Bereavement due to traumatic death

Well I was at work, it was a Wednesday in June, I went out at lunchtime and when I came back from my lunch break  my boss came into my office and said that there were two policemen who wanted to speak to me. And I immediately thought, “What have I done wrong? Have I done something awful?” And started panicking about what I could have done, that two policemen needed to come and speak to me about it. Then they sat me down in his office, with him, and someone from the personnel department. And I thought, you know they’re going to give me the sack or something. And then they said that they wanted to tell me that my daughter had been killed by a lorry. And I couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t understand, I was in such a state of shock, I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I asked where she was, and they didn’t know where she was because they hadn’t been briefed properly, so they didn’t actually know anything about what had happened. And I, it was just such a, such a shock because I’d been talking to her the night before, on the phone. We spoke, we spoke or e-mailed or something most days. She was in a flat share with a friend, but we did communicate in someway or other most days and I’d been talking to her the night before about her hair cut, because the following, a couple of days later there was going to be a party at the firm where she worked, which was also coincidentally the first anniversary of meeting her boyfriend, and so they were going to have a celebration of their anniversary as well, and so she’d arranged to have her hair cut and we were talking about her hair and what she was going to wear and so on. And I just couldn’t reconcile that conversation the night before with what these policemen were saying about the fact that she was dead. And I couldn’t believe it, I wanted to see her, and eventually after about an hour and a half they managed to find out where she was, which was the mortuary at the City of London Coroner’s office. So my boss grabbed a taxi and took me over there. And I asked the Coroner’s officer where she was, and he said that she was in the next room. And I said, “Well can I see her?” And he said, “No you can’t.” “I just need the name of your dentist because we’ll need her dental records to identify her.” And, it’s its still unbelievable in in a way. Although I do know that that is what happened. But I was finding it very hard to take in, and I was in a state of shock for quite a long time, for several months, I was just kind of reeling from it, and I assumed that people who had a job to do in connection with it would tell me what they were doing.

It was Sunday morning of the May bank holiday of the 29 May. And they’d gone out, they’d gone out the Saturday night and they were having too much fun, the driver had had too much to drink lost control of the car and they Tim died on the scene and the driver died the following day, he had a donor card and with oxygen they were able to keep his heart going but there wasn’t really any life in the lad. He was a couple of years older than Tim, he was about 23 and Tim was 19 and a half. And after like about 11 0’clock here all his friends were outside with flowers, there was probably about 30 of them  they couldn’t believe it either and by then  my wife’s mum & dad were here and some of the other family turned up, trying to make some sense of what was going on.

 

And as the day went on we were able to drive to [the local town] and pulled up at the scene of the accident and we were on our way to the mortuary to see Tim. And at the scene of the accident, it was a horrendous crash the three cars that they overtook and lost control as they went past and took the lamppost out, the car sort of exploded and parts of the car were raining down on the three cars that they’d just overtaken. Which consequently pulled up; the car bent the lamppost double and sprung out of that and went into a big tree that wasn’t moving for anybody and the car in two parts ended up some way down the road and the road was blocked. So by the time we got there about 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon most of the debris had been cleared but we found his house keys, we found his driving licence, his ID keys bits and pieces, other keys, bits and pieces there that should not have been there and of course the place smelt of drink which was in the boot, the kids carry drink in the boot, he had a fridge in there as well, so he was like considered a cool dude, you know, to have chilled drinks in the back of his car.  

In June, 3^rd June in 2001 my husband Nicholas was killed on a Sunday evening in a little country lane he’d been to see his mother for tea whilst I was at home having been busy. On the way to the station, as they drove out of the little country lane, out of the drive into the country lane, a car came up and just as they had stopped to turn and see if the road was free, if the road was free, this car came up, it was an inexperienced driver and hit full frontal and the car turned around, spun around and Nicholas died of a broken neck.

