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41. Extract from Nancy Brigstocke’s Notebook — October 1998

I wonder whether it’s ever really possible to feel another person’s suffering. Perhaps I am asking too much. But I’d hoped for something. Some words which might have shown an attempt to understand my loss. She said: “Sorry. I wish he hadn’t done it.” What did that mean? Did she wish that someone else had risked their life instead? Did she wish Jonathan was still alive? But she didn’t say that….

I have played her words over and over in my head, trying to make sense of them. Sometimes I wonder if they slipped out from somewhere deep inside. I wonder if they were a confession: whether she wished her son had been left to drown. Is that possible? I try to imagine how a mother could want her child to lose its life. But it happens, doesn’t it? Mothers kill their children through neglect. They put their own needs above those of their children. They forget about their responsibilities. It happens, you read about it. And she was guilty of neglect, why else would her five-year-old son be afloat in the sea alone? Why didn’t she run in to save him?

When we met I had already discovered that she and Jonathan had been intimate, but she told me they had never met before that day. But hadn’t they been staying in the same small holiday resort? And she repeated the lie: “I had never seen him before.” She is a liar. I could have told her I had seen the photographs, but I didn’t. I didn’t have the strength for confrontation, and really, what would have been the point? It wouldn’t bring him back. It took all my strength to stay upright, standing next to her at my son’s grave. I was cold. I was exhausted. I had wanted her to give me something. I wanted to see her son and I did find the strength to ask for that. I hoped that we would meet again and that the next time she would bring him with her, but she refused. There was no other meeting. I never saw her again and I never saw the child who was only alive because of my boy.

I remember how her cheeks glowed pink from the cold, shimmering with health, and I envied her that too, the heat coming off her. The sweat on her lip and her shiny skin. There was heat but no warmth. Her blood is too cold to ever understand what it feels like to have a stranger tell you your child is dead, to not be with your son at the moment he needs you most, at the moment he is crying out for you. And you cannot help him, you cannot hold him, you cannot tell him that it will be all right, that you are there. I wasn’t there to hold Jonathan, to stroke his head, to kiss him and tell him I loved him. Only if that happens to you can you really understand what it is like.

Her little boy is running around aboveground while mine lies rotting beneath. She didn’t even look at Jonathan’s stone, at the words we’d had carved into it: “He was our Angel.” She didn’t look down. She hadn’t brought flowers. Why did she even bother to come? I wish her child knew that he owed his life to my son. I wish he knew that if it wasn’t for Jonathan he wouldn’t be here.