Matt Breen: Thank you for coming, Andrew. I appreciate it. All the way out from Orange.

I want to start this conversation with some of your words from November last year:

“We are heartbroken over the loss of our beautiful boy, but we are determined to remember him as he was: a sensitive, handsome man who was greatly loved by his family, his friends from Orange, Joeys, Souths and beyond. He touched many people in his life.”

Andrew Logan: Did I say that?

Matt: November 12. You posted it on your account.

Andrew: There’s a lot of stuff that I look back on, particularly the eulogy that I gave, and I was so shocked and stunned at that stage that the eulogy really wasn’t that great. There’s a lot of things I wish I’d said. But that, what you’ve just read, I think that encapsulates him really well.

Matt: It’s a good way to put it. Tell me about Johannes.

Andrew: Oh, wow. Well, Johannes was one of those people that you really had to know well to understand him. He was a deep pool.

On the surface, he looked like a big, strong guy who played footy. He was that guy you saw on the footy field: tough, a hard tackler, aggressive and goal-oriented, and that sort of stuff. But when you got to really know him, when you scratched the surface, you found that he was deeply sensitive.

He was very interested in other people. He was a great protector of younger kids and people who might have been weaker in some way. He was a great listener. A lot of his mates came to me after the funeral and said, “He sat with me when I was homesick,” or, “He sat with me when I was having a hard time. He talked to me, he listened to me, and he looked after me.”

That was him. He was a good writer. He had a great appreciation for art, and he was a good visual artist. So there were things about him that, on the face of it, when you saw him playing footy for Souths or playing footy for Joeys, you just wouldn’t have realised that he had those depths to him.

Matt: A contrasting personality, in a sense. How much do you remember about the day that you found out Johannes had died?

Andrew: I remember it all. I can’t shake that feeling that he slipped through my fingers a bit.

He’d come home for the weekend. He was home in Orange. The Orange Rugby Tens were on, and he came home because he had a lot of mates travelling from all over the place to play in that. He wasn’t able to play because he was contracted, but he still came home to see his mates and catch up with a whole lot of people.

He had a good time, and I saw him a couple of times over that weekend. I was meant to see him on the Sunday before he went back to Sydney, but things sort of clashed and I didn’t see him. I was going to be in Sydney anyway, so I was hoping to catch up with him on the Sunday night, but I didn’t. He was tired and he said, “I’ll catch you in the morning for a coffee.”

So we arranged to have coffee at 6:30am in Coogee before I got on a plane to go to Queensland and he went to work.

He texted me about half past four in the morning and said, “Dad, I’ve slept really badly. I’m not going to go to work today. I’m going to just try and get some more sleep, then I’ll go to training tonight and I’ll catch you later in the week.”

And I went, “Okay, no problem. That’ll be fine. I’ll catch you in a few days when I’m back from Queensland.”

So I went down to Coogee myself, had a coffee at about 6:30, and I caught a plane to Queensland.

That night I had just gone to bed in Queensland. I’d had dinner with a work colleague who’s also a massive rugby league fan. I remember saying to him at about 8:00, “Oh, Johannes hasn’t called me after training. They must have got a flogging. They must have given him a belting. He hasn’t called me.”

I went to bed in the hotel later that night. Just as I turned out the light, I literally reached out and turned out the light, and my phone rang. It was Johannes’s flatmate saying, “We haven’t seen him today. He didn’t go to work. He didn’t go to training. His keys and his wallet are here. His car’s here. We’re worried about him.”

So we rang Waverley Police. I rang Waverley Police. We got a call back about an hour later, and he had already been found earlier that day at the bottom of the cliffs at Coogee.

I suspect he may have already died by the time I was having coffee that morning in Coogee. I was literally staying in a hotel 150 metres up the road from his apartment.

So when I say I feel like he slipped through my fingers, that’s what I mean. I missed him in that way. That’s what happened on the day. Then I had to get back the next day from Townsville, which was a really long trip. It was a very, very hard day.

Matt: When I was looking back through all the work you’ve done since, and we’ll get to that later, I couldn’t help but have emotion boiling up in myself because there are similarities in a sense.

I lost my dad to suicide, and like you say, there are sliding doors moments where you wonder, what if things were just a tiny bit different? What would have happened?

But Andrew, I’ve got three kids and I’ve got a son. I can’t imagine the pain that you must have felt at that time.

Andrew: It wasn’t even pain. It wasn’t pain for a few weeks. It was just utter shock.

Footy players and boxers talk about having your bell rung, when you get a hit in the head that’s not quite enough to knock you out, but you get that vibration through your head and your body, you get that metallic taste in your mouth, and you’re swaying on your feet a bit.

It was that. It was just a hit. It was a visceral hit to the guts. I spent the next couple of weeks just trying to stay on my feet and operate. Just get through the day. Just get up and do the things that needed to be done.

Some of those things were really, really hard. I was really fortunate to have some good mates support me through some really difficult times.

