THAT'S MEN: PÁDRAIG Ó MORÁINon a stark and raw account that brings you into the grieving heart of a family.
CATHAL O'SHEA was 13 when he cycled from a side road into the path of a car near his Co Tipperary home and was killed. That was nearly two decades ago, but the shock of that dreadful day still reverberates in the hearts, minds and bodies of his family.
Cathal's father has written about the experience in When a child dies: footsteps of a grieving family, published recently by Veritas.
There is no other book like this anywhere I know of on this subject. Because Jim O'Shea's account is stark and raw and because Cathal's mother and siblings also wrote down their feelings, either at the time or for the book, the effect is to bring you into the grieving heart of this family.
Cathal's death left the family mentally and physically shattered in the immediate aftermath. Jim writes of how, on the day of Cathal's death, and after making the horrific telephone calls to his adult daughters, " . . . I was overwhelmed. I could not bear to hear the screaming and pain of my surviving children. I felt the energy leaving my body . . . "
He could no longer carry out the role of strong father of the family. His son Bill wrote of that night: "My father was shattered. He was a rock of strength and here he is devastated. This did not make sense. This is my most lasting memory."
Jim speaks of awakening the next morning "to the nightmare". His wife Mary "lay silent beside me, struck dumb by the horror of losing one of her children".
There are so many things in this book that you would not think of unless you had been through this experience. His mother writes about going to the post office to cancel Cathal's children's allowance.
"I remember saying to the assistant, 'what do you do about children's allowance when a child dies', and then I broke down in front of him."
To this day, "I still find myself thinking of him a lot when I cook something he liked."
Nearly 20 years later, the pain of losing Cathal is still there for the whole family and that is something which I think we fail to appreciate. We all accept that parents will never stop grieving a child but we fail to understand the depth of the loss felt by siblings.
"I often stand at his grave and wish I could dig up his coffin to see him again," writes his sister Deirdre.
"It is my belief that one never recovers fully from such a loss," writes Bill. "One merely learns to live with the pain. Sure, I can laugh and have fun, but that dark cloud will never lift fully."
Jim, a teacher, insisted, after Cathal's death, that Bill return to school to do his Leaving Cert. "Looking back I realise that I was beginning to operate again, perhaps in a male way of keeping busy," Jim writes. But he wishes he had encouraged Bill to postpone his Leaving Cert for a year. The early return, he believes, "had serious consequences for him in terms of coping".
His sister Frances, when answering a questionnaire her father had prepared to help him write the book, says that "the parts that made me cry most were thinking about how he would be now, and . . . how I never told him I loved him".
Of all Cathal's siblings, Breda was closest to him and yet the shock and devastation of his death have wiped out most of her memories of him. "I used to drive myself crazy wracking my brain, trying to recall the conversations and laughs we had," she writes. "But all those occasions died with Cathal. I cannot even remember his voice."
Jim O'Shea's concentration has never fully recovered since Cathal's death. A skin condition which had emerged after the tragedy re-appeared when he was writing the book.
If you have anything at all, professionally or personally, to do with people who are bereaved then you should read this book.
It will hurt, and it's too much to bear in a single reading, but you will be a better person when you have finished it.
When a child dies: Footsteps of a grieving family , by Jim O'Shea, is published by Veritas at €9.95
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor and his blog is at justlikeaman.blogspot.com