No child should witness such unspeakable horror
PETER PERIE doesn’t celebrate the festive season. Not since 2014, when his pregnant and brain-dead daughter Natasha lay on life support for almost four weeks until the High Court gave him the nod on Christmas week to give her a dignified burial, has he filled a glass with Christmas cheer. ‘I feel nothing. I don’t celebrate Christmas – it’s too sad,’ said the quietly-spoken man after a court approved a series of payments for his bereft family.
But what of Peter’s granddaughter – Natasha’s daughter Hannah – who was just six years old when she was ushered in to the hospital to watch her beloved mother waste away on a ventilator, her face and body swollen, disfigured and almost unrecognisable.
How that little girl’s body must have recoiled at the horror before her.
How her eyes must have misted with tears then and again later that month, on December 27, when the life-support machine was switched off and all her hopes and prayers died with her mother.
Has the joy of Christmas since, the thrill of Santa Claus and presents, of gaudy tinsel and selection boxes ever displaced the sight of her mother rotting alive or the shock of having her young life turned upside down by her death?
It’s doubtful.
LAST week the judge agreed that she had endured a ‘terrible time’. He hoped, as she comes to adulthood, that she would be comforted by good memories of her mother. Of course no amount of money, from the figure just paid out to the now 11-year-old girl to the more generous sums that will be advanced in years to come, will compensate for her broken childhood or the Christmas bells that will forever chime dolefully with her grief and the chilling memory of her mother’s hideous death.
When a psychiatrist asked the devastated little Hannah what she’d ask for if she had three wishes, she responded: ‘I want my mam back.’ Hannah was ‘unhappy for a long time and grieving very deeply’, the court was told. As she grows up and friends and partners and, with luck, her own children filling the gaping void left by her mother, Christmas will still be bittersweet.
It will always mark the time when the little family unit of granddad Peter, uncle Daniel, mum Natasha and the two small children, shattered, with the little girl going to live with her dad.
The legacy of that time would not be so awful for Peter and his two grandchildren had worries about the Eighth Amendment and the right to life of Natasha’s unborn child not dragged out her death so interminably.
The 26-year-old mother-of-two suffered a ruptured brain cyst and was pronounced brain dead on December 3, but it wasn’t until St Stephen’s Day that the court decided that the medical concerns for the foetus were ‘erroneous’, that the only prospect was ‘distress and death’, paving the way for turning off life support.
Natasha’s body had disintegrated so much they had to use a closed coffin.
The Repeal result thankfully obliterates the possibility of inhumane treatment for future Natashas – but what of the other failures?
On every stage of her final journey, Natasha and her loved ones were shortchanged, not least in the five-year wait for an apology from the HSE and Mullingar Hospital, with the family’s claim for damages still to be mediated.
THE catalogue of errors also include the failure to diagnose Natasha’s ruptured brain cyst when she attended her local hospital suffering from headaches. Peter Perie hopes the next few months will bring some form of closure to his family’s five-year ordeal.
He may not celebrate Christmas, but maybe he will have reason to mark the
New Year.