Rachel’s journey of healing and hope
Lifestyle - Rachel Gotto’s extraordinary journey through tragedy and bereavement, her own life-threatening illness and resulting addiction to prescription drugs, which she has overcome is proof that people have power to change their lives, she tells JUDY MURPHY.
Rachel Gotto is an animated, vibrant woman who uses her hands – a lot – in conversation. Nothing strange about that, you might think, but that she can move her hands at all is a testament to Rachel’s will and spirit.
This woman has faced more adversity in her 50 years than most people ever will, including the sudden tragic death of her husband, which she witnessed, the death from cancer of her brother in his 20s, her daughter’s serious childhood illness, and her own brain tumour, which nearly killed her.
Yet, as she sips mint tea in a city café, she says candidly that overcoming her addiction to the sedative drug, benzodiazepine, was the toughest, most soul-destroying experience of the lot.
That addiction was the result of medication following an operation for a brain tumour, diagnosed when Rachel was in her mid-30s, which most neurologists had declared was inoperable.
Her goal in sharing her story is to inspire other people deal with what live throws at them. There may be times when the struggle gets too much and you need to rest. But her message is “don’t give up”.
From the beginning, Rachel’s life was unconventional. She was born in Glandore, County Cork, in the late 1960s – the birth would have been on a boat, as her older brother’s was, except the doctor attending her mother refused to go on board.
Her parents had arrived in Ireland by boat a couple of years previously. Her father, “an expansive, adventurous man”, had bought a small craft in England, intending to sail to New Zealand. The couple stopped off in West Cork on the way and stayed; “thankfully”, says Rachel.
Her father set up one of the earliest chandlery businesses in Ireland and the family “lived off the sea”.
Rachel, who now calls Knocknacarra home, remains deeply attached to the ocean, with swimming and rowing among her passions. That attachment has persisted despite losing her husband Nic to the sea when she was pregnant with their only child, Nicola, who is now in her early 20s.
Rachel’s mum, to whom she is very close, is 83, and her daughter describes the older woman as “a wonderful mother”. She didn’t have a good relationship with her late father, but doesn’t dwell on that.
There’s so much else to tell that it doesn’t matter.
At the age of 23, she was running her own seafood restaurant on the pier in Glandore. That’s where she met Nic, when he arrived there by boat.
“He came and went through the sea,” she says simply.
Rachel, then aged 24 was caring for her brother Dominic, just a year older than her, who had been diagnosed with cancer. He’d opted not to have conventional medical treatment and they travelled the world seeking other treatments until his death in November, 1996. Although Dominic had been more than reconciled to dying, Rachel felt hugely guilty that she hadn’t done enough to save someone she loved so much.
But she was supported by Nic, a diver and fisherman from Carrigaline, and “a constant, constant man”.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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