18 years ago today I got engaged to Paul. But he took his life after years of depression and drinking. If I had known then what I know now, the outcome may have been different, says Joan Mitchell.
I was 28 when he died. That night I asked my mother if I could sleep in bed with her. I was too scared on my own
PAUL was my first love. We used to meet in our local hotel, after the dance on a Sunday night, and snog in his Transit van before he dropped me home. I was funny and carefree, but arrogant for 18. I was going to college in England and I didn’t need a joiner from ‘bally-go-backwards’. Even when he made me learn his address by heart, I knew I would never write.
In June of 1988, Paul, my Paul, married an Irish girl in New York and I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life. At the end of every night out, I would cry in the toilets to anyone who would listen. In Easter of 1992, Paul came home, divorced. My legs shook; my head spun; I felt like jelly. I did what I should have done years before — I wrote him a letter. I was back in Ireland, at college, and that weekend I didn’t go home. Late afternoon, the phone rang; he would get the train down and be there at 7.10pm.
He arrived and it felt like a dream, our big romantic dream. He had married, discovered the error of his ways, and had run back to me. Well, not quite: she threw him out, as I would later discover, for drinking — but I was in love and could see none of it. We got engaged on this day — 18 years ago.
Source: Irish Examiner, 29/03/2013
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