A heartbroken mother has shared how she lost her teenage sons within 13 weeks.
Patrice Matthews said she knew she had lost another son while burying his brother in a heart-wrenching premonition.
“I knew the day I buried PJ, I was losing Mikey,” she expressed. “They were born 13 months apart and were inseparable.”
“I remember looking at Mikey when we had buried PJ in that graveyard and, seeing his devastation, I just felt there was nothing I could do for him,” Patrice continued.
“I’ll never forget his face and the heartache that was in it.”
PJ, 17, took his own life on New Year’s Eve 2021.
“He was a character. He would push you to the edge and be the first to try new things,” Patrice said of her son.
“He left school after fifth year because he was mad to work. He was great with his hands and could take anything apart and put it back together again, especially tractors and vintage tractors, which he loved,” she told LMFM’s Late Lunch Program.
Patrice said that during the final Christmas week, PJ went shopping before spending time with the family. He then left to be with his pals.
A cheerful PJ then returned with his friends to celebrate his nephew’s birthday. But in less than an hour, ‘something changed’ and he ‘became very upset.’
“I remember going outside to talk to him and I coaxed him up to the bed and I sat at the end of it,” Patrice recalled.
“He then bolted up and said he had to go and clear his head.”
But when he didn’t return home, she texted him and he replied saying he was on his way.
“I’d a sick feeling and just knew we would need an ambulance,” she said.
Patrice then found her son’s lifeless body and recalled hearing screams.
“Then I realized it was actually me screaming.”
Heartbreak struck again only 13 weeks later when her 18-year-old son Mikey also took his own life.
“He was 18. I couldn’t force him to go to a doctor or get help even though I spoke to him at length about it,” she said.
“On the day that he had died, I left to go to the funeral of a family friend who had died by suicide and, as I went out the door, I said ‘I love you, Mikey’.
“He rolled his eyes at me, laughed, and said ‘aye!’”
Only hours later, Mikey’s friends called her after receiving a concerning message from him.
“At 11:50PM my son Conor came running in the back door looking for help after he and friends had found Mikey in the same field where he had been fencing earlier,” Patrice said.
The grieving mother now worries for her other three children who are still getting counseling on their grief.
“Our house isn’t the same anymore. Even the silence is different. Everything is different,” she expressed.
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