Profit and loss: grief interrupted

The developer and auctioneer Philip de Vere Hunt – known to his wife Annette as Vere – took his own life on December 18, 2012. Since then, Annette’s has been a grief interrupted. For those three years, she and her five children, Robert, Philip, Julian, Alison and Evan, have been trying to pick up the pieces.

The three years have seen a series of indignities visited upon her family.

Re-opening the family mart the week of Vere’s suicide – Christmas week – to keep the family business up and running. Being sued by Nama. Having valuers poring over the house eight months after Vere’s death and taking photographs of everything to calculate a price for their family home. Making an appearance before a Dáil public accounts committee on the second anniversary of Vere’s death.

“I’ve actually had so little time to grieve, because I stepped into Vere’s shoes once he was gone,” Annette says. “I have never been in control.”

But you can’t postpone grieving; life doesn’t allow it. Life may well get in the way, of course, but grief will quietly bide its time, eventually demanding to be met and reckoned with.

In an Ireland in which the phrase “old-fashioned” is brandished now as a kind of insult, Vere was unselfconsciously an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned values.

At the core of his world was Ardmayle, the family farm outside Cashel in Co Tipperary which he had inherited from his father.

A man of the country

At 14, Vere had begun to run away from school, and kept doing so until the teachers told his father to keep him at home; that the boy clearly didn’t want to be there. His father, perhaps exasperated, set about teaching him everything he knew about running a farm. Vere took to it readily.

Annette married Vere when she was 19 and he was 23, and they moved into Ardmayle. It was 1972. Vere’s father and brother were still living in the house. Within a year they’d had a son, Robert, and a year after that, another son, Philip.

All the while, Vere tended the land and viewed himself as its caretaker. His view was that Ardmayle was his for his lifetime, and that his role was to maintain it, improve it and hand it over to the next generation as it had been handed over to him. Annette’s abiding memory of him is of standing at the window, watching him walking up through the fields at the back of the house with Rex, his working dog, after he’d been down with the cattle.

Vere was a quiet, shy man. While Annette had the fiery temper, Vere kept a cool and often inscrutable exterior, even to those who knew him best.

He was a man of the country. He’d tell his wife he didn’t need a holiday – why would he need one? He loved what he did. If he needed a break, he could go down to the River Suir, which ran through the farm and do some fly fishing, with the mayfly rising above the water. Or in the winter, tramp through the land and do some shooting. He rarely sought out social occasions. On those rare nights that he’d go to the pub, the talk would revert to cattle or farming.

Vere was also a man of firm principle. If money meant little to him, he understood it meant a lot to others. He understood even more keenly that it meant a lot to financial institutions, and the impact this could have on individuals.

In 1979, he had bought a plot of land with a loan extended to him by the bank. It was a time when interest rates were up at nearly 20 per cent, and before he knew it the bank was sending him more than weekly letters reminding him of his obligations. The stress grew, as did the tension between him and Annette, and the potential that the decision to buy the other farm would rebound on his beloved Ardmayle. It took until 1986 to sort out the loans and restructure them, but Vere had learned a valuable lesson about banks and finance.

He had also learned a valuable lesson about the toll that financial trouble can take on people’s lives, and his quiet, empathetic impulse – his sense of fairness and justice – saw him quietly step in to shield people from such stress where he could.

‘The farm was his Achilles heel’

In the months after his death, it was suggested to Annette that Vere had been keeping an account in the local credit union. She went down to enquire and discovered that, far from that, he had in fact been making regular visits to personally vouch for account holders – business owners, customers, individuals – who had got into temporary difficulty, and to ask the credit union to stand with them.

What he wanted was for the credit union to promise to stand with their lender and make sure they were not left short – because, more than money, he saw the value of that support.

Like many farmers, through the Celtic Tiger years Vere found himself involved in land deals and property developments around the county, including a shopping centre and a petrol station, which went sour when the economy began to falter.

In late 2010, Vere and his business partner Pat Moloughney had loans of about €31 million of loans associated with the developments transferred into Nama. In 2012, Moloughney went into bankruptcy, but that was never going to be an option for Vere.

“I used to say, and people would laugh at me, but I used to say that Vere loved Ardmayle first, the mart second, and me third. For him, Ardmayle was the only place to be on earth. You’d almost have to drug him to get him out of the country on a holiday,” Annette says.

Vere saw himself as simply one link in a chain of Hunts who would manage Ardmayle for generations. For him, land was not merely an asset in a portfolio, or simply a different way of expressing wealth and money.