He died at Coogee, and I thought it was really important to go up to the cliffs at Coogee before I got to a point where I couldn’t do that. My ex-brother-in-law came up with me, and I’ll be forever thankful for him for doing that, because that was something I needed to do in those first couple of days and I wouldn’t have had the strength to do it if he didn’t come with me.

I had a couple of mates of mine, Tim Burch and Todd Smart, who were old footy mates, who drove me out to Lidcombe to the coroner’s court where I had to go and view him after he died and identify him.

Those people in those times did things that were so valuable. If I learned one thing out of it all, there were people who just stood up for me and for us. In many cases, they weren’t the people I expected. The people I expected, in a lot of cases, didn’t turn up. And the people I didn’t expect did turn up. It was beautiful. It really made me see who was important in my life.

Matt: It’s funny, these conversations, how much they unlock memories.

My dad passed 16 years ago, and I was 18 at the time. I don’t know if I regret it, but I had the choice to see his body in the casket and I chose not to. I don’t know why.

Andrew: Tough thing to do at that age.

Matt: Yeah. I think I didn’t want it to be true, even though obviously it was.

Another thing that you reminded me of, that I’d completely forgotten, is that I went to the place where he died within the week. I don’t know what I was looking for. I think I wanted a ghost or something to come out of the trees and say everything’s all right. I just had to be there. And it was just silence.

What was it like for you to stand where you thought Johannes stood?

Andrew: It was hard. The walk up there was just, without over-egging it, it felt like walking to the gallows. It felt like Christ must have felt walking to the cross or something. They were just the hardest steps I’ve ever taken.

But getting up there, it was a huge outpouring of emotion. It was probably the first time since I got the news that I really just broke down, and I probably needed to.

It was in really stark contrast to seeing him, when I had to go and see him. I was steeling myself for that. I thought that was going to be really incredibly hard. And actually, it was very peaceful.

I think the reason it was so peaceful was that immediately when I walked into the room where he was, it was just very clear that his spirit wasn’t there. It was just a very empty feeling. It wasn’t him there.

Those were really formative experiences in the grieving process, I think. Feeling that the spirit of him was somewhere else and that spirit could still be with us in some way. The spirit of him wasn’t out at Lidcombe.

Matt: It’s funny you mention the spirit and the body.

When my mum passed, I think learning from, I use the word loosely, the mistake of not seeing my dad’s body, I sat with my mum’s body for a little bit in the hospital. Peaceful is one word for it. Bizarre is another word, because something that you have seen so many times light up, get angry at you — it’s just, there’s no other word for it really than the spirit that is no longer in there.

One thing that I’ve always found really hard to comprehend is the fact that my dad called me before he died. He was in so much pain. Obviously, you think Johannes texted you shortly before. What kind of state was he in?

Andrew: I only got a text, so it’s really difficult to put any feelings onto what was a pretty brief exchange.

If I looked at him in the days and weeks before, there was nothing really that I saw that made me worry. The only thing that probably concerned me was that I had a really big work week coming up. It had a lot of travel in it, and I’d been preparing for it for a little while, so I felt like I was pretty distracted by that. I lacked that presence that I wish I’d had to maybe pick up on something.

But he did all the things he normally would have done. On the Saturday night, when he was out, he sent me a photo of him with one of my mate’s sons that he was out drinking with. He often did that if he ever ran into somebody that I knew. He’d send me a photo. He texted me and asked me for a bit more money. There was nothing.

The only thing that made me prick my ears up a little bit was that he slept in really, really late on the Sunday, until 2:00. He had to get back to Sydney. He was staying at his mum’s place, but she was away with his sister on a water polo tournament, so he was staying there on his own.

He didn’t get up until about 2:00, and that was really unusual and unlike him. I just wondered later if maybe he knew that was the last time he was going to sleep in his own bed or something. I don’t know.

There’s a lot of speculation around it, and it’s easy to speculate about a lot of things. I try not to do that too much.

Something that people say a lot when I reflect on those things is, “You mustn’t blame yourself,” and, “Don’t beat yourself up over it.” I don’t at all. I don’t beat myself up over it. I don’t blame myself, because I know I did the best that I could at the time with what I knew.

Probably the thing that’s got me out of it is just how little I knew. That’s probably what’s been the driver for me to try and share some of what I’ve learned since with other parents, because I look back now and realise I knew nothing.

Matt: I want to get to that. One thing I find quite remarkable is how much — I went through all your stuff on your page, and we’ll put a link in the show notes for other people — and it’s amazing how you’ve processed this publicly.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a better way to put it. I wouldn’t say I’ve healed. Healing is going to be a long road, but definitely processed.

Matt: I think it’s worth following that journey for a little bit because something that was quite profound to me is that you got onto it really quickly. You realised that not enough people ask for help.

But rather than add another beat to that drum that is continually being made, you asked for help from your network. You said, “I need you guys to text me every day,” with the quote, “Get up, you fat bastard,” and exercise.

Andrew: Yeah. I’ve still got a couple now. I asked for help in December for 30 days, and in April the next year, I still had a few who followed through.

One of my mates, a bloke called Hamish Munro, is still there every few days. God bless him. He’s just been there the whole way.

