A moment that changed me: My mother fell off a mountain – and my life began again

To steal a well-known line, 2023 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. My annus horribilis began when a long-term relationship broke up in January, only six months after we had bought our first home together. I was about to turn 38 and the future I thought was mine – marriage, children – all fell apart. What followed was blow after blow: my sister announced her engagement, I was told by a fertility doctor that I was “not a suitable candidate” for egg freezing, and I soon began having multiple panic attacks a day.Ordinarily, my work would have been my solace; when I wrote, it was as if time was suspended. But now, my words abandoned me. They would not come, no matter how much I tried. So, in April, I decided to take the rest of the year off to recover. As I was self-employed, this was not a choice I made lightly – but my heart was broken and so too, it seemed, was my brain.As befitting a millennial woman who read Eat Pray Love at a formative age, I attempted to recover using every kind of therapy imaginable. Unfortunately, even after a five-week trip to Thailand for a yoga and wellness retreat, I didn’t feel “healed”. I still felt resentful and sad, and I became afraid that I would be mired in my anger for the rest of my life.That September, my father turned 63. He didn’t want presents; he wanted the whole family – my parents, me, my sister and her now husband – to climb Carrauntoohil, the highest mountain in Ireland, together.It was a beautiful morning, but I was tired. The insomnia that had plagued me as a teenager had returned, making every day feel like an endurance test. I threw myself into the back seat of my parents’ car, pretending to sleep until we got to County Kerry. I wanted to be left alone with my misery, ruminating on how badly I had been treated, how I was the greatest victim who had ever lived.It was my first time climbing Carrauntoohil. We ascended through the Devil’s Ladder, a steep, rocky gully with loose stones and scree; you couldn’t lose focus, even for a second. At the summit, we ate our sandwiches and took photos at the wooden cross before the descent. I was in a better mood – annoyingly, my parents were right that getting outside would help. We were close to the end, and so close to safety, when I heard a scream. I turned to see my mother falling – 20ft? 30ft? 50ft? I couldn’t tell. Her body picked up speed until she was a blur of limbs and she crashed into a stone boulder with a sickening crack.Well, I thought. My year is about to get a lot worse.I scrambled to reach her, screaming her name, my sister running behind me. My father was trying to get to her, too. His face was pale and I knew he thought the same as me, that she was dead. No one could have survived a fall like that.‘I knew it was time to let go of the grief’ … Louise O’Neill. Photograph: Clare KeoghNo one … except my mother. She moaned as she pushed herself up to a sitting position. Once I saw she was conscious, I was relieved to see her teeth were intact; she’d had them straightened for my sister’s wedding, and I knew she would be devastated if they were affected. But she had an ugly gash across her forehead and she was haemorrhaging blood. We waited hours for the helicopter to airlift her off the mountain and they were some of the worst of my life, wondering if every minute that passed was time wasted – time that should have been spent saving her. What if she had a bleed on the brain? What if she lost consciousness and we had to watch her die? Finally, she was taken to hospital and the rest of my family were guided down by volunteers from the Kerry mountain rescue team.I had been so hurt after the breakup and that hurt had seemed very important. The loss, the injustice, the things I had been denied … I carried them with me all year. But on the mountain, for those few terrible minutes in which I thought that my mother had died, something shifted. The things I had been grieving suddenly seemed so small. A house could be sold. A heart could be mended. That which I had thought would break me was, in the end, survivable.All that mattered was that my mother was alive. I could hear her voice again. I could go home and she would be there, waiting for me.That night, as I looked at my reflection in the mirror, I knew it was time to let go of the grief. Not because it was insignificant, but because I was letting it become the most important part of my story. The day on Carrauntoohil gave me perspective. It didn’t fix everything; I still had to deal with the wreckage of my old life. But that was not the same thing as ruin: I was not ruined, I realised. Rather, I had been given a chance to begin again. I just had to take it. A Bigger Life by Louise O’Neill is published by HQ on 24 September (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply