‘Grief was like being knocked down by a speeding bus. It came out of nowhere and completely floored me’
Mary Ann Kenny wasn’t expecting to find the love of her life and become a mother in her early 40s. She couldn't have predicted that he would drop dead on a morning run, leaving her a single mother of two at the age of 50. Her ensuing mental breakdown and stint in a psychiatric hospital were just as unforeseeable. She reflects on her ensuing psychotic breakdown, and the systems that, crucially, did not help.
I’d never intended to become an older mother. My own parents had both been 30 when my eldest brother was born, and I had always thought that this was a perfect age to embark on the adventure of parenthood. But my late twenties came and went, and there was no marriageable man on the horizon, or even one who I might have wanted to father my children. A few years previously, I’d cut loose from a long-term relationship, because I’d known that he wasn’t ‘the one’. As my 30th birthday approached, I had good friends and a career I enjoyed, but my happiness was tinged with disappointment that I was still single – or rather, single once again – and was therefore unlikely to become a mother any time soon.
I would be in my mid-thirties before John, my husband-to-be, walked into a classroom where I was sitting on the last evening of an academic conference hosted by the University of Dundee. He would later describe the experience of first seeing me as a coup de foudre – a bolt of lightning that also seemed to split my own life into a time before meeting him and a brighter, more fulfilling time afterwards. Life with him was more interesting and more stimulating. It was richer and fuller, it was funnier and ‘funner’, a word our children would have used when they were much younger, while John was still alive.
Our relationship got off to a rocky start. For one thing, we lived in different countries, and we spent the first years commuting back and forth across the Irish Sea to spend weekends together. Then there was the fact that, to begin with, John didn’t want children. I initially broached the ‘baby’ topic during our first holiday together as a couple. It was in the summer of 2001, and we were standing on top of an extinct volcanic peak in the Cantal region of south-central France.
I remember his big blue eyes, wide with surprise, staring back at me as he shook his head in stunned silence. It had never occurred to him that embarking on a relationship with a woman ten years his junior might involve children. Many of his closest friends had never become parents, he explained, and his first marriage had been childless by choice. Furthermore, his father had died suddenly at the age of fifty-five and John always believed that he, too, would die young. I still have the postcard he wrote me shortly afterwards, a poignant portent in which he talks about the devastating impact losing him as a father would have on the delicate psyche of our as-yet unconceived children.
There followed a few years of uncertainty, when it seemed like I might have to choose between children and John, and that there was a real possibility I might end up with neither. He believed that we could only be together if he was prepared to at least try for children, and in reality, the choice was his rather than mine. I could hear my biological clock ticking loudly as I waited passively for him to make up his mind.
Eventually John decided to move to Ireland and to me, and within the space of three to four whirlwind years when I was in my early forties, we got married, had two children and bought a house together in Wicklow. I became the breadwinner for our little family and John passionately embraced his new role of househusband and stay-at-home father. He told me that he had never been happier. I too was more fulfilled than I had ever been, especially after we moved back to Dublin and I had everything I had ever dreamed of: a loving husband, two gorgeous children, a great job, good friends, and a lovely house in a beautiful neighbourhood.
Occasionally at that time, I found myself pondering the merits and drawbacks of older parenthood. There barely seemed to be a downside for us: we were fit and energetic and had much more stability – of both the financial and the emotional kind – than if we’d had our children earlier in life. But because of our ages, there was only one surviving grandparent for our children – my elderly mother – and no other family support as John was an only child and my siblings had all emigrated as long ago as the 1970s and 1980s. I also felt the occasional twinge of apprehension in relation to John’s age, especially when he turned sixty in September 2014. I kept my fingers firmly crossed that the fault lines in our family setup would never be tested and that our children would have both their parents to guide and support them into adulthood
I turned fifty in March 2015. We had contemplated a joint party to mark both our ‘big’ birthdays, but like so many ideas, this got lost in the busyness of life with two young children. In the end, I did hold a joint birthday party, not with John, but with two friends. We hired an elegant function room in Dun Laoghaire for the evening of April 18, with a large bay window overlooking the harbour where so many farewells and reunions between John and myself had taken place over the years.
People would tell me later that I looked euphoric on the night. I was filled with joy to be surrounded by friends in that iconic location with a view of the two harbour arms stretching out and almost touching in a blue embrace at sea, and my beloved husband by my side, lanky and handsome in an open-neck shirt and the smart jacket he otherwise had so little occasion to wear. When it was my turn to address the guests, I stood up and paid tribute to John. In a short speech laced with laughter and fun, I thanked him for our gorgeous children and our beautiful home and our perfect life together. The memory of his happy face beaming back at me would be a source of comfort in the weeks that followed.
Instead of being offered talk therapy to explore why I was suffering from a delusional belief, my medications were adjusted and increased and I was asked the same questions incessantly by an ever-changing cast of nurses, doctors and social workers.
Three days later, on the morning of 21 April, John went out for a jog and dropped dead a few hundred yards from our family home. The first sense I had that something was wrong was when I came out of a work meeting into the spring sunshine and found six missed calls on my mobile phone. I started to investigate who’d been trying to contact me, and when I called John’s phone, it was answered by a guard. ‘Something has happened to John,’ he said. ‘Come to St Michael’s hospital in Dun Laoghaire. And bring someone with you.’ He refused to give me further details over the phone, and I knew immediately that John was dead.
