Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

Perhaps because there is no goodbye it was the hardest.  Worse still anyone who has experienced this tragedy knows you piece together your own goodbye with what ifs, regrets, disbelief.

And for a long time all this shapes the narrative backwards.  You doubt if you ever knew him, the truth, how he was.

Every photograph you think that boy, that man he took his own life.

The why haunts.  In his case there was never anything obvious.  A close knit family, financial security and a whole pile of friends.

To say goodbye you have to learn to not know.  To forgive him for not reaching out to you.  You have to remember in life and death we don’t have the final control.

I was a supply nurse in accident and emergency at the time.  It always hit me how the newspaper read that the fire, ambulance, police all arrived but it was too late.  That’s how it seems to me – we can go so far on human strength and skills.

The four year anniversary is drawing near.  I am now older, just, than my brother was when he ended his life at 53.

I notice now how easily his name comes from my lips.  Humourous stories of me and Niall.

Yet my goodbye is still a resignation.  An acceptance.  A loss like no other I have known.