COMEDIAN and actress Aisling Bea has shared the story of her father's death.
Aisling Bea has written how she found out her father died by suicide 30 years ago.
The Kildare native wrote a poignant piece for The Guardian in which she recalled thinking her father was a ghost following her around the house, before learning at 13 that he had taken his own life.
One learning of her father's suicide, she began to hate him... "I didn’t care that he had not been “in his right mind”, because if I had been important enough to him I would have put him back into his “right mind” before he did it. I didn’t care that he had been in “chronic pain” and that men in Ireland don’t talk about their feelings, so instead die of sadness. I didn’t want him at peace."
Later in life, however, Bea admitted to accepting her father's death and she recalled on the 30th anniversary of his death getting a phone call from her father's old workplace. The office where he used to work offered an old box of his things which they were about to throw away but Bea's family picked it up, only to find plenty of old photos.
Bea recalled the wonder she felt at seeing all these unseen photos: "Now, most of the box was horse ultrasounds... But there was also his handwriting around the edges and, then, underneath the horse X-rays and files, there were the photographs...
"The photos in the box had been collected from his desk after he had died. We had never seen them before. They were nearly all of me. He had had all of these photos stuck on his desk. I was probably the last thing he looked at before he died."
Bea finishes the story with a final note to her father, which is both hilarious and endearing at the same time.
She writes "To Daddy, here is my note to you:
I’m sad you killed yourself, because I really think that, if you could see the life you left behind, you would regret it. You didn’t get to see the Berlin wall fall or Ireland qualify for Italia 90. You didn’t get to see all the encyclopedias that you bought for us to one day ‘use at university’ get squashed into a CD and subsequently the internet. You have never got to hear your younger daughter’s voice – it annoys me sometimes, but it has also said some of the most amazing things when drunk. I think you would have been proud to watch your daughter do standup at the O2 and sad to see my mother watching it on her own. Then again, if you hadn’t died, I probably wouldn’t have been mad enough to become a clown for a living. I am your daughter and I am really fucking funny, just like you. But, unlike you, I’m going to stop being it for five minutes and write our story in the hope that it may help someone who didn’t get to have a box turn up, or who may not feel ‘in their right mind’ right now and needs a reminder to find hope.
Aisling"
To read the full article, click here.