It was an amazing thing to do. I did it on the spur of the moment because I knew I needed help. My instinct told me that if I didn’t get moving, grief was just going to overwhelm me and I wouldn’t be able to get moving.

I just knew that if I got out and did something, some sort of activity or exercise, I would get through it eventually, or get through the worst of that early stage.

So I just asked people. I said, “Send me a message every day, and those of you that can, come and do Federal Falls with me,” which is a track near Orange. It’s a trail, a good loop.

People showed up, and it was amazing. One day I had five of Johannes’s mates come and do it with me. These 18-year-old, 19-year-old guys just came out and smashed it out with me. I had a mate from Queensland who was visiting his mum in Bathurst, an old footy mate. He drove over and came and did it with me one day.

People turned up. It taught me that if you ask for help, people will show up. The hardest part is asking, but once you ask, people show up for you. And people love to be asked for help. It makes them feel like they have a purpose. Everyone wants to feel they have a purpose.

Matt: Another thing, and I think the reason people help, is because almost everyone’s been through something. You found it that way too, where people would say, “Hey, I’ve been through this. I’ve been through that.”

Andrew: Yeah. I had a lot of people talk about their own grief and compare it. They’d say, “I lost my mum, so I sort of know how you feel. But it’s not the same. It’s not as bad as what you’re going through.”

What I learned is that nothing is as bad or as good. It’s not relative. The grief you feel in yourself for whatever you’re going through is real, and it’s not comparable to anything else. It doesn’t need to be. It’s relative to you.

The grief that I’m feeling is the same grief that you felt when you lost your mum, or the same grief you felt when you lost your dad. The same grief I felt when I lost my mum. The same grief somebody else feels when they lose their husband. It’s all the same, and it deserves to be treated with that sort of kindness.

Matt: I agree. Maybe something having kids taught me is watching my kids blow up at the slightest little thing and realising, hold on, relative to them, this is a big deal.

Andrew: That’s right.

Matt: The hardest moment of someone’s life is the hardest moment of their life. They only know how to deal with it with the tools they’ve got. There are objective things that are harder, in a sense, but it’s almost pointless to compare because you don’t know what you don’t know. You can only operate on what you’ve got.

Andrew: Exactly.

Matt: You kept moving. One of the things that came to my head when you said you wanted to keep moving otherwise you thought the grief would overcome you, is a story that sticks in my mind about the bulls or the cows that run away from the rain versus the bulls or cows that run towards it.

When you run away from it, you stay in the rain a bit longer because it passes over you. If you run towards it, you run through it. You still get wet, but it lingers for a little less time.

It’s a comment to you that you kind of ran towards your pain and your grief to help process it for yourself. But very quickly in the journey, you shifted your tone a little bit. It was less comprehension, less understanding, and more, “I want to help someone like Johannes. I want to help them before it’s too late.”

Andrew: That tone shift probably happened around the time I started trying to understand. I wanted to understand what took him to that place. What drove him to that feeling of having no way out? What led him to that?

I just started listening to things and reading. Audiobooks and podcasts. Then they would mention a book in a podcast, and I’d get it and read it.

It became immediately obvious to me how little I knew about the risk factors and how poorly informed I was. It really shocked me.

My immediate thought was, my God, there are other parents out there like me who have the same ticking bomb in the background that’s going to go off one day, and they are not aware of any of the circumstances around it, just like we weren’t.

I just wanted to do whatever I could. What little I could. If I could shift one or two people a couple of degrees off that path and they ended up not crashing into the wall at the end, that was success. That’s what I was after.

Matt: I loved one of the examples that you used. I said to you before we started recording, you’ve got this beautiful way of painting pictures with your words, with stories.

You mentioned it briefly on the phone, how you saw all the road signs coming, but when you turned around, they were showing something different.

Andrew: Yeah. It was an image that came to me early and it stayed with me.

I remember saying it to somebody one day. They were asking how I was and I said, “I feel like I’ve been driving down a long road and looking at the road signs going past, and now I’m at the other end and I’m looking back, and all those road signs say something different on the other side.”

It was a reference to all of those things that I observed in Johannes along the way, but I had no framework for understanding what they were. When I look back, I suddenly realised, that thing, that thing, that thing — those were all little indicators that there was something wrong. I just had no framework or knowledge to be able to make sense of them.

Matt: There’s one example you use, and I’ll introduce it with my own example.

A few months before my dad died, we had somewhat of a falling out. He’d done something. He was having an affair. I told him I was disappointed. That’s what I said to him, for almost no other reason than that it felt like the right thing to say. I think I’d watched enough TV shows and movies to feel like that is what is said in this moment.

When you’re 18, you think you know it all.

Andrew: Definitely.

Matt: I definitely regret it. Not because of the outcome, but because that’s shaped me. If I wanted him to be part of my life, I should have found a way to deal with that there and then and move forward, however we wanted to move forward.

But there was a moment where I applied a thing and I didn’t pay any attention to the pain that he was probably feeling.

At the same time, you told a story about a certain car trip, and there’s a bit of humour in this.

