Archie Smith isn’t working to a timeline. He has tried to figure out the formula for solving grief, a solution to stipulate exactly when the sadness will stop feeling so full-bodied. But the day-to-day reminders over the past 18 months have been almost predictable in their unpredictability.
“It comes and just hits me out of the blue,” says the former Brisbane Lions ruckman. “I feel like I’m going really well, and then I’ll feel really guilty about having a smile on my face because he’s not around.
“I have some pretty difficult days and moments, just sort of coming to terms with the absoluteness of it. Sorry if I get a bit emotional. It’s just like, he was right there, you know, and now he’s not. There’s always going to be this asterisk for the rest of my life.”
The asterisk is Smith’s younger brother Sebastian, who took his own life at 21. It was in November 2020, two days after Smith’s engagement party to his now wife, Sophie. Three months ago they had a baby boy, Monty, whose middle name is Sebastian.
Since losing his brother, Smith has done a few things.
First, he returned to pre-season training and bottled it up, cried on the way there in the car but arrived with a smile and the usual banter. When he could no longer hide it from the club’s welfare manager, he was granted two weeks of leave, a period during which he all but made the decision to retire some six months before eventually hanging up his boots in September 2021 at the age of 26.
But during that fortnight Smith also sat on a Gold Coast beach writing. It started out as a way to privately sift through his own thoughts, and then turned into eight pages of notes he wanted to share. The content formed a personal video released by the Lions that July. In it, Smith spoke in depth about his family, including Sebastian. About how his brother – one of six kids – was a popular and loved young man who had struggled with his identity and convinced himself he was a burden to a family who thought the world of him. The response was overwhelming.
“It just blew me away how many people were actually going through something similar,” Smith says. “After that video, so many people from all walks of life came forward. From old police officers to parents who are noticing changes in their children. It was quite eye-opening, because initially you think you’re a little bit alone, because it’s not super publicised and there is a bit of a stigma around it.
“I had well over a thousand messages, people sending these big, long paragraphs sharing their own personal story and saying ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to say what I’m feeling or thinking’. It was sad in a way because I’d have to prepare myself to read everyone else’s stories because it was quite overwhelming. But I’m really glad, and I still keep in contact with a lot of these people.”
That video started something new for Smith, who has since become a Lifeline Australia Ambassador, and learned what it means to be a mental health advocate. He initially made contact with the organisation to ask for help with shaping his language around suicide in a sensitive and responsible way.
“It’s very particular on what you can and can’t say, and saying the wrong thing can actually be triggering for people and quite dangerous,” he says. “I was learning so much through the writing process.
“I never want to tell people what to do, because I’m sort of in their position as well. I’m just kind of experiencing what I’m going through. It’s a journal type thing, as opposed to saying ‘this works and this works’. I’m not giving tips and stuff like that, I’m literally just saying what happened and where I’m at now, with the main message being there’s actually strength in being vulnerable.”
It has helped him during speeches at schools and recently at a men’s mental health summit, and provided new perspective about how footy culture can affect players’ mental health.
“I’m now able to pick up people’s body language and how they’ve changed – at work, my friends, and even ex-footballers,” he says. “That was one of the reasons why I decided to prematurely retire – you place so much value on your worth and how you’re going inside that footy club because you’re so separate to the rest of the world.
“In professional sports it’s all about if you’re playing that week, how you’re playing. Are you playing ones? Are you playing twos? Why aren’t you getting selected? You think coaches hate you and there’s paranoia. It’s these mind games you play with yourself. In my eight years I saw like 100 players come and go, saw the ones who it ate up alive and it mentally destroyed them. I still talk to players now who are struggling, whether from the Lions or other clubs, just checking how they’re going from a human perspective.”
On the whole, the process has helped with his own grief. Speaking regularly about Sebastian, he says, helps desensitise him to the rawer end of the pain spectrum. “Being able to speak out about him and say his name,” he says, “is a bit healing.”
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Sebastian was born when Smith was four. He and older sister, Gemma, grew up with their mum Wilhelmina and stepfather Anthony, and went on to have Sebastian, Isaac and Violet. The couple then adopted five-year-old Abib from Sierra Leone.
Little Sebastian was a Buzz Lightyear fanatic. He even had an outfit, which didn’t fit too well but which he wore with bright devotion anyway. He was also one of those kids born with a six pack, who would smash wood and climb mountains and tear through Mount Gravatt on his BMX.
“He would be on a skateboard and see a big hill and be like, ‘do you reckon go down that?’ He would, and he’d get speed wobbles and rip half his shoulder off, then get back up again. He was tough as nails, a really good rugby player. He didn’t go to the gym, but had somehow had pecks and abs and could do 100 push-ups without stopping.
“And a gross sense of humour, farts and shit like that. My mum loved that. She said it at Bas’s funeral she was proud all her boys are ratbags – but good ratbags.”
He also had a heap of mates. “Just a really popular kid,” Smith says. “In hindsight, he went from this loud extrovert to quite reserved. And I thought it was maybe just him maturing or growing up. But we noticed mainly he just really didn’t like what he saw in the mirror and he convinced himself so deeply that he was unattractive or dumb or not as good as someone else He constantly just had this negative self-talk. It really happened around the end of his high school.”
After school he struggled to find his feet. Family members urged him to talk to someone. He did that a couple of times but left it there. “He’d push away, because he was quite a masculine kid,” Smith says. “But one thing that didn’t falter – which is why it may have slipped by us a little bit, is that he was always so loyal and loving of us. The fact that he loved his family so much was almost to his detriment, because he focused everything on that and had nothing left for himself, and we couldn’t convince him otherwise.”
The last time Smith saw Sebastian was at his and Sophie’s engagement party at a hotel. He had just started a job with his dad and looked in a good place. He took his three brothers and a friend – all his groomsmen – up to his room for a beer and a chat. “It was just like a nice moment on one of the greatest nights ever. I just remember after the speeches giving him a hug and telling him I loved him. That was probably the last thing I said to him.”
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Smith has only been to visit Sebastian’s grave twice – once at his funeral and again on his birthday. “I’ve really struggled to go,” he says. “I find myself driving up the driveway to the cemetery and end up just turning around because I just can’t do it. It’s like torture. Whereas my parents go most days and speak to him and stuff.
“If you look at my family, my mum and dad are very, very different in how they grieve. Then I’ve got a 16-year-old sister, Violet, who’s going through high school and having to deal with the death of her brother. And Isaac is turning 21 next year, and he’s quite reserved and more concerned about how everyone else is going and doesn’t worry about himself, which I worry about.
“Then Gemma’s got my niece, who’s three and disabled, so she’s dealing with that as well, and then Abib went the route of just putting his head into uni and just got his biomedical science degree. So everyone’s different, which means when we all come together it’s hard to check in how we’re all going.”
Smith feels it the most when he is caught off guard by a memory, sometimes thanks to Facebook notifications. He felt it on his and Sophie’s wedding day, when a seat at the bridal table was left vacant for his brother, filled only with a photo of Sebastian and the jacket he wore to the engagement party.
And he hurts for his mum when he picks up Monty and imagines losing a son. “I’m thinking ahead about how to introduce Bas to my son,” he says. “I’ve got a tattoo of him or my rib and wonder what will happen when Monty asks about what that is, who his namesake is and who is this person in pictures around the house. How to explain that to a young kid.
“That’s where I’m at at the moment, just trying to work through the next steps in grief. It is going to come and go. A lot of people, they feel like people just move on, which I guess I have to do – the whole point of this is moving on. But also not letting go, I’ve got to find a way to honour him.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
