The Day my Life Changed
Until my younger brother Brett took his own life in September 2013, suicide was always something that happened to other people, other families, not to me or my family.
I have since learned that it can happen to anyone.
We grew up on The Kapiti Coast, north of Wellington. Born in 1965, Brett was the youngest of three brothers, a year younger than me and our older brother was two years ahead of me.
As kids in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, we were raised typically of the time, boys were taught to be staunch, to show no emotion, to be tough, to just get on with it and for the most part, that’s what we did.
While I didn’t know it at the time, walking into Brett’s house on the morning of 1st September 2013 would be the day my life changed direction and after initially self-destructing and almost destroying myself with the rampant abuse of alcohol, with the help of my wife Wendy I realised that I had some deep-seated issues I needed to confront, and deal with.
The decision to quit alcohol was pivotal in my learning that for my whole life I had been living with varying levels of social anxiety and anger issues.
In 2014 an opportunity presented itself to relocate our business to Christchurch, which Wendy and I grabbed with both hands and we eventually sold our home in Levin and bought a property in Oxford.
I published a book about my journey after Brett’s suicide in 2017 Suicide; Aftermath & Beyond and Wendy and I now actively promote proactive mental wellbeing and suicide prevention, mostly in the trades and construction sector.
I have delivered talks to tradies and other groups around Canterbury about my journey and it is my hope that by sharing my personal story, others will relate to it and perhaps be encouraged to talk about their own struggles.
Written by
Paul Lynch
Mike King and I used to butt heads until we sat down one day and had a proper chat and realised we had so much in common we should work together not against each other.
If you would like more information:
p_lynch@xtra.co.nz
Also, I published a book in 2017 which we have recently reprinted, it is available here
https://aftermath-beyond.company.site/
All the proceeds from sales of the book are going directly to the Gumboot Friday initiative, I do quite a bot of stuff with Mike King.
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