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On a sunny April day, Mary Ann Kenny’s husband died suddenly while jogging near their family home. In the months that followed, Mary Ann – who had no history of mental illness – began suffering from depression, and then from a terrifying succession of physical and psychological symptoms, including the delusion that her young children had been harmed by her medications.
In her new gripping memoir, Mary Ann details her descent into psychosis, her hospitalisation, and her inspiring journey back to health and happiness. The Episode tells the story of how she recovered from her illness, came to terms with her trauma, and spoke truth to the health service about the limitations of medical psychiatry.
Here, she shares a chapter from the book, detailing the harrowing and sudden loss of her husband, and how she coped, telling her children their dad had gone…
IF MY HUSBAND John, had planned his death, he couldn’t have scripted a more perfect scene.
Bright spring sunshine. Out for a run in the crisp air on the granite hills of Killiney, the blue sweep of the bay stretching out in front of him, the coconut scent of flowering gorse. Fresh green shades of trees coming into leaf. The busy chatter of birds nesting. His favourite jogging playlist of fast tracks coming through his headphones.
A few hours to himself to get his stay-at-home dad life back on track, with the children at school and me at my lecturing job. Time to start a new fitness regime after a weekend socialising and the lingering chest cold of a long winter.
As he left the house, stretching out his long, stiff limbs after squeezing past the red foliage of the overgrown forest flame in our front garden, John waved goodbye to a neighbour. She was the last known person to see him alive.
The first indication I had that something was wrong was when I glanced at my phone at around 1.45 p.m. and noticed six missed calls. I had just come out of a three-hour work meeting into the dazzling spring sunshine.
It was a five-yearly programmatic review with an external panel of academics and representatives from industry, and it was of sufficient importance for me to have turned my phone off fully for the duration. As I strolled back towards my office building, chatting with colleagues, nodding a smiling ‘hello’ to students and enjoying the feeling of warmth spreading through my body, I switched on my phone.
In those days, my attitude to mobile phones bordered on dislike, and I had an old-fashioned button Nokia that I used mainly for text messaging. Receiving even one call on it was a rare occurrence, never mind six missed calls, and a small sense of alarm stirred deep inside as I squinted at the display.
The Episode, by Mary Ann Kenny, is out from 15 May. Penguin Random House Ireland
Penguin Random House Ireland
I hurried back to my office desk and Googled the two numbers that were visible, something I’d seen John do whenever he wanted to check the identity of a caller before ringing back. The first number was a local landline, which threw up no results at all in Google; the second turned out to be St Michael’s Hospital in Dun Laoghaire.
I had no idea why St Michael’s would want to contact me, and I didn’t have a name to call back, so I dialled the other number from which I had missed a call, the local landline. The secretary from my younger son’s school answered and said that he hadn’t been collected at pick-up time.
Next, I called the home phone, which rang out. Then I called John’s mobile. A man – not John – answered. He introduced himself as a garda.
‘Something has happened to John,’ he said. He told me to come to St Michael’s and to bring somebody with me. ‘What’s happened to John?’ I whispered.
Instead of answering my question, the policeman repeated his instructions.
Turning slowly to the colleague sitting at the desk next to mine, I gasped: ‘Something has happened to John. I think he’s dead.’
My colleague offered to drive me to the hospital. As we travelled around Dublin on the M50 towards Dun Laoghaire, I tried to figure out what might have befallen John.
Initially, I was thrown by the fact that a policeman had answered his phone, and I wondered had there been an accident, or had John been assaulted. Then I remembered the jog he had been preparing for that morning when I had called him from work at around 10 am, and I thought of his father dropping dead at the age of 55 and John’s own fear that he too might die prematurely despite his apparently good health.
So, when we reached the hospital and the same garda who had answered his phone informed me in the car park that John had collapsed and died during his morning run, he was confirming what I already suspected.
Mary Ann Kenny, writer and academic. Brid O Donovan
Brid O Donovan
I was met at the hospital entrance by an old friend – I’ll refer to him as ‘K’ – who lived nearby and who had jumped on his bike as soon as he received my call from my colleague’s car. He and I were taken to identify the body. The staff who accompanied us there were kind and solicitous and approached me with an air of hushed reverence.
