http://www.irishtimeâŚ4308160074.html
PETER MURTAGH
THE E-MAIL came from a previously unknown contributor. The address said it was from a Grace Ringwood. But it was signed âAnonymousâ. So just who was this anonymous Grace?
Her e-mail was sent at 10.24pm on Friday, August 19th. It contained an article on suicide, and Grace was insisting on anonymity should The Irish Times decide to publish it. From the content of the piece, it was clear why.
It detailed Graceâs struggle with depression. How she had tried to take her own life. How, encouraged by friends, she checked herself into hospital. âI signed a form with an unknown level of alcohol and pills in my system,â she wrote. âFor all intents and purposes, my admission was voluntary. In reality I was too mortified not to follow the wishes of my seemingly put-upon friends, not to survive for the sake of my job, and far too blinded by the smoke and mirrors of depression and self-inflicted harm to realise what I was doing.â
It was well composed: layered, complex and very lucid. Grace described herself as a âprofessional, a consultantâ and said she loved her work. The substance of the article was quite narrow. It explored the pressures that can affect a person when they return to work after trying to harm themselves. And how, when colleagues know what has happened, relationships can change and make it much more difficult for the person to resume a normal life.
âI write in the hope that this grabs someone, anyone, and makes them think twice about what they may lose by not asking the question. Seek guidance. Seek insight. For when you ask a question â a true question â only then can you receive an answer. And answers.â
The covering message with the e-mail said: âIf you need information to confirm the validity of the story and my existence, please respond and I will get in touch.â
I read the piece on Monday, August 22nd, and replied around noon.
âMany thanks for sending me this piece,â I wrote. âI would be grateful if you would get in touch with me as, while we are extremely reluctant to publish unsigned pieces, clearly this is an exception.â
I included my mobile-phone number, and I got a call that afternoon. The person at the other end said she was Grace Ringwood and then told me her real name. âActually, I think you know me,â she said, adding that she had sent me material for publication in her professional capacity and that, on at least one occasion, The Irish Times had published an article under her own name.
The âGraceâ with whom I was chatting sounded clear, calm and comfortable with what she was saying. Not unstable, just normal. She had well-thought-out views on a difficult subject about which she wrote well, with the authority of personal experience.
The conversation lasted no more than a few minutes. I said that I would discuss the piece with the Editor, to whom I would have to disclose her true identity but would be suggesting we publish it anonymously. I would let her know.
Later that evening, a few minutes before 7pm, Grace e-mailed me again.
âDear Peter,â she wrote. âThank you for your call earlier. It was very comforting to hear your interest in the area, even if my piece in particular may not be deemed suitable. Nevertheless, if you do decide to publish it, do please let me know.
âAnd again, if there is anything else I can contribute or another area of the issue you would like me to write about, please do not hesitate to ask. I enjoy writing, and I think a great deal can be gained from writings on this issue in a paper like The Irish Times .â
We did publish â anonymously, as she requested â on Friday, September 9th, which was the day before World Suicide Prevention Day. The link, Graceâs suggestion, was apposite.
But, unknown to us, by the time readers were digesting Graceâs thoughts, she was already dead.
On Monday, August 22nd, within an hour or two of e-mailing how much she enjoyed writing and looked forward to contributing more to The Irish Times , Grace Ringwood took her own life.
GRACE RINGWOODâS real name is Kate Fitzgerald. She was 25 when she died.
She radiated talent, energy, beauty and determination. Her long-term ambition was to write. She was someone whose life amounted to much more than the manner of its ending, and the immeasurable grief that that has caused her parents and brother, her wider family and friends â everyone who knew her and loved her for the person she was.
The day after Kateâs article was published, her father, Tom Fitzgerald, rang the newspaper to say he thought â was fairly certain, in fact â that the author of the anonymous piece was his daughter and that she had taken her own life between its having been submitted and published.
Some days later I met Tom and his wife, Kateâs mother, Sally. Sally explained immediately why her daughter chose the name. âRingwood is my motherâs maiden name,â she said, âand I always told Kate that if Iâd had another daughter, I was going to call her Grace. Kate loved that name.â
A cascade of raw emotion, love, memories, loss and some anger followed. But with all of those, there was also a feeling that Kateâs life story, and her many achievements, should not be swamped by bewilderment at her death, the manner of it, and that her plea for greater understanding of depression should be heard.
KATE WAS BORN on June 26th, 1986, in San Jose, California. Tom was from small-farming stock in Dingle, Co Kerry, but in 1971, aged 18, he headed for the US. Over the next seven years, he had a variety of jobs; he was a military policeman in the US air force and he worked on the Alaska oil pipeline.
One day, in 1978, he was sitting in a romantic-poetry class at the University of San Francisco. Sally, who as a teenager had spent a year at boarding school in Athlone, was sitting in front of Tom. Hearing his accent, she turned around. âThat was it: lightning bolt!â she says.
Marriage followed, then Kate and, in 1989, her brother, William. In between, Tom studied computers and became a writer of technical manuals for PC users. His work brought the family to Europe; first to London and then to Ireland.
They settled eventually in Bantry, in west Co Cork, where he and William run a technical writing and translation company.
Sally, originally from La Jolla in California, was trained in classical voice in San Francisco, and established a school of voice in Bantry.
From an early age, Kate stood out. Her twin loves of politics and communication emerged in childhood, a legacy in part perhaps from her maternal grandfather, a cartoonist with the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.
Before she was 10, she drew a picture of herself making a speech standing at the podium of the US president.
As a child in Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, she started her own newspaper, which she sold in local shops. By the time she was at secondary school in Cork, she was reviving the schoolâs moribund debating society, with Tomâs help.