An autopsy conducted a few days later revealed that he had been suffering from severe, undiagnosed cardiovascular disease. We’d had no warning or inkling whatsoever, but now I wonder if some part of me had always sensed that this was coming, especially when I’d noticed the pallor of John’s complexion or thought of his father’s sudden death at the age of fifty-five for reasons that John had never been entirely clear on.
The most terrible moment of that terrible day was telling the children that their father was dead. After I had identified his body in the hospital morgue, I picked them up from a neighbour who had been minding them for the afternoon. It had been my intention to talk to them at home, but my older son was expecting his dad and kept asking me about his whereabouts. ‘Is he dead?’ he asked me suddenly, stopping me in my tracks. I have a memory of the three of us standing in the middle of the road with the sun glaring down on us, the children wailing in anguish and me repeating over and over ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’, as if I was blaming myself for the devastation they were feeling.
Grief for me was like being knocked down by a speeding bus. It came out of nowhere and completely floored me. I stopped doing everything that I had previously enjoyed and spent my days reflecting on the devastation of our lives. While the children were at school, I sat on an armchair overlooking our back garden and thought about how they had lost so early one of the two people who loved them most in the world. Their suffering and my inability to console them felt like the nearest thing to torture I was ever likely to experience.
As for reflecting on my own loss, it seemed like such a bitter blow to have lost John so prematurely when it had taken so long for us to find one another and then to start a family. I tried to help myself by going for therapy and for long walks that took me past the spot where John had collapsed, and I read lots of self-help books about bereavement and grieving. My friends did what they could to help and so did my elderly mother. But the lack of a family network meant that I was alone in my grief and in my responsibilities for my two sons. I found myself gripped by an existential fear for the future that centred on them. I believed myself solely responsible for their happiness then and on the long road to adulthood.
After a few months, when I still wasn’t feeling any better, I worried that I might be developing depression and I decided to try an antidepressant. Within hours of first taking an SSRI, I awoke in the night, drenched in sweat, experiencing an intense burning throughout my body. Despite stopping the drug, the symptoms persisted for several weeks. The medics to whom I reached out for help insisted that what I was experiencing was a psychiatric problem requiring more drugs and different drugs. For the first time since John’s death, I felt hopelessness and despair. When I told my GP that the burning throughout my body made it difficult for me to see a future for myself, I was referred to psychiatric services.
Within a few days of the referral, my symptoms had deteriorated further and I began to believe not only that I had suffered permanent nerve damage and would never recover, but that my children had been harmed by my medication and that it was my fault. This was a delusion of guilt (although I didn’t understand it as such at the time) and the conviction that I was responsible for having harmed my children filled me with terror. I was gravely out of touch with reality and required urgent hospitalisation.
I spent a total of 12 weeks in a psychiatric hospital in the second half of 2015, while my sons were looked after by other people, first by some close family friends and then by my ninety-year-old mother supported by a band of childminders. My hospital treatment consisted solely of medication – a mixture of antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives and sleeping tablets. For several weeks, the depression and the conviction of guilt persisted unchanged, filling me with overwhelming feelings of self-loathing and dread.
Instead of being offered talk therapy to explore why I was suffering from a delusional belief, my medications were adjusted and increased and I was asked the same questions incessantly by an ever-changing cast of nurses, doctors and social workers: Had I thoughts of harm? Had I plans to harm anyone else? Had I intent? Eventually, exhausted by the questioning and by the need to verbalise appropriate responses through a fog of medicated confusion, I told the professionals what I believed they wanted to hear and confessed to thoughts of harm I’d never had.
My false confession had very grave repercussions for me. Within days, I realised the seriousness of what I had said and wanted to retract it. But the absence of talk therapy meant that there was no-one with whom I could develop a relationship of trust who might have helped me disentangle the web of confusion I had spun. Nor was there anyone to help me start to come to terms with the grief or to understand (as I did much later) that my delusional guilt had originated in the day my husband died and in the moment when I had been forced to disclose to our beloved children that their father was dead.
I was discharged from hospital just before Christmas 2015, almost exactly eight months after John had died. I was no longer depressed or suffering from any kind of delusional belief, and I was overjoyed to be reunited with my children. But I also felt shocked and traumatised by my hospital experiences. Over the following months, I picked up the pieces of my shattered life and established myself as a single mother. I took time out to sort through John’s clothes and to examine his papers and his possessions. After a process lasting several weeks, I felt reconnected to the man who had left my life just as suddenly as he had entered it, and who had given me two adorable sons who were his legacy and his gift to me.
Ten years on and the children and I are thriving, even if my sons’ happiness is sometimes punctuated by sadness over their father’s death. As for me, the bereavement and the memories of what happened during my episode of psychosis and hospital treatment are never too far from my mind. A number of years ago, I felt so overwhelmed by questions and feelings of powerlessness relating to my psychiatric treatment that I decided to write a memoir about it all. Now that this has been published, I’m being told that it is a powerful, moving and insightful read. I hope that it will find a wide readership so others can learn from what I and my family went through in 2015.
‘The Episode: A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing’ by Mary Ann Kenny, published by Sandycove, is on sale now.
Featured image via Unsplash, portrait of Mary Ann Kenny by Bríd O’Donovan.
Also Read
