Paul KeenanThrough faith in God I turned challenges into victories, writes Niall McDonagh
The first time I experienced pain was as a 20-year-old when my world was turned upside down. In an accident on the football pitch I severely broke my leg, and there was a risk it would have to be amputated. Nine months later I had to deal with another tragic event, the death of my brother, who sadly took his own life.
Initially I was left broken and confused at where my life had suddenly taken me. In the space of under a year I was learning to walk again and also had to bury my older brother. After these events I began to seek out a meaning and a purpose to my life.
One of my late brother’s belongings was his Bible. At night I would flick through it occasionally, and then I found myself reading it on a regular basis. As a faith in God began to grow within me, I started to view life through a different set of eyes. Suddenly my life’s priorities were changing.
I went back to college to study as a teacher and then as a guidance counsellor – a position I now hold. My desire to work as a counsellor was burning from within, due to my brother’s suicide.
This had now made me want to reach out to others who may be feeling isolated, depressed or vulnerable. Suddenly something that seemed like such a negative at the time was turning into a positive and my desire to surround myself with the broken and misfortunate led me around the world, from working with the homeless in the slums of Brazil to working with juvenile prisoners in the Philippines.
Gesture
You can’t control what comes into your life but you can control how you respond to it. Through my faith in God I was able to turn challenges into victories. We don’t know what life will throw at us, truth is no one wants to suffer, but it’s in our suffering that we really have to reach within ourselves – it’s where we build resilience and our character begins to grow.
So after establishing a new life for myself, I couldn’t have known what life was to throw at me again. Last October I lost a cousin who tragically took his own life, and only a few months ago I had to bury my father, who lost his battle with cancer at 63 years of age.
Mum, my brother David and I found ourselves standing at the graveyard in Kilbaecanty for a third funeral in seven months.
That morning the heavy rains of the past few days had resulted in my father’s grave partially collapsing. The team of grave diggers included my cousin, Shane Donohue, himself returned only recently from Australia as his brother had lost the struggle so common to many of our young people.
As I came to the crest of the graveyard hill following my father’s coffin I saw Shane, still in his workman’s clothes, emerge from the red earth surrounding my father’s burial place. He approached my father’s coffin and took it upon his shoulder, carrying my father the final few feet to his final resting place next to my brother Bernard.
Shane’s silent gesture was the light shining through at this dark time. It made me realise that the light others bring to you in dark times takes many forms. There are times when words are so welcome, when silence is the key to peace and when one man’s pen is his shovel and his ability to breathe comfort on you is to climb from the grave he has dug for your father and lift him gently to his final home.
My father’s weight on his back, the load of his brother’s own death on his mind, but still space in his heart to reach out to a family member.
Perspective
I feel we have three things in life: faith, hope and love. There was all three there that day. The knowledge that whatever challenge I come up against, when I know the Lord is with me, then there is nothing I can’t face or comprehend.
All endings are also beginnings, and I know that my father’s, brother’s and cousin’s death has ended their lives but not our relationship. I can always call upon the fond memories, so they will forever live within my heart.
In times of grief and trying, things in life are really put into perspective – material things have no significance and you can see them for what they are. True happiness can be found in our family and our relationships.
Times of grief
In my times of grief it was my community that really got me through the hard times. The beautiful thing that Ireland has is the proud sense of where we are from. We need to continue to commit ourselves to the community around us, because it’s our close friends and family that gives us purpose and meaning. People will come and go throughout our life, but family will always be there.
I thought everything had to be perfect before I started to enjoy my life, but what I have learnt is that happiness is not a destination or place that is one day arrived at, happiness is a journey, and we are all on that journey now together. We are walking side by side.
Niall McDonagh and his mother Mary recently organised a Walk of Life in Galway to remember those lost to suicide.