Andrew: Yeah. I picked him up. I always tried, and still do, wherever possible, to drive my kids back to boarding school. A couple of reasons. One, because it’s a few hours in the car that I get to spend with them. And two, because I want them to always feel like somebody cares enough to take them to school, not just chuck them on a train.

That said, my middle boy AJ was on the train on Monday because logistics didn’t work. But wherever I could, I tried to drive them back.

I picked Johannes up one day to take him back to school, and he got in the car and chucked his AirPods in and didn’t say anything. We drove out of town, and drove out of town, and got to Bathurst and still he hadn’t said a word. We kept going and got nearly to Lithgow, and still he hadn’t said anything.

I was starting to boil a bit, because you’re a parent and you’ve got all the stresses that come with parenting. You’ve got other things going on around work and all that sort of stuff. You’re under pressure. You’re taking time out of your day and you think you should be appreciated for doing what you’re doing. When they don’t talk to you, you start getting irritated.

So I said to myself, if this kid doesn’t talk to me by the time we get to Lithgow, I’m going to go to the train station and put him on a train.

He didn’t say anything. So we got to Lithgow and I turned around and drove to the train station. He had his head in his phone and didn’t realise what was happening. I got out, walked over the road and bought a ticket, came back and gave him the ticket.

He said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “Mate, you can not talk to me on the train just as easily as you can not talk to me in the car. So see you later. It saves me a two-hour round trip as well, so I’ll catch you.”

I put him on the train. At the time, I thought it was a bit of tough love that was necessary.

The further I get away from it, even before he died, I realised it was completely wrong. It was just the wrong thing to do. I realised he was struggling. The reason he wasn’t talking was not because he was being rude or arrogant or anything like that, because he just wasn’t that sort of kid. He was a good kid.

I should have been coming at it from that point of view and going, this kid’s a good kid. Why is a good kid feeling so silent? Why is he not able to speak up or engage?

The answer I would have got would have been: he’s daunted by going back to school. He’s homesick. He’s sad about leaving home. He was a real homebody. He loved being at home. It would have been obvious to me that he was struggling.

At the time, we butted heads about it for a few weeks after that, and that was probably the biggest falling out he and I ever had. We didn’t ever have anything like that again, but I regretted it.

I told that story because I felt really strongly about the realisation I’d come to: he was a good kid who was behaving badly because he was under pressure and he needed help, not because he was a bad kid behaving badly.

Matt: I think a lot of parents make that mistake. I’ve made it as recently as yesterday. My son’s five, and I feel like they’re all trying on new shoes. They’re trying on new personalities all the time.

He’s picked up a habit that I don’t think is a good one, and I was getting a bit harsh on him, as harsh as you can be on a five-year-old. But that lens of, no, hold on, Jimmy’s a good boy. He’s a good kid. This isn’t anything that needs to be nipped in the bud early. This is just a natural ebb and flow, or something that just needs to be observed from a different angle.

I think it’s a really useful angle.

Andrew: The other thing that came out of it for me was, what did I demonstrate to him?

What I demonstrated to him was: if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to punish you. I’m not present and available for you in a safe way for you to talk to me. There’s no safety here. There’s no security here. You either do what I want or you will be unhappy about the outcome.

That whole set of assumptions and practices and behaviours that I was demonstrating are just all counterproductive.

If we’re talking about suicide as the ultimate outcome, the ultimate expression of sadness and hopelessness, then those sorts of things start with showing boys that they are unsafe, that the place they are in is fundamentally not going to treat them well.

Fortunately, that example sticks with me because I only really did it the once. But that’s why I shared it.

Matt: It kind of leads into something that is part of your journey now, which is stuff that you want other parents to know. Not just about the behaviour we can have with kids, but about what their kids might be going through, where they’re at, and things to look out for.

Andrew: When I started, I wasn’t sure who I was talking to. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to boys and young men themselves, or whether I was talking to the parents. It became increasingly clear that I was talking to the parents.

There are people out there doing amazing work with boys and young men. I don’t know if you’ve come across Tommy Herschell, Find Ya Feet?

Matt: I think we have.

Andrew: Tommy’s a legend, and the stuff he does is amazing. I could never hope to connect with boys and young men on the level that he does. He does work in schools and NRL clubs and all that sort of stuff.

Matt: I think Jake Trbojevic spoke with Benny just recently.

Andrew: That’s right. Jake would have done that. Tommy’s a Northern Beaches guy, so they fly together.

There are guys like that doing incredible work with boys and relating really well to them. The contact I was getting, the feedback and the messages, was all from parents saying, “I’ve got two boys,” or, “I’ve got three boys. They’re footy players. They’re 16, 17, 18. They’re in high school. They’re at boarding school.” There were all these similarities with what we went through with Johannes.

They were saying, “We don’t know what to do. We don’t know if there are any risks present. We just don’t know. What can you tell us?”

Matt: What can you tell them? What would you tell yourself?

Andrew: As a broad brushstroke before getting into the detail, I’d say: listen to your intuition, but not necessarily your anxiety.

