'I wish he'd come and talked'

Lifeline - understanding Suicide: Suicide can tear families apart - or bring them closer, says Cáit Wallace, whose brother took his own life. She talks to Carl O'Brien, Social Affairs Correspondent, in the second of a three-part series

Dressed in a pair of flip-flops and an old white jumper, Cáit Wallace pushed past her younger brother and scrambled up the muddy laneway. She pushed though one gate, then another, past a parked tractor. And, suddenly, she stopped.

A million questions, worries and fears coursed through her head. Her brother had said Pat was dead. But maybe there had been a mistake? Maybe he could still be saved? Maybe it was someone else? As she stopped, she saw cattle gathered around the ramshackle old shed on the family farm. They were looking in the open door. Inside were neatly stacked bales of hay. And there he was, her 27-year-old brother, hanging from a rope.

"I stood there and collapsed to my hunkers. I remember grabbing my hair and screaming. I couldn't cry. It was shock, I felt numb," says Cáit (34), looking out the window of her sister's house towards the shed, the view partly obscured by trees and hedges.

"There are no answers. You can sit in your chair from when you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night asking yourself, why? Pat had a reason for doing it. I was never angry with Pat for doing it. Other members of the family were, I was never angry with him.

"I wished he had come and talked to us. I felt that whatever he was going through - I had a knowledge of depression, but I didn't realise he was going through it . . . If he had said, 'I feel I can't live any more', or 'there's something wrong', we would have helped him."

It is four years since Cáit's brother Pat Kerins died on the family farm in Soxline, just outside the Co Leitrim village of Dromahair. Three families within a few miles of each other have all lost young men in their 20s to suicide during this time.

In January last year Gary McTernan from Dromahair (24) killed himself, just two days after his birthday. The next young man to die was 26-year-old Kevin Fallon, who lived five miles away in Creevelea, Drumkeerin. In the past year alone around nine people died by suicide in Co Leitrim, a frightening figure given the population of the county is just 26,000.

The three families in the Dromahair area whose lives have been affected by suicide have decided to speak out. At the weekend, hundreds of people attended a conference in the village which they organised, entitled: "Suicide: Prevention and Awareness". The McTernan, Fallon and Kerins families have established a committee called STOP: Suicide: Teach, Organise, Prevent (see panel).

What gnaws at Cáit now are the small but significant signs that something might have been wrong with Pat. They never struck her at the time, but, looking back, they all form part of the same pattern of behaviour.

"I remember one day he had come back with clothes, jumpers and jeans. I remember saying: 'where did you get the jumpers? They're lovely.' And he said, 'sure take them, I may never wear them.' It was like he was giving away his personal belongings.

"And then he bought a car - a green Fiesta - two weeks before he died. And he had to have this car. And he said to me: 'I may never drive it, it's there if you want it.' I never thought more of it. He never got to drive the car. He should have been the happiest man on earth to have the car - it was just a second-hand car, but it meant everything to him. And he had to buy it. And yet he never drove it. It was so strange.

"On the Thursday morning [ the day he died] he was feeding cattle, working on the farm. I was at home, minding the nephew. When Pat came back to the house I saw him staring at me, as if he was going to tell me something, but I didn't get the chance to ask him. He smiled at me. That's what I remember."

While these signs makes sense now, Cáit says it was hard to see them, given that - outwardly at least - Pat still seemed to be his old self.

"He was happy, cheerful, gentle, kind, loving," she says, smiling. "He wouldn't harm a fly. Loved to have a pint, loved to have the craic, loved singing. He loved football, to see Leitrim play, that was his big thing. Saturday night was his night, he had so many friends, we never realised how many until he died, they fought to bring his coffin to the grave.

"He had the attitude where, if you were worried about something, he's say, sure what are you worried about? There won't be a word about it this time next year. But looking back now, though, I can see he was depressed. There was the loss of weight, not sleeping at night - which you could tell by the amount of fags out the window.

"He seemed like the happiest fella around. But it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment . It's not as if he went up to the shed and it just happened. He had it planned."

