Hope of light at the end of the tunnel

TRAGEDY is a part of life’s cycle. It touches everyone of us on the shoulder at some unknowable moment, telling us that’s it’s our time to cope with a broken heart, to fight our way out of the abyss left by the death of someone we loved with an intensity almost beyond expression.

All of us know that people around us, the ones who bring joy and constancy, a sense of it all being worthwhile to our lives, will die and that we will have mourned their passing and grieved for their absence.

Either that or they will mourn our death. There is no alternative, that’s the unalterable path ordained for every one of us.

So, try to imagine how much greater the grief, the crush of emotional devastation, faced by someone who has to accept that a person who was as important to them as the blood coursing through their veins felt the world so impossible that they believed they had no option but to take their own life.

Try to imagine the sense of pain felt by someone who has to cope with the realisation that their love, though reciprocated, was not enough to help a partner, a child or a real friend through the despair of depression to a better place where the idea of suicide could be put aside.

To a place where, even in the darkest time, possibility and hope were alive.

For some this is an overwhelming challenge, for others it becomes a life-defining process.

For others it is the beginning of a journey to a new life. A life that recognises the terrible pain and anger of a love lost to the world’s hardness but recognises too that resilience is a defining, celebratory part of being human.

A journey that recognises we will do all we can to survive and reach a point where grief is recognised, where a lost loved one is still loved and remembered but where the present can be celebrated too.

Today we are honoured and humbled to share the story of Phyllis MacNamara’s journey to a new kind of possibility, a new kind of life after her beloved husband Michael took his life just three years ago.

She describes, with great courage and inspiring candour, how her life seemed to be sundered when the world became too much for Michael but she tells too how she worked her way back to a point where it was possible to be happy enough to want to dance.

“There were days when I could laugh, and eventually a day that I could dance... I sent a text to my son ‘I am dancing, I am dancing and I never thought that I would dance again’.”

As so often the greatest challenges bring the greatest victories.

Today’s Irish Examiner focus on suicide and the reproduction of our Let’s Talk: Suicide booklet is intended to show that even at the lowest point, at the moment we feel most abandoned and alone, there is a future to secure and enjoy.

That even the death of a loved one can be the beginning of the kind of growth that makes all things, including happiness, possible.