Every parent has anxiety. We’re all worried about our kids every minute of every day. Don’t listen to the worry that’s ever present. Scratch that away and look underneath for the intuition. If your intuition is telling you there’s something a bit off, then it’s pretty likely that there is. That’s the stuff you need to be looking at.

I look at it as a four-lane highway. Imagine you’ve got a four-lane highway heading off into the distance. On the left, you’ve got beaches and beautiful parks and it’s all lovely. On the right, you’ve got a big cliff.

Lane one is normal life. You go through life, everything’s pretty good, not too many dramas. Occasionally, you move into lane two. Something bad happens, you deal with it momentarily, and then you get back into lane one.

If things get chronically bad, you end up in lane three: anxious, depressed, feeling like a burden. You don’t come back from there very easily. You tend to spend a lot of time in lane three.

Then if something goes particularly bad, you start getting really poor sleep or, if you’re an older boy or young man, you might start drinking or using drugs or whatever, and then you’re in lane four, right next to the cliff. It only takes the smallest thing to bump you off the edge.

What you’re trying to do is see when boys get up into lane three, which is all of the stuff that leads to suicidal ideation, suicidal thoughts, and head it off before they start dipping into some of the risk factors for action.

What you’ve got to know about boys and young men is that right through to their early twenties, their frontal cortex is underdeveloped. Naturally, their appreciation of consequences, their ability to understand risk, and their ability to make quality decisions is not great anyway. From when boys are 15 to when they’re about 22, that ability is not fantastic for a lot of them, just because their brain is growing and developing.

When you combine that with things like anxiety and lack of sleep, and start piling those things up, it gets bad really quickly. They become very impulsive. They lack the ability to appreciate the consequences of their actions, and that’s dangerous.

Matt: I think you’ve laid it out really well, how to observe the different lanes someone might be in and what they can do to help push back to that left lane.

How are you going now? We are, is it six months?

Andrew: Five and a bit. It’ll be six on the 10th of May.

How the process unfolded for me — and grief is very individual, as you know, so I wouldn’t presume to say this is how it should unfold for anyone else — but for me, in the early stages, it was just pure shock. It took me a few weeks to really start feeling it.

Then every few days I was having a bit of a breakdown. I’d get through a couple of days, then I’d have a bit of a breakdown. The space between those got longer.

Now, I probably go a week or a week and a half without really feeling that sad. I can distance myself from it and be fairly logical about it. But then every now and again, somebody close to me will ask the right questions or say the right thing. I say the right thing because it’s important to feel it.

People make you cry and they go, “Oh jeez, I’m sorry,” or, “Sorry, I said the wrong thing.” And it’s like, no, no, I’m feeling what I want to feel. You’ve touched the thing I care about the most.

Last night, I was having a chat and the person I was with asked a few really insightful questions. It really got me, and I had a cry for 10 minutes.

Matt: What questions?

Andrew: About Johannes. What was he like? When certain things happened, what did he do? How did he deal with certain situations? They were just talking about him.

Talking about him is a bittersweet thing. You know it’s going to make you sad, but the payoff is he’s alive for those moments you’re talking about. So you want people to talk about him.

We always talk about him. We talk about him in the same way we always did. We laugh about him and we laugh at him. We do all the same things we used to do, and we miss him.

I think it’s an important thing for people to know. I’m touching on grief, which is not really my subject outside of lived experience.

Matt: Grief is your subject.

Andrew: What I would say to people who are around people who are grieving is: ask the questions about the person. Don’t feel like you’re going to upset somebody. We actually want to talk about the person. We want to talk about them. We want to talk about what we loved about them, what they were like, and all those things.

If we look like we’re getting upset, we’re not. We’re just in touch with the thing we care about the most.

Matt: I agree. Especially if you’re close to that person. You can ask a question. You’ve just got to go with your gut. It’ll become clear if you shouldn’t be talking about it while you’re talking about it.

But I’ve seen it too many times where people are almost waiting to be asked. When you unlock that door, it’s lovely because they get to relive something they hold so dear. It’s not even close to what we wish we could have, but it’s all we’ve got and we want to savour it and make the most of it.

At my dad’s funeral, he had a three-volley salute, and one of the blokes from the Navy came up and gave me some of the bullets. In the eulogy I gave, there was a quote: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” I had it on my keychain. I’ve still got it around the house.

It reminds me. I think about my dad every day. I think about Mum every day, no matter what. But it’s so nice to have little things that prompt you out of the blue.

How does Johannes feature in your day-to-day at the moment?

Andrew: I think about him all the time. He’s with me all the time.

The time of year at the moment is tough because it’s early footy season, and footy season for our family and for me with my boys was always such a joyful time. We launched into footy season.

We used to have a day, early in the season, where we’d go and buy footy boots. It was a big day. Today we’re going to go buy footy boots. Even when I stopped playing, I was still just as excited to go and buy footy boots for them.

Footy season has always been a huge thing for us. When Johannes was in the Firsts at Joeys and then when he started playing at Souths, everyone in the family was so invested in what he was doing. Losing him, we didn’t only lose him, we lost all of that connection to those communities.

