Marie Gleeson

Like the RNLI do this amazing campaign called Float to Live.

And I remember at the time our sea survival training was always don't fight it, you know.

Just float and you will survive.

And for a lot of that time afterwards, I think that's what we were doing.

And we had this amazing support network.

And again, like we hear so much in the world now about people and it can be negative.

But like God, when we were in that situation, people came from everywhere, like the Navy, John's colleagues, my family, our friends, like it was huge.

But yeah, it's not a space you want to be in on maternity leave with no baby.

But I think the piece of something like that, it changes your perspective on the world.

And I think that old me who was the workaholic, who was go, go, go.

I think everybody in the Navy expected that I would be back at work ASAP, that I would throw myself into the job.

And even I was shocked when I didn't want to do that.

So I think like the reason I wrote the book and the reason I've spoken out about this is because back then, like what I needed was visibility of survivors.

I needed to see people who had got through the storm and in 2012, like it wasn't as visible or as easy to see stories like that.

And I think for me, that kind of your mind's, not mind, like I don't want to use words that sound like it's part of the narrative now, but like being able to look at the worst possible situation and look for something that was good in it.

So like, you know, having that time with Ciarán, he made me a mammy, you know, I wanted to make him proud.

So there were all these things.

So

The days that were bad were really bad and there was nothing good in those days.

But the days when I could take something good out of the story, that was the life raft.