 

And I don’t want to feel, I have never held the people responsible, neither his mum nor the other driver, I feel this accident could have happened any other time and  I feel I was in absolute shock when, I never suspected anything was wrong at all when Nicholas didn’t come back at 9 o’clock or something when I ran a group at home and it had ended and I was washing up and I didn’t think anything when the police came, two policemen came to the house. And it was half past eleven and I thought something happened to somebody else and they came in and said nothing and I said “What is it, is it my son?” and they said “No”, because I have one son who was at that time in Germany, working and I’m German. And  then I asked “Is it my husband?” and they said “Yes”. And because Nicholas and I had set up The Natural Death Centre together and The Natural Death Centre was set up in  1991 and The Natural Death Centre had taken us into becoming experts on green funerals family organised funerals and it had, it was sort of, being a psychotherapist death, you know, embracing death is part of life, that is sort of my daily mantra to, to live more consciously and more fully so I had even that very day as we lay in bed in the morning been thinking here I am lying in bed with you, one day, I imagined I mean, you know, no magical thinking involved, one day you will be dead, but here we are together alive, look at me and he did look at me but he didn’t really look at me in the way I expected. He looked straight through into the distance and I thought, “Well I don’t know what’s going on with him”, I thought our relationship had it’s difficulties and we had some arguments and  I thought it’s going to change and I’ll just take it lightly I won’t intrude and ask him what’s going on. And we had a wonderful parting that day and just really amazing and when he left that day to see his mum for tea, and I was about to work, I said to him, as I kissed him goodbye what do you say “Come back to me safely” and I never say anything like that. And he didn’t come back, you know, he didn’t come back and that night the policemen, they were probably feeling terrible and I was just blank when they told me he had died in a car accident. 

We, my husband Austen and I were going to Cambridge from London, our house in London, to a party, it was somebody’s 80^th birthday, and it was to be a river, a river cruise. We decided to spend the night in Cambridge, and make a, make a small holiday of it. And so we left the house a bit unnecessarily early, because I always do. We nearly, we, we and I think we caught the train before the one we had intended to as a result, which was a mistake.

 

 

Yes, we left the house earlier than we needed to, as I say we caught the, I think we caught the earlier train, I couldn’t be absolutely certain, anyway we, we, we got into a first class carriage, because we were on holiday, and we got out our magazines and books, and general travel toys. There was just one other person in, in the coach with us, who was, will loom quite large in the story. And we were sitting there smiling, and we both felt quite happy. It was a nice day. We were wearing the right clothes for a trip on the river, it was a party, and the birthday, or a birthday party, and a celebration, then we were going to have a, spend the night in a good, nice expensive hotel, and that’s that really, that’s all I remember.

I had had a series of operations. I knew that after a time, a time. They didn’t complete the operations they were going to do, one of which was to amputate my left foot because they thought I was going to die, and it wasn’t worth putting me through another miserable operation. Anyway I survived, and kept my foot which I was rather grateful for. But I didn’t really realise what had happened. I remember my son saying from a long distance away, “You’ve been in a train crash, and Austen is dead.” And I didn’t think I believed it. I mean I knew, I knew I was lying on this rather uncomfortable couch, so I assumed something had happened, but I assumed it was some kind of dream or, and I can’t remember when I actually believed it had happened.

Well it’s still very clear in my mind, even though it’s now nearly 14 years ago, and it was on the 31^st July, 1995, at 7.30 in the morning, a Monday morning, I’d just got into my office, and it was usual for me to get in there just after 7, which I did. And the telephone rang, an unusually early telephone call, 7.30 in the morning, and it was a doctor who I knew who was the accident surgeon at the hospital, [name] hospital, and he said, “Godfrey, I’m afraid Adrian’s had a bit of an accident,” Adrian was my son. So my initial reaction was not too concerned. I said, “Okay, where is he? Is he in casualty?” And he said, “No, he’s in the intensive care unit,”

 

And of course I immediately knew that this was something pretty awful. So without asking anything more I said, “Right, I’ll come straight away.” So I drove, I tried to ring my wife, she wasn’t at home, I knew she wouldn’t be at home because she went swimming at that time in the morning, so I decided I just had to go straight there, and I drove there which took me about ten minutes. Traffic was quieter in those days, and when I arrived there he was just being taken to the operating theatre, and I was shown this; that he had a head injury and they showed me the scan, and it was immediately obvious to me from the scan that I saw, even though I was no expert, that it was pretty serious stuff, and the prospect of him recovering was probably not very great.

 

So I very quickly had to get used to the idea that here was my son, a fit healthy young man, never had a days’ illness in his life, was almost certainly going to die, and, well it was unbelievably painful of course, and it became very clear over the next few hours that there was really no prospect of any successful management of the situation.

 

So I went back home, got my wife, went up there and spent the best part of 24 hours with him in the intensive care unit and eventually had to make the decision to switch off the machinery. And we were very much helped with that by the surgeon, who as I say was a personal friend, and, well life changed dramatically in the space of a very short time.