Johnny lifts the lid on suicide bereavement

JOHNNY Richardson remembers his sister Gillian. You would remember her too, he says, if you met her. He recalls an outgoing, funny person, focussed on her job, a great sister, a great partner and a great mother. She was also intensely private and maybe, he suggests, “that was part of her difficulty”.

Johnny, from Doon in County Limerick, is sitting in his office in Ennistymon. North Clare is also home to two of his siblings. He is relaxed and open. It is just over eight months since his younger sister, Gillian, took her life at nearby cliffs.

The family has organised a concert in the Falls Hotel this Thursday night to raise money for the Doolin unit of the Irish Coast Guard, Clare Suicide Bereavement Support Group and Pieta House, Limerick.

Johnny and Gillian share a birthday five years apart, a wide enough gap, he reckons, in a family of 11 to prevent too much bickering. Their birthdays fall on New Year’s Eve. For the second year in-a-row, Johnny wasn’t in much of a mood to celebrate. His father died suddenly on December 11, 2010, two weeks shy of his 80th birthday. Johnny was reeling and numb for a month. Two days before the first anniversary of his father’s death, his 38-year-old sister Gillian disappeared.

“She told my mother she was going to see the doctor. She never did,” Johnny explains. It was a Friday and by evening, there were growing concerns among her family for Gillian’s safety.

“They had no idea where she was. Her phone was switched off. They had no idea at all,” Johnny says.

The next morning, a car was reported parked at a North Clare car park. “That’s when I got a phone call, early Saturday morning. That was the first time I knew about it. That was like the phone call from hell. That was seismic, just unbelievable, your worst nightmare. That is the worst call you could ever get,” he says.

The shock took him back to a call he received almost exactly one year earlier. “I came out from a swim and there were a load of messages on my phone. The first voicemail I heard, ironically, was Gillian, telling me my father wasn’t well.”

Although Johnny’s father had already died, his younger sister had softened the blow a little. It had prepared him for the news and that is something he is, even now, grateful for.

“That call was sad because it was sudden death. But this was just your worst nightmare. This is the one where my reaction was… My brother was ringing me from London and I just went ‘oh no, no, no’ and obviously he’d known for a few minutes because he said ‘can you go to the garda station and report that she’s missing’. I just fell to my knees. I’d never prayed for anything. I said if anything’s to be granted, it’ll be this. Then I just thought ‘right, you have to get on with it’. The year before, with it being the first death in the family and with it being so sudden, I was numb even for a month after. The whole process, you got through it. But this one was, the shock… I thought ‘no, you have to focus, get your clothes on, do what you need to do, get out the door and get down to the garda station’.”

Johnny reported Gillian missing. He then went to the car park and saw her car. “I got straight into it. I accepted it, particularly when I got there and saw her car. I walked up and thought ‘she’s gone, that’s it. We now have to focus on trying to find her’. And we did intensely for a month, six weeks, but we couldn’t and then you have to deal with it.

“My sister, my aunt and one of my brothers came up shortly after that. We were the first ones to start searching. We arrived into it and, to be honest with you, everybody reacts differently to this situation but I was familiar with this process and I knew what to expect,” he says.

Johnny recalls the kindness and professionalism of the Doolin unit of the Irish Coast Guard, who began the search and stood beside him for weeks afterwards as he walked the North Clare shore looking for Gillian’s body.

December was wet and stormy and the rain was unrelenting. Johnny, family, friends, neighbours from Doon and from North Clare and volunteers gathered daily, split into teams and searched. There were hundreds of people scouring the coast for weeks.

“We reported every morning up here at the rescue centre and very calmly got everyone to sign in and assigned them to teams. Conditions were horrendous, absolutely horrendous. They were unbelievable. This was a storm. We were out in howling winds and lashing rain. We were out in driving sleet,” he recalls.

After the offical search was called off, Johnny and others continued. Through Christmas and New Year they searched. By January 2 though, people had to return to work. Johnny has his own business nearby so he was able to stick with it until January 15. People who lived near the coast were keeping an eye out too.

“We had everything covered. It was good to know that if anything ever showed up, it would be found. But it never did. So the likelihood was that the body was taken out to sea and that can happen… We just weren’t lucky and that’s the way it was,” he says.

Gillian had taken her father’s death particularly badly. Even before that though there were problems. Johnny believes she may have been suffering from depression for 20 years.

“Like anyone, she had her good periods and down periods… You wouldn’t have known she wasn’t in good form. She’d keep the show very much on the road.

“My father’s death seemed to bring the wheels off for her. We were all in shock because he was the last person we’d expected…he was full of life. It was a big shock. The first death in the family is a big shock. There’s no preparation for it. But she found it difficult to deal with that, without a doubt. In the last year, her life was a rollercoaster. She was finding it very difficult. We were concerned from then I suppose,” Johnny recalls.

Gillian entered a treatment programme in early December. She completed it on December 8. Her family thought it had gone well and were relieved.

