This Way Up star Aisling Bea said she felt abandoned after her father’s tragic death.
Aisling’s dad, Brian O’Sullivan, took his own life when she was just three years old.
However, it wasn’t until she was 10 that she learned how he had actually died.
She spent the next few decades with many questions, including the tragic thought that her father had “forgotten” her after not referencing her in his suicide note.
This Way Up cast: Aisling Bea opens up about her dad’s death
“His suicide felt like the opposite of parenting. Abandonment. Selfishness. Taking us for granted,” she told The Guardian in 2017.
“I did not want to talk about him. Ever again. I now hated him. I didn’t want him at peace.”
However, many years later, the Channel 4 star received a surprise in the post.
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A box of things arrived that included photos that her father had been looking at shortly before he passed, and they were almost all of her.
His old colleagues had found them at his former workplace and decided to forward them on to Aisling all these years later.
The comedian said it immediately helped rid her of those feelings of abandonment.
After finally coming to terms with her own grief, Aisling wrote a letter to her father that she said made it feel like she had “finally buried him”.
“I’m sad you killed yourself because I really think that, if you could see the life you left behind, you would regret it,” she wrote.
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“I am your daughter and I am really fucking funny, just like you.”
“But, unlike you, I’m going to stop being it for five minutes and write our story in the hope that it may help someone who didn’t get to have a box turn up, or who may not feel ‘in their right mind’ right now and needs a reminder to find hope,” she added.
This Way Up airs on Channel 4, Wednesdays, at 10pm.
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