Every parent shares the numbing grief for the six Elim teenagers who did not come home last night, nor ever will again

Jump to Comments

Only a parent can begin to imagine the awful numbing grief of losing a child. When I heard on the 6am news yesterday that six Auckland teenagers on a school trip had perished in a flash flood while canyoning down the Mangatepopo Stream in Tongariro National Park, my feelings for their parents were beyond words. So many children. So many devastated parents.

Such a tragedy is made even worse, if such a thing is possible, by there being so many deaths together. It creates intense media and public scrutiny that can be impossible to bear on top of the loss of a child. All over again, it is like Cave Creek, where 14 young people died, and just 13 days short of the anniversary of the terrible 1995 platform collapse there.

As a parent, I worry about my children whenever I am not with them and especially when they are away with others, whether with friends, or on school camps, or other activities. Mine call me the Worry Wart because of the way I have always fretted for their safety. I am the kind of parent who even leaps to catch other people’s children when I fear they are about to fall out of a supermarket trolley. But we have to let our children grow up and become independent young adults responsible for their own health and safety.

I have been triply relieved with my own three children because none of them has ever got really sick with anything at all, with the only major incidents being two of them breaking their arms on the same school monkey bars at the age of six, three years apart. After the second, the school removed the monkey bars, which I thought was ridiculously over the top, as neither mine nor any of the several other children injured on that piece of playground equipment over the years suffered any long-term harm, but probably learnt something about using monkey bars when they are wet.

But the fact they are growing up so healthy and fit makes me even more nervous. I keep telling myself they are perfectly capable kids who don’t need me to hold their hands crossing the road any more, then worry about the law of averages versus the number of times they cross the road.

When my baby was a year old, my nephew, her cousin, Alastair, 16, the same age as all the Elim kids, was killed in terrible circumstances in a highly publicised accident. The evening before he died, Alastair was at my house bouncing my baby on his knee. He was a lovely boy who adored babies and older people and was very popular with his peer group, guys and girls. At 4am next day, the bedside phone rang. It was his grandmother. “Alastair’s dead,” was all she said. The grief was indescribable. Why hadn’t I taken a photo of him with my baby on his knee? Why did it have to be him and not one of all the other kids who were right next to him when he was killed? The effect on Alastair’s parents, I could never even begin to imagine. I don’t know how they ever recovered from it. Happily, it seemed to make them stronger as a couple.

Up until then, Alastair’s parents had often said my own, much younger, son was “another Alastair.” By that they meant he was a daredevil, a physically active boy who took risks and loved life. From that dreadful 4am phone call on, I couldn’t bear hearing my son being likened to Alastair, lest it tempted fate.

Now, if any of my children were away from home and the phone rang at 4am, I would be too terrified to answer it.

In her column in the Listener this week, an old colleague, Joanne Black, writes as only a parent can of the nightmare she has been living through after her phone rang the Saturday morning before last with the caller saying her son, Seb, 12, had been seriously injured in a mountainbiking accident at Castlepoint in the Wairarapa.

“It was only when we arrived at Masterton hospital that we started to be sucked down into the kind of vortex that can come from nowhere and suddenly engulf your life,” she wrote, in an article that will not be online until May 10, so buy the print edition, please.

“Seb did not recognise us. And, from his behaviour, we would not have recognised him. He was lashing out at a nurse and locked in some terrible pain-filled space inside his bruised brain. [He] had a small haemorrhage in his brain, and a possible fracture in his neck and would be airlifted to Wellington’s intensive care unit. I turned to find that my unflappable, just-the-person you-want-in-a-crisis husband, was about to faint off his chair. He lay down on the floor and there I was, with the two most important males in my life both stretched out in a hospital room in Masterton.”

It was the most arresting, moving story I have ever read by Joanne, whose Listener column is usually a whimsical account of the travails of renovating her house. There is no whimsy in this latest column, but much gnawing parental anguish. I emailed her the moment I put it down. Seb had just been released from hospital and would probably recover fully, but they did not know for certain, she replied.

I wonder if Toms, who commented on this blog yesterday that he refused to buy the Listener because of Joanne, whom he sneeringly described as a “Glenngarry Tory” who parroted her husband’s lines, would have posted that had he known of Seb’s accident. I hope not.

In the moments after I heard the 6am news yesterday, I thought of Seb and I thought of Alastair and I thought of my own three children and I thought and I grieved and shed tears for the parents of those six beautiful Elim Christian College teens who are not coming home again. My heart aches for each of those mothers and fathers. I might not believe in their god, but as a parent I do give thanks every day my own children come home.

6 Comments

Filed under New Zealand

Tags: Mangatepopo River tragedy, parents