Bereavement due to traumatic death

Well what happened was that my son James, who actually was on the way to a presentation event that morning at I think Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and was actually on a tube that he wouldn’t normally have been on because he lived in Islington, and was on the tube that was blown up at Russell Square basically and well it was a bomb on the 7 July and I think…. I think probably one of the things that was strange about it, I can remember very clearly, I was on the way to Excel in East London to an exhibition about careers and I was sitting at Stratford Station and I remember there were lots of messages about power outages and things and it was a very strange feeling because nobody really knew what was going on and I think it wasn’t, I didn’t realise, I went to the exhibition and I didn’t realise until lunchtime that there had been any problem at all.

 

In fact how I realised was I had lots of messages on my mobile phone, people asking if I was alright because I wasn’t in the office, and I knew that James was actually doing this presentation that day and it was quite important to him because he’d come back from Prague the previous day so that he could do it. And I didn’t, but I didn’t know that … we just didn’t know where he was and I didn’t get any answers from my mobile phone messages and I spent a lot of the afternoon, obviously, and the evening trying to find out where he was. And I have to say I did realise very quickly that something had happened to him, you know, I think even though you are told by people, you know, the help line and so forth was very unhelpful, and I got a lot of stuff about how many people had actually, how many calls they’d had but I just knew that something had happened to him because he, he was supposed to be coming round to supper that evening, and he didn’t come, obviously, and I just couldn’t get hold of him so I mean I, I was fairly sure, fairly quickly that something had happened to him I’m afraid, and I think that’s probably one of the most difficult things to deal with because I did realise, it’s not just hindsight, I really did realise fairly quickly, and other people didn’t, and of course there was all this days of, you know, hope and his friends going around looking in hospitals and all the rest of it, which is quite difficult to deal with because, you know, I knew there wasn’t any point in it and I mean really deep down I knew there wasn’t any point in it.

 

And I think that that was one of the most difficult things about the whole thing because you just, I mean I was very close to him, I mean people say that in these circumstances don’t they but I was and I just knew that, that something had happened to him. And I suppose that was the worst part of it really, particularly at first, because it was kind of frustrating, which I know you couldn’t really, I couldn’t say to his sister or his friends that, you know, I knew that because it sounded rather defeatist but I just did know it so.

My brother was killed in the Bali bombings of 12^th October 2002. He was killed five weeks after getting married, and he was in Bali on a rugby tour with a lot of his friends. He was killed alongside at least twelve of his friends, and of his Singapore stag party, at least half the thirty men who were at the party were also killed from a lot of different parts of South East Asia, ex-pats, British ex-pats from South East Asia. They all gathered in Bali as I say for this rugby weekend. My brother and his set of friends who had come from Hong Kong had just gone to a meal and they were walking, they were the first table to get their bill, the other, the other table of friends, their bill was late and they were, my brother’s party were walking up to the Sari nightclub and had just gone in. My brother asked his new wife if she wanted a drink and she and a couple of friends went off to the dance floor, and the boys of the group went to the bar, and then the bombs went off.

 

My brother was killed at 31, he was a brilliant sportsman, he’s still the fastest runner I’ve ever met, he was a Cambridge educated lawyer, and barrister, was a lawyer in Hong Kong, and was a man at the top of his game, at the top of his career, had just got married and had a very successful and fulfilled life to look forward to, and he was looking forward to fatherhood, and everything, everything was going right for him, but he was killed. And I remember, we, my partner and I were ironically staying at the Taj in Bombay when we turned on our mobile phones and there were, the phones erupted with millions of text messages, and because we were on the same timeline as Bali, and Bali, the Bali bombings went off at 11.30, we’d already gone to bed by the time it happened.

 

And that was when we fell through the trap door, because life was completely normal up to the point which we turned on our mobile phones. And the messages were, “phone home, phone home. There’s been a bombing. And in Bali and Dan, Dan’s missing.”

 

So we phoned home, and there was no news, somebody had passed a mobile phone to my badly injured sister in law, while she was waiting to be taken to the hospital and she had within maybe an hour of the bomb going off, and she was and was terribly badly burnt and somebody had kindly put her out, and people were dying around her, and she was able to phone her parents and say that something, there’d been a terrible explosion, she couldn’t find my brother, she couldn’t find any of the other friends that were with her, and that she was injured and that, that was it, essentially she was taken to the hospital in Bali and evacuated out to Australia, but to cut a long story short, my brother was missing, presumed dead until it was confirmed he was one of the bodies in the morgue, nearly three weeks later.

And …….and you have these huge physical reactions, I kept having to go to the bathroom, as kind of just waves of physical shock hit you, and we kept phoning back to my parents to see if there was any news, but there was no news, and we had to, and of course, every second that passes with no news is almost certainly going to be; make, I mean the outcome will be worse. And you oscillate between hope and despair of course.

Yeah, well, the day of the, on the Sunday morning I went to get the Sunday papers, and I got the Sunday Times and I saw a sort of sideline saying big bomb in Bali, many killed. I had a terrible sense of foreboding actually because I knew he was there, and in fact he’d called me on Friday, the Friday with great sense of excitement to say that he’d finally been able to get away and was going down with the boys to play rugby in this tournament in Bali. I said to him I thought Bali was a wonderful place, and it was a, would be great, should be a good weekend, and he was a great traveler and so, it was fairly typical of him to go off at the last minute to Bali.

 

So I knew he was there. I just drove home and as I came in through the door my partner handed me the phone and said, “Ah here’s somebody from Hong Kong.” It was a friend of his, who wanted to, to speak to me and he obviously with the time zone had, was much further ahead, and he said, “Look the situation is very serious, a lot of people have been killed, the Hong Kong Football club are doing their best to find out what’s happened to their people, we have no news, news of Ed, I think the situation is quite serious”.

 

I also knew, because he was a great communicator that, you know, if there’s been any problem and he was, he was able to communicate, he would have found a way to phone me, even in the middle of the night, so, I pretty well realised that the situation was pretty desperate. But I was, I guess at that point in time I was just totally stunned, it was almost unbelievable to believe that he’d been killed, but you know as the day wore on, I sort of became more and more, to some extent resigned. It was, it was absolutely awful, I think it would be fair to say that that boy was the apple of my eye.