried everything, he was really, really trying to stay alive,” he says.
On the timing of the programme, O’Connell says: “For a lot of people, Christmas is a time when their loss is felt more acutely and I wanted to acknowledge that and at the same time, give people a guide and a few tools on how to overcome it or get through it or at least to have the conversation at Christmas.”
But he says, “You know, sometimes it isn’t the birthdays or the Christmas days that get you, it’s the wet Wednesday. Grief is hiding in the mundane, and in such unexpected ways.” ‘Life After Loss’ airs on RTE Radio 1 on December 29