I first spoke publicly about the death of my older, and only, brother Gerard on the morning of the 1987 All-Ireland football final. It was the first of four finals which Meath would play over the next five years. At that time, it was the biggest and most important game I would ever be part of and, I'm not sure why, but during the course of a two-hour interview with David Walsh from the Sunday Tribune I mentioned to him, as we were finishing up, that I would like to talk about someone else.

I have that article in front of me now, and midway through I am quoted as saying:

"Gerard thought deeply about things. He wrote a lot. It has been said that he was down, a bit depressed before he did it but that is untrue. My memory is of coming home from work on the Friday evening, two days before his death, and Gerard having my dinner ready for me. People who are down do not prepare an evening meal for their younger brother.

"I still have not worked out why it happened. It is something I need to do but I have not been able to confront it. I know I must. Gerard left a lot of stuff that he had written. Ideally I would like to spend some time going through it. As yet, I have not been able to."

Five years later, in the spring of 1992, in Out of Our Skins, my autobiographical account of my career as a Meath footballer, I also wrote about Gerard's death in much more intimate detail, recounting our conversations in the days before he died, explaining how the two of us shared a small bedroom in our family home at that time, and further recounting the long, devastating search we had through the middle of the night and into the early hours of the morning before three of us – myself, my Uncle Brian Smyth, and a football colleague in Skryne and local garda, Pat Tierney – discovered Gerard's body in the Gaelic football field a few hundred yards from where we lived.

At that time, I had a completely different view of my brother's state of mind in the time before his death than I had in 1987. Only very infrequently after that did I write about my brother's death and, on a couple of occasions, I think I'm correct in saying, I spoke publicly about what happened to him.

My father, who passed away in 2003, and I never spoke to one another about Gerard's death. My beloved, huge-hearted mother, who quietly and privately counsels families bereaved by suicide, and who possesses a small book in which there are over 100, possibly 200, names, I am told, will bring Gerard up in conversation with me perhaps once a year, and when she does so she knows that I will keep the conversation extremely short.

When my mother talks to me about Gerard, I am overcome by an immediate, fanatical need to stop or escape the conversation, and most often I do so within a minute or two. I always feel a small sense of guilt at being so useless and completely unhelpful at these times.

I know my mother would love to talk to me about my brother, but being the most generous person I have ever known, in addition to being unselfish beyond the belief of everyone who has ever met her, she will hardly ever restart the conversation with me.

I have never come to understand why I can behave like that towards such a deserving person. Neither do I have any idea why the emotion I feel at those times is, somehow, almost physical, in a strange sort of way. It's as though this is not some place I am prepared to go. It does not make sense to me! I don't want to talk to my own mother about my brother who died 26 years ago, but I am prepared, and able, to write about my brother on this page this morning.

To the best of my knowledge, my 'refusal' to talk with my mother is not a fear of returning to the day of Gerard's awful, violent act against himself, or the days and weeks which followed and which built themselves into months from which there seemed no end.

The horror, for all of us who loved my brother, ruled our whole existence through those months, and still grips our family, tightly for some of us, more lightly for me and others. For me, night-time was the worst of it but, eventually, it was night-time which also brought me to a more peaceful place with my brother.

After his death, I continued to sleep in the room I shared with Gerard with the lights on and with the radio playing, and waited for sleep to come when, repeatedly, I would search for Gerard. I always found him alive. We would talk. We would physically struggle on the ground. I would always win. The dreams continue still, but any hint of violence has left them. In them now, Gerard and I talk in the bedroom we shared in our family home in Co Meath, and we talk about everything and anything – why he went away, and why he has come back; everything and anything apart from his death.

On Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the news bulletin on my radio alarm clock and immediately informed that Darren Sutherland had been found dead in his London home. So much has been written about the young man over the course of the last several days, and most of the articles and commentary, from friends and from more casual acquaintances in the boxing world, has bundled together glowing memories of him as the wonderful and supreme athlete he was, with constant questioning about his state of mind over the last few weeks and days of his short life.

I never had the opportunity of meeting Darren Sutherland, and therefore I know no more about the young man than you or I have learned this past week.

We have been informed that our Olympic bronze medalist was a quiet, private, happy and ambitious young man who, in his short period of winning four contests as a professional fighter, had become increasingly lonely and worried, and had become slowly detached from his training and the exciting direction he had taken in his life. But, we have also been informed that nobody thought anything was about to happen to Darren, and nobody thought for one second that Darren's life was about to end.

From my experience, that is how it is. All too often none of us in situations where loved one's are about to end their lives, or attempt to end their lives, can see very much to concern or worry ourselves about at all.

Should it have been easier or harder to see that Darren Sutherland – a young man with so much happiness and success awaiting him in the very near future, but who was talking to those around him about the depth of his unhappiness – was suddenly in the most awful and vulnerable place in his life?

Who on earth knows? All I know is that happy and sad people, and people with fantastic futures and seemingly hopeless futures, are each equally susceptible to ending their own lives. That is all I know for certain.

And that is all I have come to know.

Families who have lost a loved one to suicide always ask: why? All families do. Forever, they ask: why? My family did, and still does. The hundreds of families my mother has helped carry this same question, as will Darren Sutherland's mother and father, and his sisters, for the remainder of their lives.

We have all attempted to piece together the acts and conversations, and every little interaction which took place before the death of our mother, father, brother or sister, and we don't just content ourselves with the weeks and days before the suicide. We look back over the years and search through all sorts of happenings in our loved one's life. Families search blindly, and families are doomed to end their search back where they began, knowing nothing for sure, and finding nothing of any help. Whether a loved one left notes, or a goodbye letter, as my brother did in a pocket on his body, we are left knowing so very little. There are absolutely no clues. There is nothing to lead us to any firmer understanding as to why or how?

Darren Sutherland's family are left with a question which can only be answered by their loving, handsome, talented son and brother, and that young man is gone from them. Like hundreds of families in this country, every single year, Tony and Linda, and their daughters Nicole and Shaneika, have been left now to live with a violent, senseless ending to a beautiful and triumphant life.

I wish the Sutherland family peace, as soon as humanly possible.