Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I told Dean, we all love you to bits so just talk to us. He would just say, ‘thanks lads but I’m fine’
OFFALY BROTHERS STILL COMING TO TERMS WITH SUICIDE OF TROUBLED TEAMMATE DEAN
BY
SHORTLY after word of Dean Morris’s death emerged last May, his friends and Rhode teammates Conor and Ruairi Mcnamee and Stephen Hannon visited the family home to pay their respects.
The news, while shocking, was not altogether surprising.
Dean, 29, had flirted with suicide on a couple of occasions and while football had helped to restore a sort of equilibrium to his life, those closest to him knew how fragile it was.
That’s why, despite the grief that must have been encircling her, his mother Dympna was largely conveying gratitude to the lads when they arrived at her door.
The manner in which they had rallied around him, she felt, had afforded her and the family an extra few years with Dean which they wouldn’t have enjoyed otherwise.
Because Dean’s company was to be enjoyed. Very much a social animal, he had a self-deprecating nature and would poke fun at himself, pointing out how, as Rhode’s long-serving sub goalkeeper, his five county medals made him the most decorated footballer in the village – on a medals-to-minutes ratio.
After a previous suicide attempt in 2016, he brought himself to the brink of finally winning one as a starter in 2019, but Ferbane swamped them in the county final.
“He used to always rip the piss out of himself as well and say that it was his fault,” says Conor. “That was the type of character he was.
Less than a week before his death, he showed Conor pictures of the new home he was about to move into with his girlfriend Jenny and her daughter Amelia. “We were all talking about it, how can he go from that? We all said, look, don’t try and figure it out because if you go down that rabbit hole you’ll drive yourself mad. As close as we were to him, we don’t know.
“You get to a point, and I did a few of the nights, you know when you’re on the beer, you think you have a lad, having really good conversations, getting down to it and I’d straight out ask him, ‘What’s going on?’ and he just always put the barrier up so there’s no point trying to figure it out properly. He wasn’t happy.
“There were a few times where I properly sat down and said, ‘We all love you to bits and if anything ever happens again, just talk to somebody’. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I really appreciate that, but I’m fine’ and pass it off.”
They were never convinced,
however, and lines of communication between those closest to him in the club and his family were always open.
“Anybody notice anything about Dean?” But even all that concentrated vigilance couldn’t keep his demons at bay indefinitely.
He was buried the day after Ruairi was one of five Rhode players that drove Offaly to a crucial League win over Tipperary en route to promotion to Division Two. The Morris family home is a few miles outside the village but people lined the road all the way to the church.
“His sister got out of the car and she was actually smiling,” Ruairi (right) recalls. “She was nearly overwhelmed. It wasn’t just a guard of honour from the footballers, it was a guard of honour nearly from the whole of Rhode.
“We’re in touch with the family still. Even on a night out, we’d always sit down and have a drink with them.”
Football had wrapped itself around
Dean following his darkest moments and the Mcnamee brothers threw themselves back into it after his death.
When that routine was removed after Rhode lost the county final to Tullamore after a replay last month, they realised that they had essentially been postponing their grief.
“The week or two after was horrendous,” says Conor. “You’ve no structure. You’re doing it because you want to win it for Dean, that’s getting you through, getting you through.
“Then that’s taken away, you haven’t won it for him and then everything kind of comes crashing in and there was two weeks when the two of us were flat, completely flat.”
“The family were the first people to come over to us and say, ‘Get over it. It’s only a game of football’,” says Ruairi.
FERMANAGH GAA STAR ON DEALING WITH PERSONAL TRAGEDY AMID ALL-IRELAND TRIUMPH: SEE PAGE 22