‘You have to give yourself permission in grief to feel joy and live your life again’
THEY say the greatest gift a person can have in life is the tendency towards an optimistic disposition.
Teodora Sutra is the embodiment of it.
Her bubbly laugh bounces around a small cafe in the Dublin sunshine. The perfect accompaniment to her creamy blonde hair and bright blue eyes — she is sunshine both inside and out. What no-one could possibly tell is that she is carrying the pain of a tragedy almost too awful to comprehend.
In 2013, Teo lost her nineyear-old sister Gabriela in a house fire. What would have been Gabriela’s 14th birthday passed recently.
“She would have been starting to become a young woman,” says Teo. “I thought in time it would go away, the pain, but it never will.”
On the fateful night Gabriela was dropped off by her parents — Aidan O’Rourke and Zane Sutra — to spend the night with her grandmother while they visited Enniscorthy town for a quiet dinner in a restaurant owned by independent TD Mick Wallace.
Aidan and Zane arrived back at his mother’s home at 12.30am to find the house was engulfed in flames. Smoke billowed through the roof. Aidan smashed through windows in a desperate effort to save his mother and daughter. But it was too late.
For Teo, the tragedy unfolded when she woke at 5am in the morning to dozens of missed calls.
“I called straight back and my mum answered. She was in tears. She said ‘Gabby’s gone.’ I said ‘what do you mean she’s gone? ‘She said: she’s gone.’
“‘Where?’, I asked. ‘Where is she gone? I couldn’t understand it. But my mum just kept crying.” She pauses for a moment to steady herself. “And then she told me and I just started bawling and crying. I remember not believing it. I thought maybe she is still going to find her. And then I thought ‘but it’s four hours since mum first called. They would have found her if she was missing. It was such a hard phone call because I wasn’t there with her... Gabby was so, so tiny. that’s the hardest part.”
Now, almost five years later, Teo says it has been a long road but it has inspired her to be happy and to live her life to the fullest: “I was never angry [at God or bad fortune] or the injustice of it all,” she says. “It’s not in my genetics. I was just incredibly sad. For months, I cried every day. Gabby was so happy and so positive and loved nature. A real hippy baby. And she loved life. So she was the embodiment of a lesson to live life to the full and not to worry about silly things. Because you could be gone in the morning. She was only nine when she died. So you never know. It didn’t make me not want to live life, if anything, it has made me want to live it more.”
She says the depths of grief have taught her that you “have to let go and be happy”.
“Many people who go through something like this struggle with that emotion,” she says. “My mum very much still is. For a long time, she couldn’t let it go even for a minute. She said to me the other day ‘you almost feel that people have an automatic view of how you are going to be because they are thinking of what happened’. So they expect her to be sad and she almost feels guilty for being happy. I told her that it is inspiring if she can be happy again after dealing with such a huge tragedy. I try to reassure her that you have to give yourself permission to live life and be happy. It’s hard enough to find any joy again without having to feel guilty when you do.”
Her tendency to look towards the light in life has resonated in her work. Her early teens were blighted with daily back pain. She tried to dismiss it as an injury she picked up while playing and at 14 her mother entered her in Ireland’s Supermodel of the World competition.
Dressed in old flared jeans, runners and with her hair scrapped back with no make-up, she felt out of place among a sea of girls sporting full hair and makeup and tottering past her in glamorous dresses and high heels.
But 1st Option Models Management agency plucked her from the crowd and she went on to win the nationwide competition. At 15, she was travelling from her home in Wexford to Dublin on her own to work. Her first job was modelling Vera Wang wedding dresses for Brown Thomas. But still the pain wouldn’t shift. She visited her doctor, who diagnosed her with both mild spina bifida “when the lower vertebrae of your spine don’t develop properly”, Teo explains, and scoliosis, “a curved spine”.
She goes to the gym daily to exercise her lower back and keep the pain at bay and has not let it affect her career as one of Ireland’s most indemand models.
She jokes at the rearrangement she has to make for photographs. “I do notice that one shoulder is a little higher than the other — so in pictures I have to stand dead straight but I am not 100pc symmetrical, I am a little bit crooked, it is so funny,” she laughs.
Now, following through on her promise to squeeze the most out of life, she has recently returned from seven months of travelling the world. Taking in the length and breadth of Europe first, she went on to explore Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Peru, and finished her adventure in New Zealand.
Posting photographs of sitting at the top of Mount Bromo volcano or trekking through the Amazon rainforest, she took in mountain-top sunrises and went on boat trips in crocodile-infested waters, reinforcing her preference for real experience over material possessions.
“I don’t spend a lot of money on clothes, I don’t have any designer handbags but I have been to a lot of really beautiful places and I have done a lot of things like sky dives and it’s fun to have good memories that last.
“When I am old, that’s what I will remember — not a handbag. I want to keep travelling forever and see every country in the world.”
‘They expect her to be sad, so she almost feels guilty for being happy’