Gathering remembers those lost to suicide
Mark, who she describes as a caring, quiet, hard-working 22 year old, had never shown any real danger signs of being in such distress, even now, more than four years later, she still can’t pinpoint what led him to take his life.
As a teenager, Mark had gone through a bad patch, drinking and getting in trouble with gardaí, but once he turned 18 and took up a position as an apprentice mason he became more serious.
“He loved work and was very happy, his mother says, but he had been badly affected by the death of his best friend in a car crash.
“Although he was outgoing and had loads of friends, after the accident I did notice he withdrew into himself. Sometimes he didn’t want to get up for work but I thought it was just normal Monday morning blues,” she says.
“He began to spend a lot of time in his room, but I thought he was just being sensible and he had a television up there so I didn’t think much of it.”
So although his troubles were not apparent from the outside, inside Mark was struggling with life. Bernadine recalled the hours leading up to a moment which would change her life forever.
“Mark went out that Friday night. I saw him Saturday morning and then he went off that afternoon,” she says.
The mother of two was somewhat alarmed when the guards called to the door on Sunday morning asking if he had come home. “When the guards called I thought ‘what has he done’, but then I realised something was wrong.”
Bernadine says she can recall screaming the house down when they told her what had happened, and later going to the morgue.
“I remember going to the morgue on my own and identifying him. Looking back now I wonder why I didn’t stay with him longer.”
Months after his death, the family found a note Mark had left. It was stuck to his mattress. It said ‘I am so sorry and pray for forgiveness every day, sorry Mam’. “I knew then he had planned it, and that he knew he was leaving the house that day to do it and that it was not a spur of the moment thing.
“I often wonder what he was thinking about on that two-mile walk to such a lonely place where he took his life.”
Bernadine was in shock and went into counselling almost straight away. She spent at least a year in “survival mode”, she says, getting by day to day. “I work as a learning disability nurse so I went back to work and got by with the help of work friends and family. The first three years were very tough. People always say it will get easier, and I never believed it but although I still think about Mark every single day, it is a little bit easier now.”
Bernadine gets great comfort from being involved with the organisation Console, which provides counselling to people bereaved by suicide. She works with them to raise awareness, and was involved in a documentary — I see Darkness. The Cobh woman was one of some 3,000 who gathered yesterday to remember people lost to suicide.
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