Radio star's secret life coming to grips with grief

Each of us has a secret life behind the public face. An inner drama flowing beneath the business of workday chores and superficial pleasantries. Many of us use the distraction of TV and radio chatter to mask the inner dialogue which constantly grapples with unresolved personal issues - stories that will probably never make a headline in The Irish Times or the RTE news if we're lucky.

One of the men who produces the distracting chatter did something extraordinary. On RTE TV's Would You Believe last Tuesday night, Liveline's Joe Duffy revealed his secret life in a way which is new for Irish male media personalities. He broke down as he spoke of his younger brother's death in a car crash. In doing so, he also showed us what it is like to be unlucky enough to experience a tragedy which finds its way into the headlines.

Duffy was sitting in for Marian Finucane on Liveline on August 29th, 1991, when, as the show was signing off, he heard a news headline that a man had been killed on the road. How terrible, he thought to himself, then moved on. As he left the radio centre, gardai were waiting. The dead man was Duffy's 25-year-old brother, Aidan, to whom Duffy had been like a father.

It was left to Duffy to tell his mother the heart-breaking news.

As Duffy shared his torment with the viewers, many were amazed to see that behind the jocular showman and father of triplets is a tortured soul, still grieving for the death of his brother in a car crash. Beneath the sensible, professional, avuncular persona which listens to other people's problems on a daily basis, there is a vulnerable man who still remembers pushing his baby brother, 10 years younger than him, in his box pram on the streets of Ballyfermot.

Duffy himself says that he felt numb watching the broadcast, which he watched with his hands in front of his face, peering through his fingers. It was strange, he says, to see himself mirrored back. Until the interview - which, coincidentally, took place on his dead brother's birthday - Duffy had been afraid to talk about his brother's death because "men don't cry".

Duffy had not even been able to look at his brother's picture. And eight years after the death, Duffy still could not talk about his brother without crying. He feared that people would think he needed to see a psychologist.

Once or twice after the filming, he considered calling the Would You Believe team and asking it to edit out these moments of private grief, but to his credit he thought better of it.

His friends are not surprised. They say that for Duffy there is no problem in letting the mask slip because there is no mask. The Duffy we hear on Liveline is the only Duffy there is - a sincere, intense, ambitious man who has not let fame turn him into a prima donna, as can happen.

Duffy says he is "stunned" by the reaction to his appearance on Would You Believe. The morning after, he went for his usual swim, then collected his Irish Times at 7.40 a.m. in a local shop. "A man came up to me and was crying for his own son who was killed."

Since then, the expressions of empathy have not stopped. "It's quite incredible. I'm quite taken aback at all the letters, the emails, the people coming up to me on the street. I seem to have connected on a number levels with people I don't even know.

"Many of the letters begin by saying: `It is now 10 past midnight on Tuesday night and I have to say it reminded me of my own brother or son'. "

Duffy has found the letters helpful and the experience of sharing his grief and seeing it reflected back has offered him an unexpected opportunity for healing. As anyone who has experienced it knows, grief has a life of its own. Always a patient visitor, grief waits for its moment.

Now in his early 40s with young children, Duffy has reached the time of life when grief and the awareness of one's own mortality spring forth with greater vigour and demand to be addressed.

Guilt has been a huge issue for him. On one level, he feels guilty that while his brother died young, Duffy himself has done extraordinarily well - especially for a lad from Ballyfermot who had to blaze a trail through Trinity College Dublin for people from Ballyfermot to be accepted as equals.

Duffy also tormented himself with the thought that Aidan would not have died if Duffy had insisted that he get a new van. "The last conversation I had with Aidan, he was kicking the tyre of the van, saying: `I've been begging them to get me a new one' ". A few days later, the front wheel of the van collapsed and the van went out of control and careered under a truck.

Finding meaning in Aidan's death has led Duffy to visit twice the graves of second World War casualties in France. He has also been to the Vietnam war memorial in Washington DC, where he purchased a dogtag of a man who died on the same day that Aidan was born, 19-1-66. Duffy finds comfort in being in a place where dead young men are remembered.

Unintentionally, he has provided comfort by sharing his feelings publicly. It hasn't done his career any harm either. The irony is that when Would You Believe first asked him for an interview, he declined on the grounds that he didn't warrant it. After the broadcast, Duffy was amazed to hear that Would You Believe got the highest ratings for the programme all season.