Weather girl Audrey McGrath regularly lights up our screens but is secretly battling through “many dark moments” since her mum’s sudden death four years ago.
The RTE star has opened up about the crippling grief that made her “shut down”.
Her dazzling telly smile masks the pain after losing mum Anne when she suffered two strokes in 2015.
Audrey said: “I was never the same person after my mother died.”
The 38-year-old was on a Spanish holiday with her parents Anne and Albert when her mum became ill.
In an emotional interview she told the RTE Guide: “I had just come out of a long-term relationship and my mother said it would be a nice break for me.
“But within the first two days she suffered a stroke. Mum was in hospital in Spain and making a good recovery when she got another stroke.”
Anne was taken home from the Costa del Sol in in an air ambulance, but after a month in Cork University Hospital she died.
It has taken Audrey a long time to come to terms with the tragic loss.
She said: “For the first year it was very raw with many dark moments I was not equipped to deal with. I’m still working through my grief, through the loss of my mum. As humans we think we have a say in things but I don’t feel that way anymore.
“I believe, and I say this with a certain amount of cynicism, that what is meant to be will be.”
Audrey was born in Dublin, but her family moved to Waterfall, near Cork, when she was two.
She has two older sisters Ciara and Rachel and a younger sister Lorraine.
In 2013 her long-term boyfriend Kevin O’Connor popped the question, but the wedding was called off less than a year later.
Audrey said she wears her mum’s engagement ring as a precious reminder of he, adding: “My mum loved me and all her children unconditionally. And since my mother died, my dad has been my rock.”
Audrey landed a gig in RTE as a continuity announcer in 2002 after working for a time at Cork radio station 96FM.
But she insists there is far more to life than the glossy world of television.
Audrey said: “In recent times I have realised the importance of privacy. I’m on social media, but I only give what I want to give. I call Instagram my scrapbook.
“It’s not based on real life. Real life is when I’m in Waterfall without a scrap of make-up and hair squished back.”