We still support Souths a lot, because his flatmates are still there, or one of his flatmates is still playing. Leblanc and some of his good mates — Tom Fletcher, Joey Gray and Matty Humphreys — those are all good mates of his who are playing. We try to support those guys because that makes us feel close to him. That’s just a thing we love to do and it keeps him alive for us.

It’s little things. Little things that people say and little stories that come up along the way that make us laugh about him and remember him.

Matt: I might be pulling the curtain back a bit on how silly I am, but whenever we see a feather, we call it a GG. That’s what my mum wanted to be called as a grandma.

We’ve got little quirks like that where, for the moment, we allow it to be that they’re around. You know, GG put that there to say hello.

You had something recently. You’re a big Souths supporter now, but you play Wordle, like every middle-aged man plays Wordle.

Andrew: That was just extraordinary. I was sitting with Johannes’s sister, Abby, at a cafe. I think we were in Manly, and it wasn’t very long after he died. It was in December, maybe around Christmas.

We were sitting there doing Wordle. Johannes was a rugby player who went to league and went to play for the Bunnies. For a laugh, we said, “Johannes is with us today. We should put rugby in.” So we put rugby in, and we got the U and the B and the Y.

The next word we put in was bunny. And that was it. We got it in two that day, which is one of the very few days we’ve ever got it in two. The two words were rugby, bunny. It was extraordinary to me.

We see that stuff a lot. We keep an eye out, a bit like you guys. We look out for bunnies all over the place.

Matt: I think it is what you make it. We had a fellow on before, Murray, who spoke about how his wife passed and he messages his wife on Facebook often. It’s just little things we do to keep the ones we love alive.

I chat to my parents all the time. When I want to make a decision, I’ll consult them. I’ll think about what they would have said. It’s just normal. You just want them around.

Andrew: Absolutely. Everyone’s got their own views about spirituality and that sort of thing, but I definitely feel him with me.

He had this way of answering the phone or greeting you when he opened the door. He’d say, “Hey, Dad,” but he’d sort of run the two words together. It was just this little, “Hey, Dad.” That’s what he said whenever he answered the phone or opened the door.

I hear that occasionally. I get a feel that he’s around, and I hear that little, “Hey, Dad.” Is it my mind playing tricks on me? Is he with me? I don’t know. I don’t care. It makes me feel better, and I love tuning into him from time to time.

I know he’s with us. I know that the spirit I spoke about that was absent when I went to see him at Lidcombe, that spirit didn’t disappear. It’s around us and with us. I don’t think we lose people that we care about that much, that we love that much.

Matt: It depends what you believe, but ultimately it is what you make it. In the same way that whatever you’ve been through is yours, your grief is your grief. Your relationship with whoever has passed is your relationship with them.

There’s something that jumped out to me. That bloke I spoke to before relied a lot on religion in his time, and R4R is not religious, but we try to champion everyone’s positions on how they get through things. Often, the spiritual can be such a north star for people.

I don’t know whether it is for you, but I think it connects with your journey from grief, or still grief, through grief, to trying to help others.

The quote you said was: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

You’ve learned so much through this, haven’t you?

Andrew: Yeah. It’s been without question the most formative event of my life. The most unwanted formative event of my life also.

I’ve learned so much, not just about suicide and the thinking that leads up to that, but about people, relationships and friendships. It’s been an extraordinary period of time.

Matt: With all that knowledge, it seems like you’re really channelling it into a movement that is tasked with teaching people to say, “Hey, I’m not okay.”

Andrew: I want boys and young men to be able to say, “Hey, I’m not okay.” That phrase came out of thinking about how you give them something that is simple and easy to say.

That was early on, when I felt like maybe I was talking to boys. But when I realised I was talking to their parents, it became: how do you give parents a better understanding of how they show up so their boys can say that?

How do you, as a parent, observe the signs? How do you connect better? How do you provide a space that’s safe and quiet and allows boys to talk when they’re ready, so that when they are ready, they can say, “Hey, I’m not okay.”

Matt: You’re still early in this piece. What do you envision down the road with this goal of yours to help create that language, but also create that behaviour?

Andrew: I don’t really know. I’ve got a lot of conversations going with people who are involved in mental health in all sorts of ways. I’ve got a lot of respect for everybody who works in the space. There are amazing initiatives in the space. There’s very necessary research going on.

Black Dog has just released a really great report into teens and screens, looking at how social media use affects kids, and there are some really interesting conclusions in that. That sort of research, formal education and awareness is everywhere.

I think the risk with a lot of that is that it becomes overwhelming for people and people switch off.

I had some conversations early with a couple of rugby league journalists who asked me if I thought the NRL should have a mental health round. I said no, I don’t think they should.

They said, “Don’t you think it’s the NRL’s responsibility?” I said, “No, I don’t think it is their responsibility.” I think there’s an opportunity for organisations like the NRL, who are very influential, to do things. But having a mental health round, I think, reduces it to a slogan, and I don’t think that’s helpful.

Ultimately, the responsibility rests with parents. The really obvious dynamic that parents are asking about and saying they have difficulty with is connecting. How do we connect with our boys in a way that they feel safe and can actually talk to us?