There are aspects to the State's handling of suicide deaths - or any sudden deaths - which make dealing with bereavement even more difficult, she says. The involvement of gardaí and the visit to the morgue were hard, she says, but the inquest three months after his death was the most difficult of all.

She, her sister Mary Teresa and brother Francis sat through several hours of inquest details, waiting for Pat's name to be called.

"We were among the last to be called. The second-last one was about two young fellas dying in a car crash. It was a horrific death, the coroner went through everything. I watched one sister fall off her chair, down onto the ground. She had to be carried out of the courtroom. I was crying, Mary Teresa was crying. I wanted to go over and hug that family," she says.

"Then Francis took the stand and he wasn't able to speak, he was in hysterics crying. The coroner stopped the whole lot and said, 'We've heard enough'.

"People were sympathetic to us, but I got up, walked out of that court and said that no one should have to go through that. I was so mad and so angry that the system could put people through that."

She says inquests should be handled in a more sensitive manner and that families should be given some kind of privacy away from the public glare.

To this day, even five years on, each day can be difficult. On any given day someone in the family feels down about his death in some way or another.

"It's the kind of thing that can rip a family apart, but it can also bring a family so much closer together. You can become so possessive of the family. And you wonder, would some of the rest of the boys do it on us? I absolutely murdered them with love, running after them, ringing them, asking when they'd be home, you become so protective.

"You never get a good day in our house, there's always someone upset - every day that you hear of someone who has died by suicide. We reacted differently. Some of the family were angry, some cried a lot.

"I went up to the grave three or four times a day, the boys preferred not to. Everyone deals with it in their own way," she says.

"I couldn't sleep for a month afterwards, I couldn't go to bed, so when my mother and father went to bed, I'd stay up cleaning. When I saw 6 or 7 coming [on the clock], I knew they were getting up, so I could go to bed. I'm not sure why."

One of the reasons STOP has been set up by families in Co Leitrim is because of what they see as inadequate State services, such as counselling or bereavement therapy.

Cáit says many families feel isolated, without any form of intervention from the health services.

"We needed someone to come out and say 'this is what the next few days would be like', or to say, 'we're here to help'. If we could pick up the phone and say, 'we're having a bad day', or whatever, that would have meant a lot. Our neighbours and our friends helped enormously, but there was no health service response. That needs to change."

Cáit's hunger for knowledge and attempts to understand why Pat died prompted her to read widely on the subject and attend conferences on the issue.

"I remember going to a seminar in Limerick. I had a lump in my throat and heaviness in my chest after Patdied. I remember two speakers talking about the different stages of bereavement. One person described the symptoms I had and said that's part of bereavement. I remember it felt like a weight lifted from me.

"I said we need something like this in the north west - the signs are there to be spotted in people with depression, and we need to help bereaved people to talk. That's what the group is about."

While the group is celebrating a successful conference at the weekend, the work will continue, she says.

"We have to educate people more. We need the government involved. We need more money. We can't fund this support group on our own. But we're not going to stand down, either," she says.

"We'll never get over Pat, and there isn't a day that goes by that you don't think of him, the way he died, and all the pain he was going through. And yet, just a couple of weeks beforehand, he was looking at us and saying that we mightn't be around . . . to think Pat actually knew . . . what was going through his head in the dead of night? These days, if I find I'm having a bad day, I ask Pat to help get me through it. And that's the way I've gotten through things - you've got the power, I say, you've got the strength; you help me get through this now. And we do feel him with us. He has helped us through things."

Help at hand

STOP (Suicide: Teach, Organise, Prevent), Leitrim, Mary McTernan (STOP secretary), Market Street, Dromahair, Co Leitrim, 071-9164286. E-mail: stopsuicide@eircom.net

Console (Bereaved by Suicide Foundation) helpline 1800-201-890. E-mail:info@console.ie

Aware (helping to defeat depression) helpline 1890-303-302. www.aware.ie

Samaritans, Republic: 1850-609090, North: 08457-909090. E-mail: jo@samaritans.org