Suicide: A Mother's Grief

Suicide is always a shocking tragedy. The emotions, feelings and overwhelming grief associated the trauma and its aftermath are often indescribable.

“When I was a young man in Oxford,” Bill Clinton said recently in Dublin, “my roommate was a person I admired beyond my ability to say. Shortly after we came home, he took his life out of despair.”
“For years afterwards I wondered whether there wasn’t something I could have or should have done to intervene to stop him, to get him to take another look, and I know that every family member and every loved one of every child who commits suicide, every single one asks that question for years and years and years.”
Maureen Bolger has certainly asked herself the same question over and over again. Her 16-year-old son, Darren, died by suicide on 6th April 2003. Darren was one of the 444 people who took their own lives that year. Four out of five were men aged 15 to 24. In the same year, there were 11,200 attempted suicides (what’s called parasuicide). Startlingly, this amounts to a 400% increase in suicides over the past 15 years.
Experts in the field agree that there are many reasons why suicide is so prevalent nowadays and Darren’s mother, Maureen, has spent every day since her son’s death searching for these reasons.
“Darren was bullied by a couple of groups and six weeks before he died, he was jumped on by one particular gang and ended up breaking one of his knuckles. Even though he was the life and soul of the party and was always laughing and joking, he suffered terribly from low self-esteem. Towards the end, he became unhappy at school and wanted to leave. At the time, I had no idea that this was all becoming too much for him, but with hindsight, I can see that all of these things contributed to his decision to end his life,” she says.
Maureen believes that Darren had planned his death well in advance because he presented her with an Easter egg on Mother’s Day, knowing he wouldn’t be around to give it to her at Easter. Four weeks later, on a day that she remarks was “no different from any other day”, and with no obvious clues to the tragedy about to unfold, Maureen said goodbye to Darren and left to get her hair done. She had no idea that this would be the last time she would see him alive.
Later that night, his brother Alan found Darren hanged in his bedroom. The suicide note said that he loved them all and included instructions about his cremation and the music to be played at his funeral.
Distraught yet acutely aware of the impact Darren’s untimely death would have on his friends and peers, Maureen took the brave decision to bring her son’s body home to their house in Tallaght and to invite everyone to come to see him and to be open and honest about his suicide. She left the door of her home open and within hours, a queue of young people who wanted to see him had formed right around the block. Maureen felt that the experience of actually seeing the finality of Darren’s actions resonated much more deeply with his peers than any amount of words.
She feels that those days immediately after Darren’s death opened some kind of floodgate for those who knew him to begin talking about the subject of suicide and for her to begin her crusade to address and de-stigmatise the whole area of suicide.
Maureen had many visits from Darren’s friends and school pals following his death and some of them admitted to her that they sometimes had suicidal thoughts. When she asked why they didn’t speak to their parents about these thoughts and feelings, most said they didn’t want to upset them. She says this has emerged as a common theme.
A parent of one of Darren’s classmates admitted to her that following Darren’s death she asked her children had any of them ever thought about suicide. She was horrified and devastated to find that the one she least suspected of ever considering it, in fact had harboured thoughts about doing it. Maureen now believes that when you get over the initial shock and upset of having your child admit that they have suicidal thoughts, at least it is out in the open and with the emergence of this opportunity for dialogue, more vigilance and support can be offered.
Maureen had three separate incidents of teenagers approaching her because they were depressed and felt suicidal and who believed that she would have a deeper understanding following the death of Darren. They told her they didn’t know where else to go. When Maureen mentioned the Samaritans and Childline, she says, “ They thought that the Samaritans was a religious organisation and that Childline was specifically for abused children”. It was then that Maureen realised how sorely lacking in services and neglected the whole area of young adult depression and suicide really is.

Necessary Groundwork

Fast-forward to today and the young adult depression and suicide helpline, Teen-Line Ireland, is almost set to go. Despite no government funding and against many odds, Maureen and a dedicated committee set about raising funds of ¤55,000 and have secured a premises which will be ready to move into in two weeks time. The Samaritans have agreed to train Teen-Line’s volunteers and Maureen expects the service to be fully operational by October this year.
In addition to offering a telephone service, Maureen says, “It is really important that we use methods of engaging with young people that they feel more comfortable with, for example, texting and the Internet.”
She believes that it is vital that mental health and suicide awareness programmes such as Aware’s ‘Beat the Blues’ are introduced into schools. “Some teachers have said that they are afraid this might put the thought of suicide into some students’ heads. Let me assure you, those thoughts are already there for many. It’s about providing an opportunity for them to talk about them and to bring the whole area of depression and suicide out into the open where it can be addressed and dealt with before suicide becomes the only option left.”
Maureen believes that this may provide an invaluable way of finding out what is going on in students’ minds and may help defuse possible problem areas. She also feels that it is imperative that all secondary schools employ an appropriately qualified counsellor dealing solely with students’ emotional and mental health issues.
With the recent increase in media attention on the subject of suicide, Maureen believes that more effort should be put into highlighting the issue in more young people focused publications such as Hot Press.
“People in my son’s age group read magazines like Hot Press, so it’s important to reach them. My son loved music. The piece of music he chose to accompany his cremation was Led Zeppelin’s ‘Thank You’,” she says. Containing the lyric “Little drops of rain, whisper of the pain…” it’s hard not to imagine the poignant significance this must now have for his bereft family.
In relation to RehabCare’s Suicide Prevention Programme, Maureen says, “I welcome any suicide prevention programme that helps raise awareness and targets young people in particular. We would welcome help and support from a big organisation like RehabCare and would ask them to consider providing funding to Teen-Line Ireland as we have done all the necessary groundwork, and are on the brink of being operational”.
RehabCare Chief Executive, Angela Kerins says, “More people are dying each year by suicide than on our roads. This is a national crisis and RehabCare is going to tackle it by establishing Ireland’s first comprehensive national service to address all of the factors driving people – particularly young people – to take their own lives.”
Maureen Bolger, meanwhile, says that a day doesn’t go by without her wishing the son she lost was back with her and achingly wondering why he didn’t tell her how full of despair he must have been. This brave mother is devoting the rest of her life to trying to reach those who are considering suicide.
“When Darren lay dead on my bed, I made him a promise. I told him that because he couldn’t, for whatever reason, come to me, I was going to make myself available to others in the hope that reaching out and talking to them might help them come to me or someone else in a way that he felt he couldn’t”.

Aware Helpline: 1890 303 302.
For further information about RehabCare’s Suicide Prevention Programme, telephone 01 205 7200. Maureen Bolger encourages anybody seeking information about Teen-Line to contact her on 086 360 7626 or 085 741 6019.