I think maybe that comes with broadening the circle of people that boys are connected to.

Any man knows that when you are in your late teens or early twenties, you think your parents don’t know anything. I think we’re all the same. It’s a story that’s been told in various ways many times, but the first time I heard it was from a rugby league player. It was someone in the ilk of Brad Fittler. I don’t think it was Brad Fittler, but it was someone along those lines years ago.

He basically said, “When I was 16, I thought my old man was an idiot. Later on, when I was about 25, I was amazed how much he’d learned in the last nine years.”

I think that’s true.

It’s one thing for me to say to my boys, “I’m proud of you. I love you. I respect your effort. I admire your commitment.” But they expect that from me. If someone outside their circle says it — a family friend or a coach, just somebody else — and says, “Hey, I love you. I respect you. I admire your achievement. You’re an important person to me. You’re an important person in my life,” that hits hard.

That’s the sort of stuff they need to hear from a broader circle. I think our society has evolved in a way where we don’t have as many of those people around us, extended family and other people like that, as we had in the past.

Matt: A network of role models can work on the flip side as well. Like you say, in that unique window where parents don’t know anything, you’re not going to take feedback as quickly as you could. But if somebody, maybe a friend, says, “You’re being a bit of a loony at the moment. Pull your head in,” you’re much more likely to take it on board.

Andrew: That’s true. The guy who said it the other day and encapsulated it beautifully was a mate of mine, John Minto, who’s an ex-Rabbitoh himself. We were talking about it the other day, and he said, “You have to show boys how important they are to other people.”

That was the key thing: those three words, “to other people.”

You can tell boys how important they are. “Mate, you’re really important to me. I love you,” and all that sort of stuff. But they have to understand that they’re important to other people. They already know they’re important to their parents. They know that. And that actually comes with some pressure, too.

But if they feel they’re important to other people, that becomes a real safety net. It becomes a real foundation they can stand on.

Matt: It’s almost diversifying it in a way, creating layers to the safety net.

Andrew: Exactly. When I talk about the four-lane highway, what we’re trying to do as parents is set up a guardrail along that cliff edge, so there are things that stop them from going over the edge.

Matt: Andrew, I know the people listening to this right now are probably parents. Where can they go? What resource is that first rung on the ladder that sets them off on the journey to being equipped as they need to be?

Andrew: The thing that was most impactful for me was a podcast with a guy called Matthew Nock, who’s a Harvard researcher. He’s specialised in suicide for many years. He’s had lived experience himself.

He did a podcast with Jay Shetty, and the link to that is in my Instagram bio. I got the transcription of that and did a summary of the risk factors.

Think of it this way. It’s pretty straightforward. There are risk factors for suicidal ideation, suicidal thoughts. Then it becomes a progression.

People who sit with suicidal ideation for a long time, if they are then also exposed to the risk factors for suicidal action, are more likely to make an attempt.

So what parents need to be doing, if they have concerns, is familiarising themselves with those risk factors.

There are three or four risk factors for suicidal ideation: things like depression, anxiety, lack of belonging, feeling like a burden. Those are the main ones.

Then there are a dozen or so for suicidal action, and they include triggers. They’re mostly triggers: access to lethal means, chronic sleep deprivation, use of drugs and alcohol, and all these sorts of things.

What we’re saying is, people who have those risk factors for ideation, if they stay in that long enough, progress to thinking about taking action. If those risk factors for action are present, that’s when catastrophe happens.

If I talk about Johannes in practical terms, he had always had some level of anxiety. He put a lot of pressure on himself to perform, and he was very conscious of performing at a high level. He was very goal-oriented. He was a typical elite athlete, focused on performing and down on himself when he didn’t.

So the anxiety was always present. Then, judging by some of the comments he used to make to me, I think he felt to some degree like he was a bit of a burden on us. If I helped him out with a few weeks’ rent or something like that, he’d grumble and go, “Jeez, I’m really sorry, Dad. I know I shouldn’t be doing this.” And I was like, “Mate, that’s what we do. We’re parents.”

But there was some level of burdensomeness and some level of anxiety. Those are the risk factors for ideation.

Then he went to the GP for help with sleep because he was having trouble sleeping. So suddenly you’ve got anxiety and burdensomeness mixed with chronic sleep deprivation. A young fellow in the offseason, recovering from injury, having a few beers — don’t know what else — and then, in the location where he was living, access to lethal means.

Suddenly you start looking at it that way and the risk factors start piling up. This is what I mean when I say we didn’t know anything. I just had no idea.

He went to the GP. She said, “Here’s some medication to help with anxiety. Here’s some melatonin to help with sleep.” If I’d known just those two things and knew what I know now, I would have gone, “Whoa, red flags. Massive red flags.” Because anxiety mixed with chronic sleep deprivation is a huge risk.

But I just didn’t know.

Matt: Didn’t know. And that’s a lot of what you’re trying to do now.

Andrew: So what I would say to parents, back to your original question, is familiarise yourself with the risk factors. At the very least, know what you’re talking about. Know what the risks are, so that you can start to recognise that stuff.

