“A 12-YEAR-OLD girl has died in a swimming accident on a school trip to France.”
My heart thuds hard. Where are my children? Who has my children?
In the next beat, pounding harder, I place them: Safe, finishing off our family holiday in the sunshine with their daddy, not too far away.
I call to hear their happy voices. They have been for a long walk, had hot dogs and are now doing some colouring in.
So you see, silly. It’s fine. They are fine. You can stop sweating, everything is OK.
Except it’s not. One family has lost their little girl, Jessica. Already in France, they are bereft, looking for answers to an impossible question: Why did our little girl die?
Distraught, they will stare at the pontoon she was standing on in the lake. They will see her — can you hear her? — laughing and giggling with her 12-year-old mates.
Goofing about in a bikini, carefree, splashing, having fun. Proper fun.
The sort of fun we all wish for our children.
Fun that doesn’t involve dark alleys or the dangers of the night.
Away from iPhones and monsters online, safe from men in vans looking to steal children from the streets.
They were away from all that.
The day you give birth is the day you truly understand fear.
And a parent’s biggest fear is that someone will take their precious bundle away.
“Be careful on the zebra crossing. If a man says, ‘Get in my car’, what do you say? If you are lost, who do you ask for help?
“Remember, if you have a problem, no matter how bad, you tell Mummy — Mummy can’t make a secret better.”
Ask me my biggest fear in life and my answer will always be, “Losing my children”.
A mother must never lose a child before she dies, lest the natural order of life be disrupted.
Our babies grow up fast. Long and lanky-limbed, grinning at us over their shoulder, they are ready to take on the world.
But to us they will always be our baby. Tiny, weak, blind to everything.
We want to keep them all wrapped up in the blanket we bought especially because it looked so soft and clean.
Jessica Lawson’s world went topsy-turvy in the blink of an eye. The pontoon turned over.
She was trapped underneath. Unconscious, she was pulled from the water and briefly revived before her body turned the lights off one last time.
Her sister asks her friends to remember her not for what she could have been but for what she was.
I am sure to her mother and father she was everything: Bright, beautiful, perfect.
But so much more than that — to her mum she was still a baby, wrapped up in the softest shawl.
None of us can understand. We can only know the fear. And we feel it, too.
To Jessica’s family I would say this. I’m not sure there are answers for you in France. But there must be comfort in the closeness.
Being among her things, smelling the familiarity, hearing her laughing before the quiet closes in.
And I just wanted to let you know, as a mum myself, that I am so sorry you have lost your baby.
