My Story - Caroline Harbord

The telephone rang. It was half past two in the morning and we had been asleep for barely three hours. The moment I was awake, I knew. I wonder if all mothers would have known at that instant, before any words were spoken, before my husband’s face betrayed the knowledge and my world disintegrated. The rest of the night passed, huddled in our bed, with telephone calls to a distraught friend at the hospital in Italy and helpful but formal communications with very correct young men at the Foreign Office in London. The morning brought no new world. The girls had to know; one sound asleep, a hangover deferred; the other at her flat or elsewhere with friends. Frantic calls to locate the missing daughter, with time creeping slowly, too slowly by. A dog to be walked, to make normal what could never be normal. And then the breaking of news they didn’t want to hear, and the grief, so different; one pushing away comfort, one clutching and crying, inconsolable in a world which would never be the same again.

Relations to be told; care first for the old and frail, a mother whose years had already seen so much death and despair; sisters in-laws unable to cope, incapable of finding words, thrusting receivers at their husbands. Then the friends; Beryl who dropped everything and drove thirty miles to put her arms round us without thinking twice; Judy and Ian who filled the fridge with pies and sandwiches and left us alone; John and Sally who said “Come to a party, it might help.” That evening I cooked liver and cried at the blood which dripped on the kitchen floor.

The question of travelling to Italy and bringing him back was answered in the negative by those kind young men in London “Better to stay home.”

Returning to the University two days later. “You shouldn’t be here.” But where else was there to go. Hilary, so good, so patient, letting me talk of a young man she never knew. The embarrassment of the tutor, who complained of a missed tutorial, then realised the cause. The work helped as I knew it would, but I sat in tears through lectures and fled to the car to go home.

Angela, who held my hand as I went to the mortuary. No notice given of the need to attend and Richard at work in London. He seemed so pale, dark bruises on his skin, but distant — they advised me not to go too close, the smell, a botched embalming, they said. The girls escaped to London, to friends, and returned with a kitten to love.

They all came to the funeral; all his family and all his friends. We played his favourite music — Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge over Troubled Waters’ — and we held hands as our friend John, six years a Priest, who had known him from the age often, found words to explain the inexplicable. “How could this happen?” The ‘party’ afterwards was joyful with anecdotes and memories shared. Then the young ones all left and we were silent and alone.

That night I dreamed of him, He was seated on a bench by the fire on the opposite side of a small darkened room, and he smiled at me. Joyfully I turned to Richard but realised he was not aware of him, could not see him. “Dad doesn’t need to see me, Mum,” he said, “You do.” I woke in tears.

I was once just me. For twenty years before he came into my life, I was a person who was happy and alive, so surely I could be that person again. The beta-blockers those first few weeks and two years on, when I was completely in pieces, when everyone thought I was ‘getting over it’ yet I could barely function, the pastoral counselling service where I put myself together again with the help of Anne. “I am lost in the middle of a dark wood,” I said, “I know where I want to be but I can’t find the path, the way out.” I learned to carry him lightly with me, tucked in my pocket not weighing me down like a millstone round my neck. “Loss will always occur in life, so don’t be afraid next time to ask for help,” she said when I left after six months.

I don’t forget; how can I? After twenty-four years I still remember.