When Kate was in her teens, strong, high-achieving women became her heroes and role models. On her bedroom wall was a picture of Diane Sawyer, the US television anchorwoman. She admired the actor Katharine Hepburn as well as Katharine Graham, the matriarch of the Washington Post. All strong women, as Sally notes.
But the very qualities that made Kate special might also have marked her out in a manner not to her advantage. The bright kid with the American accent was bullied. âShe was tough,â says Sally, âbut not as tough as we thought. She had her own style. She stood out. She was single-minded, knew what she was about, what she wanted.â
Kate studied journalism at Dublin City University but switched to the international-relations course. She was 18 when the US Democrat senator John Kerry was demolished by Republican George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Kate sat up all night as the Democratsâ disaster unfolded.
She threw herself into the Irish branch of Democrats Abroad and emerged, in late 2007, as its chairwoman. She was just 21 years old but flung herself at the challenge of turning around an organisation that was, in effect, defunct. Within two years, membership had grown from about 200 to 1,400, and funds in the bank were up from âŹ600 to âŹ11,000.
By the time of the Barack Obama-John McCain presidential election, in November 2008, she was a regular radio and television commentator on the campaign. A trip to Washington for the inauguration followed, and when President Obama came to Ireland in May, Kate featured on RTĂ and on TV3.
âShe loved the adrenalin of being head of Democrats Abroad,â says Sally. âShe was so stylish; she was in PR, she knew how to present herself,â says Tom.
But beneath the surface, all was not well.
Tom says: âI think she felt in over her head. I think she was unable to cope with the value system that often exists in journalism and PR. She was hooked on the adrenalin of power, the pressure, the deadlines â but, you know, it was all too much for her.â
âShe was not comfortable with failure,â says Sally. âShe always wanted to be on top. She was constantly critical of herself; she never thought she could be good enough. She was a perfectionist.â Behind all the success, all the achievement, was there insecurity?
âYes,â replies Sally. A lack of confidence, despite apparent self-confidence? âYes.â
Drink began to assume a destructive role in her life. A broken relationship didnât help. On July 18th, she checked herself into St Patrickâs University Hospital in Dublin, which specialises in mental-health issues. She did so through a fog of drink and antidepressants.
âIn St Patâs, she behaved like a normal person; friends visited, and so on,â says Tom. âBut underneath all that was the problem she was hiding from everyone,â says Sally.
Sallyâs theory is that a depressed person can sometimes try to âmanageâ their condition by stepping outside themselves but, far from controlling their condition, âthey get farther and farther from realityâ.
âI think thatâs where Katie was that night. The person who commits suicide is not the person you know,â she says.
And maybe there was something in Kateâs mind from her family history. A half-aunt and an uncle, Sallyâs brother, had taken their own lives in 1985 and 2002. The thought of a connection in Kateâs mind, however tenuous, upsets Sally, but she dwells on it. âThat really distresses me a lot.â
ON THAT NIGHT , after e-mailing The Irish Times her prim, matter-of-fact but friendly note, Kate descended rapidly. Within a couple of hours, drink and pills had taken over. Tom and Sally believe I may have been the last person she spoke to. After that conversation, Kate left an incoherent voice message on another phone, but there was no last note, no message of explanation. Her yet-to-be-published article was the nearest thing to that.
Quite simply, and on her own, Kate went to a dark place from which she did not return.
The next day, two gardaĂ called to the family home in Bantry to deliver the worst news imaginable.
Amid the grief, a torrent of tributes was posted on Kateâs Facebook page. âSuch a loss of a beautiful, smart and inspirational girl. In even a short time, she made a huge impact,â wrote Laura.
âKate was a truly radiant personality. The world is a lesser place without her,â wrote Pat Lewis.
âI feel so incredibly privileged to have known Kate, to have tried to be as knowledgeable and as passionate and as damn good a dancer as she was,â wrote Alan.
At Kateâs funeral, in Glengarriff, Sally asked her students at West Cork School of Voice to sing Aaron Coplandâs working of Simple Gifts, the Shaker hymn:
âTis the gift to be simple,
âtis the gift to be free,
âtis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.
Tom spoke. So did William. Sally read Kateâs entry to Plan Irelandâs blog, Because I am a Girl â âalthough it was extremely difficult to do, I wanted Kates words to be heardâ â and there were words too from the American writer Mary Kay Simmons, a friend of Kate.
She mentioned the dark corner of Kateâs bouts of depression and how âshe lacked that extra skin that helps the rest of us fight oneâs corner without depressionâ but still lit up the lives of others.
Kateâs ashes were scattered at Sea Ranch, a holiday resort in Sonoma County, in northern California, a place she knew and loved. âSheâs there now with the whales and California sea lions,â says Tom.
Tom, Sally and William nurse their grief and want Kateâs legacy to be a better understanding of depression and suicide. They, no more than anyone else, do not have instant solutions.
âWhat Iâve learned from it?â Sally responds to my question. âTrust your instincts. Choose your friends and associates carefully. We also wish to help erase the stigma attached to suicide. Depression is a medical illness, not merely a mental condition. As Kate implied in her article, the answer is there, if you ask the right question.â
. You sound like a man in need of a bit of purpose in his life and stuck in a rut. Drinking seems to be a method of escape but its leading you back to the same hole. I was the same way a while back, staying out till dawn on Sunday in London. Dont know why I did it considering the absolute shithole I tended to end up in at that hour. Absolutely hated my job and the city at that stage and was in need of something different in my life. Maybe consider packing in your job and head around Europe or South America for 6 months. Just see where the wind takes ya. If not, there are other ways of socialising apart from boozing. Triathlons, 10k clubs, even tag rugby seem to be popular at home these days for getting to meet people outside the normal boozing. A stint volunteering at a homeless shelter might give ya a sense of perspective aswell.