Being the the one to break the link between Ardmayle and all those generations of future Hunts was a thought he could not bear. He believed he had protected the farm from any of his business dealings, and that only the assets of the partnership could be seized if anything went wrong.

With Moloughney in bankruptcy, Vere became the entire focus of the negotiations.

“What they wanted from him couldn’t be delivered. It simply couldn’t. They made it very clear to him that they wanted the farm. That was his Achilles heel. He felt ashamed,” Annette said. “God help him, he had no chance. No chance at all.”

‘Annette, I’m in hell’

At some point in October 2012 – the moment itself is burned in Annette’s memory – Vere turned to his wife and said: “Annette, I’m in hell.”

Not a loquacious man at the best of times, a man who would become uncomfortable if Annette put his arm around him “walking down the street in New York City, never mind here in Cashel”, it was an astonishingly open, forthright and desperate thing for him to say.

“I was rooted to the spot,” says Annette. “I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to say, or what I could say. I just gave him a hug. And yet, you know, I should have seen that it was possibly an opportunity to delve deeper, but I simply did not.

“All along, I had adopted the attitude that if Vere wanted to talk to me, I’d let him talk to me, but when he was at home I felt I wanted him to be able to park it and leave it behind. I didn’t want to be dragging it up and reminding him of it. I felt that when he was at home, he’d be able to be at peace and forget about it for a while. If I was going to be quizzing him about it and discussing it, there’d be no rest for him and no respite from the worries. It’s so easy to be wise afterwards.”

Only now, when Annette looks at pictures of Vere from the time, can she see how he aged over the course of his negotiations. “It did take a physical toll on him. But when you see someone every day, you don’t really see it,” she says.

Vere appears to have made up his mind in mid-October 2012. On the 23rd of that month, he went to his solicitor and made his will, leaving everything to Annette. He didn’t tell her that he had done so.

Meanwhile, he was taking an increasing interest in making improvements to the farm and the house, which he had perhaps overlooked in previous years.

He had tidied up some trees at the end of the avenue which had begun to be a safety hazard, and he pressed Annette to renovate the kitchen – an area in which he had previously shown no interest.

“He’d rather see six bullocks down in the field than a new carpet,” she says.

Now, all of a sudden, he was insisting that she pick out paint for the walls and new surfaces for the floor. “It was totally out of character.”

The darkest moment

On the evening that he took his life, Vere ate dinner with Annette and told her he was going to the mart to take care of some business. It was slightly unusual for him to be working so late, but he was involved in a very large land sale, and he had a court appearance in Dublin the next morning related to his debts, so it seemed reasonable to Annette that he might be preparing in some way for that.

She also had hope that the deal would give him added motivation. “This land sale was a very big thing, and I thought: ‘This will keep him going, he’ll get stuck into this’,” she says.

So Annette and her daughter Alison settled in for the evening, and Vere went to the mart to take care of that unspecified business. At 9.20pm, Annette got a text that he had gone playing cards. “I said to Alison: ‘What’s he doing, going playing cards? He has to be up early in the morning.’ Then I thought, sure maybe he needs to escape and maybe the cards will allow him to free up all that’s going on in his head.”

She texted him back wishing him luck for the next morning, and that she probably wouldn’t see him. To this day, she has no idea if he came back and slept at home, or stayed in the mart that night.

The next morning, she noticed two missed calls on her phone from Vere’s business partner, Pat Moloughney. He had been supposed to meet Vere at the train station that morning to go to Dublin, but Vere hadn’t turned up.

Vere’s jeep was parked at the front of the house, and he had taken Alison’s old Skoda to the mart.

By then, Moloughney had contacted Vere’s solicitor, Aidan Leahy, who had climbed over the gate and gone into the mart.

“The place was locked. When Vere went in, he locked everything and he turned on no lights because he didn’t want to draw attention. He used a torch for light, and when they looked in, they could see he was there.”

By the time Annette got to the mart, it was after 10am, and her son Robert was already there.

“I knew this wasn’t good,” she says. “A terrible, sick feeling came over me. And when I looked at Robert’s face, it was the same colour as the front of a fridge. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say it because [by then] I knew.”

There was also, by that time, a small gathering of people in the yard of the mart, including Moloughney, Aidan Leahy, some gardaí and a handful of others.

“To be quite honest, there was a lot of people knew Vere was dead before I did,” Annette said. “I began to realise that people knew, because they were driving past the gates. They were slowing down and looking in. And none of my family knew, because I had only just found and three of my children didn’t know.”

