Kathleen Chada on rebuilding her life after tragedy, ahead of Kilkenny memoir signing

On July 29, 2013, Kathleen Chada’s husband Sanjeev brutally murdered their two sons, Eoghan, aged 10 and Ruairi aged 5. Sanjeev Chada later attempted to take his own life.

Having killed the boys at Skehanagh Lower in Ballintubber, Co Mayo, and their bodies were found in the boot of his car, which he had crashed into a wall.

Sanjeev Chada is serving two life sentences to run concurrently for the murders of their sons. Now Kathleen has written the story of Eoghan and Ruairi called Everything. Her memoir is a beautiful though painful celebration of her boys’ young lives, but it is also a rewarding story of how a mother has attempted to rebuild her life back after the devastation of their deaths at the hands of their father.

Kathleen Chada memoir Everything 

Here is a glimpse into Kathleen’s world today…   

Kathleen, thank you for speaking to me. Why did you decide to bring out a book ten years after the boys' tragic deaths?

It’s been there for a long time on and off. I do so much talking in interviews and novenas and what I found was every time I speak I put a little bit of my jigsaw together.

I would go through phases of where I would journal, and I found writing things down was quite cathartic. It’s strange when you read back something, and you see what your thought processes were at the time.

The thought to write was there for a long time and the decision to do it came easy because I was SO comfortable with my editor.   

Did you write the book yourself?

I wrote it with Liam Hayes from Umbrella Publishing. He was a Meath County footballer in his day and now is a journalist, writer, and pundit.  He is from Carlow too, so that kind of swung it when I first met him.

My good friend Angela Doyle Stuart wrote a book about her sister who was tragically murdered. She guided me a lot in the process, and she felt that Liam Hayes would be the perfect editor for me. HE HAD helped her with her book ‘Loving Lisa’. We both found Liam to be hugely empathic and he had a great way of keeping me on track.

I did warn him that I would go off on tangents and I needed Liam to hold MY THOUGHTS together and on track. And he said ‘no Kathleen, just go with it. It’s in the tangents that we will learn the most and that’s where the magic happens.’

I’m glad we wrote it as a hybrid creation, because if it had been left up to me, I would have over-thought every single line. It happened really quickly. It took three months in total; from the time I met him to it being published.

How hard was it to put your most inner thoughts and feelings down on paper?

It was emotional, as opposed to hard. I often describe it as when you read something about me, Eoghan and Ruairi, you are hearing or reading a sanitised version of it. I live with the un-sanitised version in my head. So, I process that all the time and it’s there all the time.

I’ve learnt how to manage the thoughts and what I need to do to keep myself sane in order not to lose my mind thinking about what happened to my boys.

That helped when writing, because nothing that I write down can ever be worse than what’s in my head.

It was hugely cathartic to be able to do that and do it in a very safe space. We established at the very beginning that if I made the decision not to publish, that was okay. That gave me a huge amount of control and why I was comfortable with it.

You wrote, “I had everything taken from me. My boys…and Sanj was in prison. It took me time to comprehend the evil he had done and to understand what he had been in my life, but he was gone too. From July 29, 2013, I was alone.”

This is written in the same chapter where your mother was afraid you would take your own life. Kathleen the book is very raw and honest.

It's what it was. I was very lucky to meet a very good psychologist quite early on. I met him for the first time about five weeks after losing the boys and I credit him completely for keeping me sane.

When it comes to any loss, in particular child loss, emotions and feelings can embed themselves inside of you and it's not always going to be healthy. Whereas I was able to talk that through with a professional who had a background in trauma counselling.

That allowed me to make sense of things, I’ve always said that I wasn’t suicidal, but there have been many times where I thought I don’t want to be here. The way I often describe it is, if I had a cancer diagnosis within those first couple of years, I don’t know if I would have wanted to treat it. I would have just let it play out, in other words if something happened to me, I wouldn’t have been sorry.

It's different now, but I often talk about how death doesn’t scare me, because I am going to meet my boys.

I don’t want to get over the loss of my boys, I feel that every day. I am very aware that words can be very powerful. People say you move on, I don’t, I just move forward. It’s the same with grief, I don’t want to get over it, but I need to learn to live with it and find some meaning in that life and that’s what I’ve done.

Your home was a happy family home, and the boys idolised their dad. Were there any warning signs?

No there wasn’t. There was the embezzlement, which I found out about ten days before. So, things were strained with us at that particular point, but the boys would not have been aware of that. Prior to that we were just a normal happy family.

There was absolutely no way of predicting what was going to happen. Even on that Sunday night and throughout the Monday when the Gardai were coming and going, I kept thinking, Sanj will be ok, he has the boys with him, they will all be ok. It never occurred to me throughout that whole time that he would do anything to the boys.

What is your message for people?

Reach out for help. Whatever is going on, just please reach out. Or if you can’t do it yourself, have somebody do it on your behalf. Just have a conversation. To me that’s what it’s all about, because things are always fixable.

Kathleen Chada will be attending a book signing of her memoir ‘Everything’ in Kilkenny’s Easons at MacDonagh Junction on Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 12noon.