JIM O'SHEA
Counselling Service

Sometimes I remember him as I pass the crossroads where

he was killed. At one stage I contemplated putting up a cross

where he died. I wanted people to remember what had

happened. I wanted people to know that we had lost a child.

 I actually received permission from the County Manager to do so.

This thinking soon changed. As I have said, Cathal is always

in my heart; I don’t need any concrete reminders of him. He

lives there, always as a thirteen-year-old child. He will never

grow old for us. I do not always feel sad when I see reminders

of Cathal, but probably a little numb, for it is still hard to

contemplate the loss of my child. It is hard to contemplate

this young boy lying in the cold earth, as I drive past the

graveyard. It is not possible to forget. But who would want to

forget one’s child? These moments of sadness are generally

brief, and I rarely think of him for the rest of the day. Life

goes on, and most of the time is happy and peaceful.

So now when people ask me if it is possible to get over the

death of a child, my response is that it is not, but that the

surviving parents and siblings can be peaceful and happy.

That is how I am. I am happy, and have peace of mind. But I

think of Cathal almost every day, even after eighteen years,

and sometimes I feel a deep sadness and a sense of loss. I

think of Cathal because I always remember my family, alive

and dead, in my brief daily prayers, and because the graveyard

where he lies is on the road from my house to Thurles. I rarely

visit his grave. The memory of him, his face and his voice, are

engraved on my heart. Mary, however, finds some comfort in

visiting his grave every Sunday. I know, too, that he is forever

in her heart; she who remained at home from work so that

she would always be there for him and for all our children.

People say that one never gets over the death of a child. I never wanted to believe this. It is possible to get over many losses, and I thought that the loss of a child was no exception. This thought, in a sense, was a burden. This burden was lifted one day when a psychotherapist friend remarked that one never really gets over the death of a child. She did not realise how her comment impacted on me. But I believed her because she is a highly skilled therapist with long experience, and it validated how I felt, so long after Cathal had died. It made me accept the reality that I had been trying to dismiss, pretending that after a number of years I could be perfectly happy, even though I knew deep down that I would never forget. Of course, there is no forgetting, and there is sometimes some element of pain, as I suspect there will be for as long as I live. There will always be a nagging feeling of loss, some unease beneath the surface. It is not always apparent, but it is never absent. There is no perfect happiness following the death of a child.

The book shows what

happened and how we experienced it. Writing the book has

been a more painful experience than I anticipated, and I

hope it will help my family as well as others who read it.

Although I am the author, every member of the family has

contibuted. Their written accounts show how differently

people grieve. Some of my family have come to terms with

this most painful loss better than others. As far as I can see,

this is one of the few books that allows male and female

siblings to express in their own words how the death of a

sibling affected them. Any books I have read on the death of

a child use parents’ accounts of how their surviving children

subsequently felt. This book will show the feelings of siblings

in their teens and early twenties, and later on as mature

adults. Bill was only seventeen when Cathal died, Deirdre was

nineteen, Breda was twenty-one, and Frances twenty-two.

As part of my counselling training I did considerable research

on grief and bereavement for my thesis. Some of the material

I read was entirely academic, explaining the feelings of grief,

and the tasks of grieving; others had a more human touch

and were a celebration of the deceased. When I wrote my

thesis I combined the two, but it still had a largely academic

bias, and would have been of limited help to those suffering

loss. This account is neither of these two approaches. It is not

about Cathal. It is about our experience of losing him. It is

about the brutality of sudden death. It is not embellished in

any way, and it is not an exercise in self-pity.

As previously promised I will now serialise my book on the death of our child, Cathal, who died 0n 18th February 1990.

Introduction

In talking about the death of a child, I wish to be as

inclusive as possible. Pre-natal and post-natal children,

miscarried children, children who die in the womb, stillbirths, children who die soon after birth, pre-teen and

teenagers, and adult children of all ages are relevant to the

context of this book. To lose a child is one of the most

devastating ordeals a family can suffer. Our children have said

that they cannot imagine how painful it is for Mary and

me, as parents, to have lost our child. Breda, one of our

daughters, cannot find words to express how sad she is for us

that we were to ‘fall in love, carry a baby for nine months,

give birth, and then lose that person you created together. To

have him snatched away years before his time’. That may be

so, and there is no point in trying to compare the severity of

grief, but having read the anguish that my surviving children

suffered, I can only conclude that the pain of siblings is far

more severe than what we may imagine.