Julian was in the Netherlands; Philip was in London; Evan was in France, doing exams. “To my dying day, I will remember their voices and the shock and utter disbelief,” Annette says.

“It was one thing to tell them their dad was dead – I mean, there was no easy way to say it, I couldn’t dress it up, I couldn’t make it any easier. I just said, your dad is dead.”

“Then the next question was: what happened? ‘Did he have a heart attack.’ ‘Was he in an accident?’ And I had to tell them. I didn’t want them finding out on Facebook or something, with somebody putting up a message about what had happened.”

Vere had left a letter to Annette. In it, he asked her to lead the family and explained his sense of shame at putting the family farm at risk.

“I am thankful every day that Vere did write the note. I don’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering why. Some families never find out, and 20 years later they’re still in agony, wondering why. Vere’s note is very clear and unambiguous. It explained so much.”

In it, he said how much he loved his family, and told Annette to lead the team and get on with her life.

But he also revealed the burden he had been carrying for those years, faced with the dreaded prospect of losing Ardmayle.

“I could not deal with the pressure and disgrace I brought to my family. There’s no way out of this problem. I will be bankrupt and shamed,” he wrote. “Even if I win, I lose.”

In the weeks after that, there was little time to process any of it. As Vere asked of her, Annette has been leading the team. “Really, I’ve been following his orders since,” she says. “There have been desperate times, really.”

All the while, she knows that she has been delaying the inevitable, postponing the real job of processing the huge volume of grief that a wife must bear when her husband ends his own life.

“I’m very thankful to my friends and family for their kindness and support, which has never wavered. I don’t know where I’d be without them,” she says. “And I’m so proud of my children for having come through this ordeal and picked up the pieces and lived their lives.”

But the grief remains. “I have cried a fair share, and when I do cry I have to be alone. I don’t do grief publicly. We’re very private people. We’ve been thrust into the spotlight and it’s not a place we’re comfortable.

“I have many days where I say to myself, did this really happen. I wake up and I think: how did we ever find ourselves in this situation?”

She says a recurring comment from those who came to Vere’s wake in Ardmayle was: “My God, if we were making a list of people who we might feel were at risk of killing themselves, his name would never be on it.”

The majority of people who take their own lives suffer from some form of mental health issue, but Annette says that for all the time she knew Vere, he did not suffer from depression. “I am only speaking for Vere. I am not an authority,” she says. “But what I have learned is that everybody has a breaking point.

“That was one of the scary things in relation to Vere. I didn’t ever entertain that idea at any point. And I’d lived with him for 40 years.”

Keeping above water

It has now been more than three years since Vere’s death. Three years in which Annette de Vere Hunt has had to sublimate her grief, squeeze it down and hope to deal with it another day, so that she can lead the team, negotiate with Nama and keep her family above water. That leaves a mark.

In May 2013, Annette attended Vere’s inquest. The coroner, Philip Morris, made headlines when he described the banks’ “moral vacuum” and how they “make an idol of money and sacrifice the dignity of the human being”, bringing Vere to “the end of his tether”. It caused a flurry of news coverage; but behind the news headlines, it was a further opening of Annette’s wounds.

“I had no idea it would be gone into in such graphic detail. It was all so harrowing,” she said.

Last March, she was driving along the motorway and a feeling of fear – a kind of trembling or numbness – washed over her.

“I thought: ‘Am I having a heart attack? What is going on here?’ I was going as far as Kildare and I kept driving, but eventually I had to pull over because I thought I was going to cause an accident if I didn’t.”

Parked on the side of the motorway, trembling, not sure where she was exactly, Annette thought: “If I die here on the side of the road, people are going to have no idea what happened.”

She was so frightened that she dialled 999, and the operator talked her down. She drove at a snail’s pace to the next exit, for Portlaoise, where she stopped in the town for a coffee. The fear had gone, but her body still felt weak and drained. “I sat back into the car and I just made it home eventually. I’d say I didn’t really know what I’d experienced, but I was okay and I thought it was only a one-off.”

Then, in October, she had to go to Cork to pick up her son Evan, who was flying home for the weekend. It was a horrible Sunday, windy and lashing rain, and as she was driving outside Cahir that same sensation overwhelmed her again.

She pulled over several times on the way down, despite the wind and rain, and she had to walk herself around the car and persuade herself she could drive the rest of the way to the airport. “It’s very bad, because I have to be independent,” she says.

You can’t postpone grief; life doesn’t allow it.