Connell and Helen break up two weeks after Rob Hegarty’s funeral, where grief and an argument about Marianne bring their existing strain into the open. The separation is not presented as a simple consequence of one dispute: Connell is grieving, increasingly unwell, and unable to engage with the conflict, while Helen interprets his attention to Marianne as evidence of distance between them.

Background and Grief

A few days into the new year, Connell received a late-night group message from Rachel Moran asking whether anyone had seen or heard from Rob. Connell was returning from a night out with Helen. When she asked what the message said, he dismissed it as an ordinary group message and wished her a happy New Year. Rob’s body was recovered from the River Corrib the following day.

Connell later learned that Rob had been drinking heavily and seemed unlike himself in the weeks before his death. Connell had not known: he had spent little time at home the previous term and had not been seeing his school friends. Looking through Facebook, he found Rob’s last message to him, sent years earlier with a photograph from a night out. Connell had never replied. He had not seen Rob at Christmas and could not remember for certain whether they had met the previous summer. When he tried to picture Rob, the image would not hold its features clearly.

At his first university counselling session, Connell told Yvonne that he felt guilty for not keeping in touch and for never answering Rob’s final message. Yvonne told him that Rob’s death was not his fault, but Connell answered that other people had at least tried to help. His guilt sits beside the gaps in his memory and contact: the friendship had receded from his daily life, but its unfinished messages and missed occasions acquired new weight after Rob’s death.

The Funeral and the Argument

Connell attended the funeral with Helen. Marianne was there too, having returned from Sweden. Connell was struck by how naturally she moved through the encounter, a contrast with their school years, when he had understood how to behave and she had been treated as someone who aggravated others. After the funeral, Connell cried, but the crying felt detached from any sense of relief.

The funeral also returned him to memories of his friendship with Rob. He remembered Rob exuberantly embracing him after a school football goal, when their feelings could find expression in the exceptional permission of a match. He remembered, too, Rob showing the boys photographs of Lisa’s naked body on Debs night. Connell understood Rob as deeply invested in others’ approval and willing to betray kindness or confidence for social acceptance. He did not treat that weakness as wholly foreign to himself: he had also wanted to appear normal and conceal what he found shameful or confusing. He credited Marianne with showing him that other ways of living were possible.

That night, Connell and Helen lay awake in his room. Helen asked why he had not introduced her to more of his friends. Connell pointed out that she had met Eric, but Helen felt he had not genuinely wanted his friends to meet her. Connell answered that a funeral was a poor setting for introductions and, exhausted by the occasion, said he was sorry he had asked her to come. He tried to clarify that he had meant he had given her the wrong impression about what the day would be like, not that he regretted her presence.

Helen then accused him of paying particular attention to Marianne in the church. Connell denied intentionally staring, but admitted he had been glad to see her. He protested that every argument seemed to return to Marianne and objected that Helen was raising their relationship while their friend’s death was still immediate. Helen replied that she had noticed him looking at another woman. Connell said that his manner with Marianne was simply his normal personality; the exchange left the difference between them unresolved.

Separation and Aftermath

Helen eventually lay back down beside Connell without resolving the argument. Two weeks later, they broke up. By then Connell was so depleted that he could barely respond. His distress came in crying fits and panic attacks, yet it felt as if it arrived from outside him; the narration contrasts the emotions he was outwardly expressing with an internal numbness.

The separation unfolds within the worsening aftermath of Rob’s death. Connell’s anxiety, previously a chronic but low-level inhibition, had become severe, with panic attacks and episodes in which his surroundings seemed unreal. At counselling, he later received a score of forty-three on the Beck Depression Inventory, which Yvonne identified as indicating very serious depression. The breakup therefore coincides with a broader collapse in Connell’s emotional capacity, rather than offering a clean resolution to the funeral dispute.

Significance

The event connects bereavement to the vulnerabilities in Connell and Helen’s relationship. Their argument concerns Marianne, but it occurs in the wake of Rob’s death and amid Connell’s sense that he failed to maintain contact with an old friend. His attention to Marianne also carries a history: she had helped him imagine alternatives to the self-concealment he shared, in a different form, with Rob. Helen sees the visible intimacy of that connection; Connell, overwhelmed by grief, experiences her accusation as a return to an old conflict at a moment when he can scarcely manage the present one.

The funeral thus becomes both a site of mourning and a turning point in Connell and Helen’s relationship. The breakup follows not a decisive reconciliation or confrontation, but an argument that neither can settle while Connell is becoming increasingly isolated and numb. Rob’s absence continues to shape the living: through Connell’s guilt, through the memories Marianne also carries, and through the strained conversations that follow the funeral.