“She had a rough year. She was keeping it all in. Then she agreed to go for treatment and did the whole programme fantastically well. Most people don’t do three days in that type of programme. She did it all and then really shocked everybody. She came home and then the next day she went.”

“That was her journey,” according to Johnny.

The days after Gillian’s death were agonising. “It was a very difficult period. It was a surreal experience, I suppose, looking back but you coped with it. Every day you got up and you just went straight up there. You tried to relax and do whatever you could at night-time. But then when we realised it wasn’t going to happen, it began to sink in that this was what we had to face up to now. All along, hope sustains you, you know. There’s always hope. Everyday you hope that this is going to be our day.”

The Richardsons’ day didn’t come and coping with that was difficult. A friend put Johnny in touch with a Belfast-based counsellor, who agreed to meet with the family.

“We arranged for a family meeting, which was actually very therapeutic and very healing because we hadn’t had 10 minutes together. The whole time we were coming and going. We hadn’t been able to meet properly together at all. He was able to help bring us closure. He was good for us. So we were able, from that point, to start letting go,” he remembers.

Johnny is able to talk about himself and what he is going through. He knows other people find it more difficult. He recommends a family counselling session to anyone who has gone through a similar trauma, no matter how long ago.

“I think a family counselling session with a good counsellor is actually a great idea for anybody because everyone has their own ideas on what happened. This got us into a room together for three hours and with the help of a very experienced man, we worked through a lot of what she might have been thinking, what she was going through and what happened. It was actually very good. It helped to let us release and let go to a fair degree,” he adds.

Johnny then went to counselling sessions in the North West Clare Family Resource Centre in Ennistymon.

“I thought it was better to go now, rather than wait until you end up in a dark place yourself and that was good,” he says.

Then he heard about Clare Suicide Bereavement Support Group. “They were doing a healing course and I went to that and that was harrowing but very therapeutic. The first night, there was 10 people. Every single case was as bad as the next one. I thought having got counselling myself, and I seemed to be dealing with it very well, I thought ‘well, some of these are badly affected’ and if they want someone to talk, I’ll talk. I kind of thought maybe I’d be first if nobody else wanted to go. I ended up being last. The things that I noticed were that every one of the people there spoke of a person who had fought a very long battle with depression and, often, a very silent battle… they didn’t want others to feel their pain and the length of it, the enormity of it” he believes.

Johnny notes the difference between the way society sees physical illnesses compared to mental illnesses.

“If it was a physical condition, you would have said ‘God, they fought a great battle’… What I found out about this was that all these people have found it a very long battle and, ultimately, they’d had enough. That brought a great sense of explanation to it, which people, if they’re not affected by it themselves, might find difficult to understand.

“Suicide traditionally has stigma to it… People have to realise that depression is so common it’s unfortunately a general illness. Most people suffer depression in their own ways. Chronic depression though is unfortunately far too prevalent and some people lose their life because of it,” he adds.

“In my own experience, I found people superb, from every age and walk of life. They were very comforting and couldn’t do enough to help you… If some people did find it difficult to approach the subject, which is natural, I would actually bring it up with them. They were relieved and then we’d have a great chat about it. And that’s the way that I am with it… Other people, though, maybe the state of mind that they were in, they seemed to perceive that maybe people rightly or wrongly were shunning them. I just think that often, maybe, it’s a misconception, that people just didn’t know what to say to them,” he continues.

Looking back, Johnny is not sure what he would have done differently but he advises anyone who is worried about a friend or family member “it’s best to act if you have your fears”.

“Families have to be careful but at the same time, I think it’s more important to talk to the person, to engage with them and ask them very calmly if they would like to speak to somebody. I think the most effective method if you think they’re in trouble is to seek out a counsellor that can connect with them,” he suggests.

“That person can start to work with them and bring them out of the dark place that they are in and also to get to the bottom of what’s troubling them.”

Johnny is not bitter and accepts Gillian’s decision.“She was a very tough nut to crack,” he says and while others tried to intervene at times when they felt she was struggling, Johnny “stayed out of it and we got on fine. She respected me for that and I respected her privacy. I thought ‘when she needs help, she’ll come in her own way’.

“She didn’t ultimately but I wasn’t angry about it because the thing is, anger is a futile emotion and although it’s natural in its own way, you don’t know, you can’t get inside somebody else’s head. You don’t know how bad it was for them. You don’t know how bloody hard they had it and they did have it hard.”

The Richardsons could not hold a funeral and a death certificate cannot be issued for seven years. The bureaucracy “doesn’t make it any easier” but Johnny is pragmatic about it. A piece of paper won’t change the fact Gillian is gone. He points to her smiling face looking out from a photograph on his office shelf.

“Looking back, I never think of any bad things at all. I think of good things – the craic, the fun that she was. She was very headstrong.”

This Thursday night, at the charity event at The Falls Hotel, music will be provided by a neighbour of the Richardsons and well-known country singer, Jimmy Buckley. All three voluntary groups are reliant on fundraising and Johnny believes they deserve tremendous credit for the work they do.