I did not know Gerry Ryan, not personally, although I lived for a while on the same road and then, for 10 years, on another road in Clontarf in Dublin where he had lived all of his life.

I would have seen him occasionally about the place; at Xtra-vision, usually on Sunday evening when he was dropping back or taking out a DVD, perhaps with one of his children. We never spoke.

He did not look like a celebrity at Xtra-vision. I have a memory of him in a black tracksuit, white socks and brown deck shoes; man, husband, dad, not caring really how he may have appeared to others, comfortable, as he was, in the bosom of his family. That would have been, maybe, seven or eight years ago.

His son was a year ahead of my son at Belgrove, the local primary school; his daughter is a year behind mine in the girls' school.

Other than that we had little in common, but for one thing that deeply affected both our lives -- our marriages had ended, mine five years ago, his two.

My children stay with me when they want, several nights a week. I chose to live nearby. They come, they go. On Friday night all three were with me, watching the Disney Channel.

My daughter was particularly upset at the death of Gerry Ryan. I have noticed before how she talks more animatedly when somebody she has known has died -- a girl at school most recently -- of how death stokes something within her, of how she feels a need to express herself in a way that she does not normally do.

She did not know Gerry Ryan either, but she knows his youngest daughter: "She said I had nice shoes." My daughter's fear is that she might come home from school some day, like Gerry Ryan's daughter on Friday, to be told that her dad has died.

That fear is doubly so, laden with all kinds of unimaginable feelings, because she comes from what society likes to call a broken home. I wonder, and worry, if we had not separated, whether my daughter would be so full of this anxiety.

I feel I will never fully "get over" -- if that is the term -- the breakdown of my marriage, or whether I ever should. It changes you in so many ways, no matter who you are; in some ways for the better, in other ways not. It balances out eventually. In the end, though, you emerge a different person.

Gerry Ryan's marriage ended in a whirl of publicity two years ago. Although I did not know him, and had never spoken to him about it, of this I am certain: it had changed, or was changing him too, and profoundly so. It could not have been any other way.

A few years ago I spoke to Sean Dunne, the property developer, about this. His first marriage ended too. He told me then that it takes at least four years to emerge from the fog of depression and anxiety and uncertainty that rises up and chokes almost every father who has gone through a separation or divorce, and he was right.

There is no short cut through. You may be a celebrity broadcaster, a wealthy businessman, a two-bit hack, or none of these things; you may know the world of people and have so many friends; you may have your colleagues at work, and your work to do; you may feel better, at times, and fool yourself that you are done, that it is over, that you are through it. But you are not, not really, not for at least four years, not ever really. It leaves its mark.

"Whatever the circumstances are that lead to a separation, it is an incredibly difficult time. And even the most robust, strong-willed and emotionally stable person will get a head spin out of it," Gerry Ryan said in a newspaper interview at the publication of his memoir recently.

I can guarantee you that Gerry Ryan's head was still spinning last week when he died alone in an apartment, where he had chosen to live after the breakdown of his marriage.

He and Morah had been childhood sweethearts. They became engaged to be married when Morah was just 17, and wed four years later. She talked about this, movingly so, in an interview with Liadan Hynes in Life magazine some time ago.

Women seem to cope better with the trauma of marriage breakdown. Perhaps it is that, for them, the upheaval is usually not so pronounced, that the children normally stay with a mother.

Morah became involved in art again. She also leaned heavily on her women friends who are, by instinct, more empathetic. They helped her cope. For men, even for men as in touch with their feelings as was Gerry Ryan, it is different.

He had good friends too, many of them household names, mainly drawn from his social circle. He leaned on them also. They provided him with many of the basics he needed to come through; accommodation, camaraderie, a form of routine.

But in the end he went home alone most nights. He had a new partner who cared for him deeply, and he for her. It was a different kind of love, though. They did not share a home, a family, the comings and goings, those most routine of things that you take for granted, until they are gone.

Most nights, then -- at whatever hour, in whatever condition -- Gerry Ryan would come home alone. That is the killer moment, the moment the door shuts closed behind you and you are left with nothing but yourself and the sound of your own foot falling.

It is at such a moment that you begin the process of questioning everything you thought you knew about yourself; a deep-tissue unravelling of your very core. Gerry Ryan would have been in the middle of that process.

Let me tell you what that must have been like for him, for any man -- husband and father -- to come home alone to an empty house at the end of a long marriage.

Throughout his married life -- 26 years -- it is fair to say that Gerry Ryan did not, every evening, mow the grass or prune the roses or do those other things that many family men like to do. Neither did I. You are too busy doing other things, living a life more hectic. But home was always there, a wife, a family, a sanctuary. You are not truly aware of the comfort of that until it is gone.

For the last two years Gerry Ryan, single again, had been living what you might call a fulsome life, a style of life perhaps not a million miles from the life he was living while he was married. But the comfort was gone, the certainty had disappeared.

Nothing prepares you for the loss of that certainty; nothing can fill the void, not really -- not friends, not workmates, certainly not alcohol. You are left only to engage in the process of looking at yourself, and you must do that and do it honestly, as I feel sure Gerry Ryan had been been doing, or was getting around to do.

Eventually, the best you can hope for is to, first of all, try to readjust, then learn to cope and then rebuild. My feeling is that Gerry Ryan had not yet learned to cope. He had been only two years into the readjustment. He had at least two to go, probably more.

So on those nights when he came home alone he would have got a taxi from wherever he was to wherever he was going. It would have been late; he would have been taking whiskey.

He would have turned a key in the door, he would have opened it and he would have been met by a coldness in the air. There would have been no sense of another presence, his children were not upstairs asleep, his wife was not warm and secure in his bed.

There would have been no children's toys in the hallway, no coats hanging on the stairs, no warmth from the walls, no schoolbooks on the table, and no or precious little food in the fridge.

He would turn on the television, watch Sky News; he would feel tired, and would go upstairs. There would be a towel on the bathroom floor, the laundry basket would be full; there would be clothes discarded on the bedroom floor, his bed would be unmade.

There would be no scatter cushions, no candles, no bedside lights dimly glowing. None of this would have bothered him either.

But there would be no sound of his children gently breathing. He would be acutely aware of that. He may take a sleeping tablet to help get him through the night, or four or five hours of it anyway.

Before he lay down, he would have looked out the window at the night sky, and would seen the moon, and he would have thought of how it was shining, too, in Clontarf, over the house where his children slept; he would have wished that he was with them there, and he would have felt at a loss to know why he was not.

He would have ached to be not just under the same night sky, but under the same roof, so that he might at least feel that he could protect his children if protection they needed, to keep them safe.

This is the thought that would have bothered him, that would have upset him, the one that he would have taken to his unmade bed. He may have cried.

He would have done all of this without complaining, hiding from his public the inner turmoil he had not yet come to terms with. And then he would set out for RTE, his home away from home, and he would perform, as he always did, a command performance.

Originally published in