Before entering the morgue, I was warned that the corpse would still be intubated and that several people would be in the room with me. Having identified John’s body, we were then accompanied to a small office at the front of the building, where I calmly went through everything else that was required of me.
I asked to view the body for a second time, this time on my own. Back in the morgue, I stared at John’s bloodless face, unable to connect it with the happy smile beaming back at me at my 50th birthday party three days previously. I had given a short impromptu speech in which I thanked John for our gorgeous children and our beautiful home and our perfect life together, almost as if I’d had a premonition of what was to come.
As I walked back along the corridor to where K was waiting, the hospital worker who accompanied me shared two pieces of advice. ‘Find a funeral director as soon as possible to take care of the arrangements,’ he urged me. ‘And make sure you get the funeral you want.’
I didn’t expect family strife over the funeral arrangements – in fact, it was the prospect of minimal family involvement that chilled me. John was an only child, and both his parents were dead. I came from a family of six, but all my siblings lived abroad.
‘Is there some family nearby you would like to call?’ I was asked when I returned from the morgue. I explained that my mother was elderly and hard of hearing, and that, although she was in good health for her 90 years, I would prefer to tell her in person. Then I used the hospital phone to call my brother in the UK, and he promised to be with me by evening.
The first time I cried was when I asked the hospital staff how I was to break the news to my children. While I don’t recall their exact response, I do know that it contained the word ‘heaven’, and I remember the absolute certainty I felt that if there was one word I would not be using when I talked to my sons it was ‘heaven’.
In an effort to delay as long as possible the moment when I would shatter my children’s happiness, I suggested to K when we emerged into the blinding sunshine that we walk the pier in Dun Laoghaire. Once there, I stopped to call my younger sister in the States, where she would now be awake. Then I talked to the neighbour who was minding my sons, and I found myself overwhelmed by an urge to hold them in my arms.
The most terrible moment of that terrible day was telling the boys. Before meeting them, I had briefly entered our empty house, where John had left breakfast crumbs on the countertop in the kitchen and the water heater running for his post-jog bath. Then K and I walked the five minutes to my neighbour’s house. It had been my intention to bring the children home to talk to them there, but as we made our way back, my older son kept interrogating me about his father’s whereabouts. ‘Where’s Dad?’ he asked me over and over.
‘I’ll tell you when we get home,’ I kept repeating. ‘Is he dead?’ he asked me finally, stopping me in my tracks.
Aged only eight, he had always been wiser than his years. I have a memory of the three of us standing immobilised in the middle of the road. K was there too, but he doesn’t feature in the scene where the sun is glaring down on us, the children are wailing in anguish, and I am repeating over and over, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ an expression I used with other people that day too, as if I was blaming myself for the devastation they were feeling.
I don’t remember much about the evening. I had asked K to contact my mother and to drive her to our house so I could tell her in person. ‘Don’t cry, boys,’ she instructed as we all sat together in our sitting-room, and I snapped back at her that they could cry if they wanted to. She was just as bewildered as everyone else, but she angered me at that moment with her old-fashioned, schoolteacher-ish directives, so familiar to me from my childhood, when our needs had always seemed less important than those of the adults in our lives.
‘And don’t speak to me in Irish in front of them,’ I added, furious that she was attempting to give me coded messages about my children while they looked on helplessly, struggling to make sense of the tragedy that had befallen them.
Years later, I would read that what we call madness often begins with ‘normal’ cognitions and ‘normal’ emotions. I believe that the roots of the pathological guilt I suffered in the second half of 2015 can be found in the events of 21 April, when I assumed full and sole responsibility for shattering my children’s lives because I was the one to disclose to them that their father was dead.
But the details of the day John died would not appear anywhere in the voluminous files that were created about me and my family later that year by psychiatric services and by Tusla, the national Child and Family Agency.
Of all the mental health and child protection professionals to interact with me in the months following John’s death, only one would ever ask me to talk about the events of 21 April 2015, and that was the therapist I visited directly afterwards, long before I ever broke down.
Mary Ann Kenny is an academic. She lives in Dublin with her children. ‘The Episode’ is published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and is available from 15 May.
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