What A Difference A Day Makes: Aaron McCormack on a call from home while abroad

Aaron McCormack recalls his cousin, Edward, as like an older brother. The chair of Cycle Against Suicide tells Helen O’Callaghan about the impact on him of Edward’s suicide – and about an organisation that helps people bring something positive out of a very tragic event in their life.

Aaron McCormack: "It’s a shock… Your mind goes quickly to… first, his wife, children, parents, siblings. And then you’re asking how, and why, and could anything have been done? Could I have done anything?"

I got the call in Boston – September 2013. I’d just started my day’s work as a biomedical researcher. My father rang – that was the first thing, it’s my job to ring him.

He said ‘I’ve got some very bad news. Your cousin, Edward, is dead’. For anyone in our diaspora, far from home, we know we’re going to get calls – I’d had a call a few years earlier: ‘you’d better come home, your mother has metastatic breast cancer’. So we know these calls might come.