The 16th of October 2016 is etched indelibly onto Olive Foley's memory. It is a day she will never forget.
It began like a usual Sunday morning at the home in Killaloe that she shared with her husband, Anthony and their two young sons. She was getting Tony, aged 11, and eight-year-old, Dan, ready for Mass. There was an air of excitement in their east Co Clare house because their dad's club, Munster, was preparing to play Racing Métro that afternoon in the first round of the 2016-17 European Rugby Champion's Cup in Paris. Anthony "Axel" Foley, one of Irish rugby's most respected figures, was its head coach.
Before every game, the players and coaches would meet for a pre-match breakfast at their hotel, she recalled. This day should have been no different. When her husband did not turn up for the meal at the team's hotel in Suresnes, a suburb west of Paris, they assumed the popular coach, who had taken on the Munster role two years previously, was having a lie-in. But that would have been out of character for him.
However, it was when he failed to turn up for line-out training, which he would have taken later that morning, that the management and the team became concerned. Some of them returned to the Novotel to check on him. When they went to his room, they were shocked to discover that the 42-year-old had died.
Unaware of what was going on, Olive was at home, carrying on with life as normal. She will never forget what it felt like to hear the news that Anthony had passed away. He died in his sleep from natural causes, an undetected heart defect, she said.
She shared her journey of faith, loss, and resilience earlier this week at the Galway Cathedral's 41st annual Novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The title of her talk was "Grief: the price of love". She said she found telling her story healing and hoped it might offer a "little hope or light" to other people who were living with loss.
She recalled how she and her husband met when they were in their twenties and married in 1999. Their 25th wedding anniversary took place last July but sadly she had to celebrate this milestone of marital togetherness without the love of her life. Instead, she marked this poignant occasion with a Mass which was attended by her children, family, friends, and neighbours.
The hours and days that followed his sudden passing were devastating and truly heartbreaking for her family, she said. "I would never have imagined having to deliver a eulogy for Anthony at the age of 42. We were both 42."
The Munster and Ireland rugby legend was an ordinary man with wonderful values, she recalled, and went about his business with humility. "He played and coached with a heart and a passion and treated people with kindness and respect." Their home life with their two young boys was idyllic.
When he died, she lost her best friend, husband, confidante, and the "most heartbreaking" thing of all, she lost the father of her children, she said. Her life had changed forever and she was left with a void that was "impossible to fill".
"On the day of Anthony's funeral, I spoke about handing him over to God. My faith sustained me." It had been nurtured since childhood by her parents who lived in a small village in east Clare. Growing up in a traditional Catholic household, her mother is now a retired primary teacher and her father, a retired butcher and farmer.
They were a family who had a strong faith and the young Olive was moved when she first heard that the Blessed Virgin had appeared to a group of young children in a small village called Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina in June 1981. She first went to this pilgrimage site 20 years ago and describes it as "one of the closest places to heaven on earth". Her faith and connection to God developed further after going there. She has visited this holy place many times since and tries to go there at least once a year now.
Strengthened by her deep faith and the support and kindness of family, friends, and the rugby fraternity, she tried to adapt to the new reality of a life without her soulmate. There were many tears along the way.
"Grief is difficult, it is like the ocean, it comes in waves," she said. "There is an ebbing and a flowing and the waves can be overwhelming. Sometimes all you can do is learn how to tread the water."
From her eldest son Tony's grief came the inspiration to reach out to others who were living with loss. Days after the then 11-year-old lost his dad he came up with the idea of a remembrance campaign - people would who plays as a number 8
He played 62 times for Ireland between 1995 and 2005 — then an Irish record for a No. 8, the position at the back of rugby’s eight-man scrum formation — but was best known for his role in the emergence of Munster, the southernmost of Ireland’s four historic provinces, as a European rugby power.
Foley played for Ireland 62 times as a back-row forward and captained his country on three occasions. He also led Munster to their first European Cup triumph in 2006.
He made a try-scoring international debut against England in the 1995 Six Nations, but it was from 2000 to 2005 that he became established as a key figure in Ireland's team.