Then, when you’re talking to the GP, you can say, “Anxiety, chronic sleep deprivation — I’m really concerned about those things. What do we do about that?”

Don’t be fobbed off with, “Here’s some, try this, try that.” You need to take those things seriously, but you can only do it if you know what they are.

Matt: We’ll definitely put the link to that podcast. Matthew Nock with Jay Shetty, and the summary you did. There’s also the PDF.

Andrew: There’s a link to that in my bio as well. I can give you the links and you can put them up.

Matt: How can people help what you’re trying to do in their everyday life? Is there anything you’re trying to do where we can send people over from our community if it resonated with them? What can we do to help?

Andrew: I don’t have a foundation or anything like that. What I’d say is not so much how can people help me, but how can they help boys?

I would say, connect with the boys. Not just your own boys, because you’re actually more influential to boys that you’re not the parent of. That’s helpful to their parents. Connect with boys and young men that you know in the community and ask how they’re going. Be one of those people that provides them with a wider circle.

The second thing I would say is definitely familiarise yourself with the risk factors.

If you really want to do something tangible, and you want to do some work for an organisation that actually makes a difference — and I know this because I’ve spoken to people who have been on the phone to them and have said that was the turning point for me — that’s Lifeline.

I’ve got endless respect for the people who run Lifeline and work for it. They’re poorly funded. They deserve much better funding than they get. The work they do is on the ground. It actually makes a difference to people who are in crisis in that moment.

I would say to people, if you want to really help, donate some money to Lifeline or volunteer for Lifeline.

As a parent myself, when I talk about parenting, please don’t ever let me appear to be an authority, because I screw it up just as much as all of us. I’ve learned through bitter, bitter experience.

But what I would say is our instinct as parents is to give advice and correction. When boys and young men are struggling, those are the two worst things we can do.

There’s another link in my bio which has some notes for connection. It talks about connecting with boys through positive contact and encouragement. No questions. No advice. No corrections. Just reminding them that you’re there for them.

Send them a text. Send them a handwritten note. Drop a note in their lunchbox or in their bag, or whatever, that says, “Mate, I’m proud of you. I’m thinking of you today. I admire the effort that you put into training, or that project, or whatever it was.”

Just simple statements that remind them that you’re there for them. You’re not judging them. You’re not advising them. You’re not correcting them. You’re just there, and you’re there when they need you.

Matt: I couldn’t agree more. From feeling it, and from being on the other side where I’ve tried to fix people’s problems, the most powerful times are when you literally just say, “Mate, I’m here for you,” and then silence.

Andrew: You’re so right. A mate asked me at lunch yesterday, “What’s the best thing I could do with my son?” I said, “Mate, I don’t want to be flippant, but shut the fuck up.”

That’s the best thing we could all do. Sit in the silence. Give them security, safety and silence, and let them talk when they’re ready.

It might take a while for them to organise their thoughts in their head to a point where they can actually say something. It’s our job to provide them with the space to do it, not to try and prod them and pull it out of them and reach down their throat and drag the words out.

One of the things I said in one of my posts, which was totally off the cuff and so many people commented on it, was: our job is to get information out, not put information in.

We spend so much time putting information in. “Here’s some advice. Here’s some correction. Did you do this? Did you do that? Here’s a question.” Shut it up.

Give them space and safety to talk when they’re ready. It might take a few goes. You might sit there in silence and get nothing. It’s not about us getting a response. That’s the other thing. We’re so wedded to getting a response.

I did it with Johannes. I used to manipulate and probably bully him in a way to talk. Eventually I would corner him into talking, and finally when he talked, I’d feel like, right, I’ve got him talking, that was the aim. It was totally not the aim at all. It was the wrong way to go about it altogether.

He might have talked, but he only talked because he was cornered into a place where he had no other option. That was my frustration, my own ego and pride, trying to get him to do what I wanted him to do, rather than allowing him to talk about what he needed to talk about.

That didn’t happen all the time, but there were times when I let my own needs get in the way of the conversation that should have been taking place.

Matt: I think this example you’ve just given is the right example to wrap up on.

You said that you admire Lifeline, as do I. Incredible organisation. Andrew, people like you are the people I admire. People who put effort in to improve the patch of grass they’re on, and you’re doing this in real time. You’re allowing people in to see you come to your conclusions and trying to help people as you go.

I’m sure you’ve had people reach out and let you know you’re making a difference, but I’m telling you, mate, there will be people following your journey one step behind you, and they will get so much out of what you’re trying to do to improve your patch of grass. I’ve just got respect for you.

Andrew: That’s very humbling, and I appreciate it. Thank you.

I’ve had a lot of people reach out and say that what they’ve seen in my content has made a difference to them, and that again is really humbling.

I don’t at all intend to be an authority. I’m not a clinician. I’m a dad who lost a son that he loved very, very dearly. I felt like the only way to make a difference in the wake of that was to share some of the experiences where I got it wrong and share what I’d learned so that other people could be better.

Matt: It’s admirable. Thank you.

Andrew: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Matt: No, thanks for coming.