Baring her soul
Lifestyle - Plunged into grief by the death of her teenage brother and her father in the space of eighteen months, Meghann Scully has found a way to come to terms with the desolation – by writing a book to intimately detail her emotional journey. She talked to Judy Murphy.
Appearances can be deceptive. Meghann Scully is proof of that. The 27-year-old Ardrahan woman lives in Limerick where she works as a presenter with Spin South West radio station. She’s beautiful, academically successful and, going by her social media accounts, has a great social life.
But behind the image there’s a far more complex story, one Meghann tells in her new book, Broken Love: My Journey Through Loss & Grief, which was launched in Galway last Friday. In it, she explores a journey that began with the sudden, shocking death of her 18-year-old brother Marcus on March 5, 2005, when she was just 15. He and his friend Cathal died as a result of a car crash. A year and a half later, Meghann’s father, Maxie, died too, aged 52, “of a broken heart”, she says.
Her relationship with Maxie hadn’t always been straightforward, as she recounts in Broken Love. He and her mother, Pauline had separated when Meghann was a toddler. The family lived in Dublin at the time and Maxie, who was originally from Gort, remained there while Pauline and the children moved to Spiddal. Eventually, they settled in Pauline’s home place of Ardrahan.
Maxie was a complex character for whom marriage and fatherhood didn’t come easy. A former champion showjumper, who had represented Ireland internationally, he suffered kidney failure aged 21 and nearly died before a successful transplant.
He had been a distant father when Marcus and Meghann were small and it was only after 2000, when he, too, relocated to Galway, that father and daughter became close.
Meghann is as open in person as she is in the book, but it took a long time for that to happen. One reason was because she witnessed how Marcus’s death had affected their mother.
She recalls hearing Pauline wailing during the night in the months after he was killed.
“Her crying in the hallway used to go through me,” says Meghann simply. “I had to supress my own feelings. She needed me.”
Some years later, while Meghann was doing a Masters in Journalism in NUIG, their roles reversed. She entered a dark place and Pauline told her “now it’s me being here for you”.
Broken Love is “about a young girl who loved and lost” as Meghann explains in the book’s foreword. She has no formal training in psychology but did a lot of therapy and tried different holistic treatments over the years, attempting to come to terms with her devastating loss.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.