Shortly after word of Dean Morris’s death emerged last May, his friends and Rhode teammates Conor and Ruairí McNamee and Stephen Hannon visited the family home to pay their respects.
The news, while shocking, was not altogether surprising. Dean, 29, had flirted with suicide on a couple of occasions previously and while football had helped to restore a sort of equilibrium to his life, those closest to him knew how fragile it was.
That’s why, despite the grief that must have been encircling her, his mother Dympna was largely conveying gratitude to the lads when they arrived at her door. The manner in which they had rallied around him, she felt, had afforded her and the family an extra few years with Dean which they wouldn’t have enjoyed otherwise.
Because Dean’s company was to be enjoyed. Very much a social animal, he had a self-deprecating nature and would poke fun at himself, pointing out how, as Rhode’s long-serving sub goalkeeper, his five county medals made him the most decorated footballer in the village - on a medals-to-minutes ratio.
On the back of his previous suicide attempt in 2016, he brought himself to the brink of finally winning one as a starter in 2019, but Ferbane swamped them in the county final.
“He used to always rip the piss out of himself as well and say that it was his fault,” says Conor. “That was the type of character he was.
“He used to say there was lads over in Pullough or somewhere that would kill for a medal and I can’t find mine.”
Less than a week before his death, he had shown Conor pictures of the new home he was about to move into with his girlfriend Jenny and her daughter Amelia.
“We were all talking about it, how can he go from that? We all said, look, don’t try and figure it out because if you go down that rabbit hole you’ll drive yourself mad. As close as we were to him, we don’t know.
“You get to a point, and I did a few of the nights, you know when you’re on the beer, you think you have a lad, having really good conversations, getting down to it and I’d straight out ask him, ‘What’s going on?’ and he just always put the barrier up so there’s no point trying to figure it out properly. He wasn’t happy.
“There were a few times where I properly sat down and said, ‘We all love you to bits and if anything ever happens again, just talk to somebody’. All the things that you would say and a couple of times he did, he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I really appreciate that, but I’m fine’ and pass it off.”
They were never convinced, however, and the lines of communication between those closest to him in the club and his family were constantly open.
“Anybody notice anything about Dean?”
But even all that concentrated vigilance couldn’t keep his demons at bay indefinitely.
He was buried the day after Ruairí was one of five Rhode players that drove Offaly to a crucial League win over Tipperary en route to promotion to Division Two. The Morris family home is a few miles outside the village but people lined the road all the way to the church.
“His sister got out of the car and she was actually smiling,” Ruairí recalls. “She was nearly overwhelmed with it all. It wasn’t just a guard of honour from the footballers, it was a guard of honour nearly from the whole of Rhode.
“We’re in touch with the family quite regularly still. Even on a night out, we’d always sit down and have a drink with them.”
Football had wrapped itself around Dean following his darkest moments and the McNamee brothers threw themselves back into it after his death. Whether with club or county, there was always a training session or a game coming around sharply, but when that routine was removed after Rhode lost the county final to Tullamore after a replay last month, they realised that they had essentially been postponing their grief.
“The week or two weeks after was horrendous,” says Conor.
“You’ve no structure. You’re doing it because you want to win it for Dean, that’s getting you through, getting you through. Then that’s taken away, you haven’t won it for him and then everything kind of comes crashing in and there was two weeks when the two of us were flat, completely flat.
“I wasn’t expecting it to come at all and then just flatlined. The two of us were in a slump, found it really, really hard to get out of it. Just not being productive. Just getting by with what we had to do as opposed to the months previous when we were bouncing.”
“The family were the first people to come over to us and say, ‘Get over it. It’s only a game of football’,” says Ruairí.
To honour Dean’s memory and in aid of Jigsaw, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health, the brothers will undertake a virtual 200km cycle, roughly the distance from Rhode to Westport, on the exercise bikes in their fledgling Bear Trap gym, on December 18.
“It’s funny now,” Ruairí acknowledges, “we’re probably putting all our energy now into doing the charity cycle.”
And the two of them will resume training with Offaly next week, with Conor returning after prioritising his studies and setting up his business, C-Bear Performance and Nutrition, over the past year.
It’d be easy for them to kick the can down the road with fundraising and football rather than confront their grief, but their recent slump showed them that there’s no future in that.
“Go to a counsellor and talk about it properly,” Conor says candidly. “I think that’s what I need to do.
“For myself personally, from two weeks of being low, it’s important for people to keep an eye on what you’re doing and mind yourself.
“Like, I have a thousand things going on which is great until you get to a point where you do flatline and then no matter how busy you are you’re going to find yourself in a pretty dark place and getting it hard to get out of it, which is what I found.
“You’re just doing x, y and z, staying as busy as possible. This place has been great, football - busy, doing a masters - busy, busy, busy and then all of a sudden, boom, because I wasn’t actually minding myself properly.”
Time to mind themselves now, like they did with Dean.
To support Conor and Ruairí's Rhode to Westport 200km Cycle, click here.
