One of the condolence messages left by a fan, at the soccer stadium in Hanover, on Thursday. The note in the teddy’s hands asks ‘Why?’

Robert Enke’s suicide has shocked his country and triggered a national debate about the concealment of mental illness in high-profile sport.

Enke, the Germany goalkeeper, lived with the daily dread of his depressive illness being exposed and the fear that it could end his career, his widow said Wednesday.

The day after Enke took his own life at 32 by lying down in front of a train, Teresa, his widow, said: “When he was acutely depressive it was difficult. Difficult above all because he didn’t want anything to get out… he was terrified of losing his sport… he thought there was no hope of a recovery on the horizon for him.”

The 30-year-old told how her husband was most afraid that their adoption of a newborn baby would be overturned by the authorities if his depression became public knowledge.

Enke’s widow appeared at a press conference organised by Hannover 96, her husband’s club. Although officials stressed that it was her decision to talk to reporters less than 24 hours after the suicide, it was plain that the club wanted to demonstrate that they had not put Enke under pressure or encouraged him to hide his illness. They were simply unaware of a problem.

Enke, who had played for clubs in Germany, Spain, Portugal and Turkey before settling at Hanover in 2004, winning eight full caps, had been treated by Valentin Markser, a therapist, for the past six years.

“We were very close, yet even I didn’t notice how acute the threat was,” Markser said. “He knew how to hide the scope of his illness, had developed defence mechanisms.”

Details of the final moments in Enke’s life emerged Wednesday.

On Tuesday morning, before setting out for training, he had rung his doctors and told them that he was breaking off treatment because he felt well enough to carry on.

After training, he appears to have driven around in his Mercedes Jeep and then, at about 6pm, parked close to a level crossing in Neustadt am Rubenberge, a place where he would go sometimes with his four dogs and was about one-and-a-half miles (2.5km) from his home.

As the train, travelling at 100mph (160kmph), approached, the goalkeeper left the car and lay on the tracks. On the passenger seat he left a letter to his wife and doctor apologising for not revealing the true depth of his depression and his sense that there was no alternative.

His widow explained Wednesday that her husband must have believed the world was about to crumble around him.

The couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Lara, died three years ago. She had a serious heart defect and had spent much of her life in intensive care.

“You live with the knowledge that if a call comes from a nurse at midnight, it is to tell you to come and say your farewells to your daughter,” Enke said in an interview in 2007. “That’s when you start to fear the sound of a telephone.”

In May they adopted Leila, but the arrival of the child, though healthy, piled new pressures on the goalkeeper.

“It was the fear about what people would say about a child with a depressive father. And I always told him, ‘Don’t worry.’ Right to the end, he cared lovingly for Leila,” his widow said.

Her tears flowed when she accepted that her husband’s suicide was a kind of personal defeat. “We thought that we could do it all, that with love everything was possible,” she said. “But sometimes it’s not enough. I drove to training with him. I wanted to help him to get through it. He didn’t want to accept help any more. Football was everything. It was his life.”

Hundreds of fans gathered outside the stadium in Hanover to leave flowers and candles in memory of Enke, who was widely expected to be the first-choice goalkeeper for Germany in next summer’s World Cup finals.