The death by suicide of his brother led to the Brisbane ruckman’s premature retirement and gave rise to new learnings in mental health advocacy
rchie Smith isn’t working to a timeline. He has tried to figure out the formula for solving grief, a solution to stipulate exactly when the sadness will stop feeling so full-bodied. But the day-to-day reminders over the past 18 months have been almost predictable in their unpredictability.
But during that fortnight Smith also sat on a Gold Coast beach writing. It started out as a way to privately sift through his own thoughts, and then turned into eight pages of notes he wanted to share. The content formed a personal video released by the Lions that July. In it, Smith spoke in depth about his family, including Sebastian.
“It’s very particular on what you can and can’t say, and saying the wrong thing can actually be triggering for people and quite dangerous,” he says. “I was learning so much through the writing process. “In professional sports it’s all about if you’re playing that week, how you’re playing. Are you playing ones? Are you playing twos? Why aren’t you getting selected? You think coaches hate you and there’s paranoia. It’s these mind games you play with yourself. In my eight years I saw like 100 players come and go, saw the ones who it ate up alive and it mentally destroyed them.
“And a gross sense of humour, farts and shit like that. My mum loved that. She said it at Bas’s funeral she was proud all her boys are ratbags – but good ratbags.”
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