A woman whose father took his own life has said it is “possible” to heal but warned that “nothing good comes from suicide”.
Michelle MacMullan was 15-years-old and her father, Liam, was 48-years-old at the time of his death.
Thinking about her father, Ms MacMullan recalls he was a “very outgoing” person and a very social man who had “a vibe that drew people to him”.
“When they met him, they knew him forever,” she told The Pat Kenny Show.
“He was funny, he wasn’t shy; certainly, when you met him, you would think, ‘That is a happy guy.’”
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Despite appearances, Ms MacMullan said, with hindsight, things were only going well “on the surface”.
“Scratch a little deeper, not so much,” she said.
“My Dad would sometimes have migraines and he would go to bed for a couple of days on end.
“Now I know, as an adult, obviously that was a depressive episode; it was simply not a migraine.
“But as a young teenager, I sort of accepted it on face value.”
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One day, to her great surprise, her aunt arrived suddenly midweek to see her - that was “all out of whack”.
“She said, ‘Your Dad was really sick during the night,’” Ms MacMullan recalled.
“Then she said, ‘Then he was taken to hospital, he got so sick.’
“So, I said, ‘Okay, let’s visit him.’
“Then she said, ‘Darling, we can’t visit him because then he got really sick then and he died.’
“And the first thing I said was, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”
Michelle MacMullan and her father. Image: Supplied.In the aftermath, no one told Ms MacMullan that her father had taken his own life.
In the 90s, mental health was much less spoken about and Ms MacMullan’s mother had a “huge desire to protect” the family from the hurt that news would bring.
“In the most loving motive possible, she said that he had had an aneurysm in his lung,” she said.
“Pretty unpredictable, very quick, relatively painless.”
It was only when she was a student that Ms MacMullan suddenly pieced the truth together.
“I was coming up to my finals in UCD, so you move from sort of 15 to early 20s,” she said.
“I was starting my finals on the Tuesday and it was on the Monday before - and I’ll never forget it.
“I sat at the bed and I just said aloud to no one in particular, ‘My Dad killed himself.’
“I didn’t have a dream; there was no angelic revelation, it was just this unbidden, unwelcome dawning of the truth.
“I knew it so completely in my gut.”
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Ms MacMullan said the experience of bereavement is different when it is suicide.
“My aunt, who I was super close to, she died a few years ago of cancer,” she said.
“I watched her fight to the bitter end; she wanted to live, she wanted to be with the family she loved, she fought right up to the end.
“The kicker in suicide is choice; I feel my Dad chose not to live and that’s the difference between a horrible illness, a horrible accident, regular death that comes to us all eventually.
“It’s the element of choice that brings with it a distinct sting of abandonment.”
The second episode of Claire Darmody’s Losing a Parent to Suicide series is now live, supported by @CarterFellows & @shineonlineie.
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Ms MacMullan said that while an “awful lot of me has healed from it”, she concluded that “nothing good comes from suicide”.
Newstalk's Losing A Parent To Suicide series is supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in Ireland, in partnership with Shine. It was produced by senior producer and 2025 fellow Claire Darmody.
If you or someone you know has been impacted by suicide, you can contact the Samaritans on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.ie or visit www.samaritans.ie to find your nearest branch.
Main image: Michelle MacMullan. Image: Newstalk.
