How I told kids their MP mum had been killed
By the husband of JO COX
Almost exactly a year ago today, Jo and Brendan Cox sat on a bench overlooking the garden they’d reclaimed at their dilapidated and isolated Welsh cottage.
A few yards away their children, Cuillin, then five, and Lejla, three, climbed up an old rope, fearless and free.
“I remember Jo turned to me and said: ‘You know, we’ll look back on these days as the happiest days of our life’,” says her husband, Brendan. Four days later she was dead. Jo Cox, 41, mum, wife, daughter, sister, friend and campaigning MP was shot and stabbed outside the library in Birstall, West Yorks, on June 16, just two miles from where she grew up in Batley.
It was a crime which stunned Britain and punctuated the EU referendum campaign in the most terrible way.
One year on Brendan, 37, is finally ready to discuss his wife’s murder and its impact. He’s written a book, Jo Cox – More in Common, which will be serialised in the Daily Mirror next week.
The fact Jo felt so much excitement in the final days before she was killed by right-wing fanatic Thomas Mair must make it all even harder to bear.
“Yeah, but it’s so much better that than the alternative... If those last weeks and months had been really unhappy or we were feuding over something,” says Brendan slowly. “To have that moment where Jo was the happiest she had ever been in her life before she died, that is very important to me.”
Brendan was in London, where the family lived in a houseboat, when he heard Jo had been hurt in her constituency. He immediately jumped on a train. And it was on the journey, totally alone, he took another call from Jo’s sister Kim to say Jo had died.
A stranger on the train tried to comfort his anguished sobs.
“I don’t know if it would have been any worse or any better if I’d been anywhere else, or if I’d been with someone,” he says.
As for the sensation of hearing the news, he remembers: “It feels like an explosion or a hand grenade going off inside you. And then you’re just a shell really and retreat into shock mixed with collapse.”
Immediately Brendan became fixed upon what impact this horror would have on Cuillin and Lejla’s young lives.
Within hours he had contacted child psychologists about the best way to break the news. “They said to be very open and honest from the start,” he says.
“Not to have any metaphors or mysteries like she’d gone to sleep but to be really clear about the permanence of it and to answer their questions honestly. So that’s what I did. They asked what had happened and I just answered them as honestly as I could.” In the book Brendan recalls: “I had to say No, I couldn’t dream up a way to bring Mummy back to us. “I explained to Cuillin that his good idea that scientists might be able to inject life into her wouldn’t work. “We also couldn’t make a new version of Mummy out of wood, as Lejla had suggested, and we weren’t going to see her in another world. I told them Jo was gone but that she lived on in our hearts and heads.” That same day Brendan’s sister Stacia came up with an idea. “Each of us would write down some of our favourite memories of Jo – of Mummy – on small pieces of coloured paper,” says Brendan. “We would then hang them on the apple tree in Mum and Dad’s garden.”
It seemed to help and that evening Cuillin even made up a song in memory of his mother. But days later Brendan was faced with an even tougher task.
“For me the most difficult decision was letting them see Jo’s body. I was very anti doing it. I didn’t want to even do it myself and so I hadn’t identified Jo’s body, her sister had done it.
“But the child psychologist said evidence is strong that most kids get something from it, it helps them accept what’s happened and they don’t have any of the squeamishness adults do.
“We were only there a few minutes but it was definitely, definitely the right thing to do. I could tell immediately because it was like then they accepted she was gone.”
Afterwards they asked why the man had killed their mummy. It’s a question which has recurred many times since.
“I say ‘Mummy wanted to help people and that’s how she spent her life’.
“And that the person who killed her didn’t want her to help people because he didn’t like certain people and he was a very bad man. But that there are very few in the world and he’s in prison now.”
Cuillin and Lejla joined Brendan at a meeting of Parliament to pay respects to Jo and a gathering in Trafalgar Square in the whirlwind days after her death.
Since then he has been determined to keep them out of the public eye – and that, he says, is how it will remain.
“I’ve done a lot to try to make them feel secure emotionally and not to change anything else in their life since Jo died so they’re in the same school, same home and everything is the same – apart from the one thing which is completely different. So far they haven’t
really had fear as an instinct and I never want them to live with fear.”
He has also ensured Jo remains a firm presence in family life.
Cuillin, now six, is about to go on Beaver camp. “He wanted to take Mummy’s rucksack with him so we were getting that out this morning and having a chat about her.”
Brendan’s determination to help his children seems to have become a mission during which some must wonder if he has neglected his own grief.
“I am quite a rationalist and I knew from the beginning there was nothing I could do about what had happened to Jo and I hated that powerlessness.
“But I also knew that what I could do something about was how the kids coped with it, so that was everything I thought about.”
As we talk Brendan looks exhausted and often tearful. And while he has worked hard at ensuring his children talk freely about their mum and their memories, he has shunned counselling himself.
“I feel much more comfortable being upset by myself and I don’t like inflicting my pain on other people,” he says.
The pair had been a couple since October 2005 and married in Western Scotland less than five years later. Both worked for charities before Jo was elected as MP for Batley and Spen in 2015.
They shared a love of rock climbing, travelling and exploring. While the children have kept some of their mum’s paint-splattered jumpers she wore for playing with them, Brendan has kept her rock climbing hat.
“I take it with me every time I go climbing,” he says, tears once again brimming. “I went to Scotland recently with two of my closest friends and dragged them up some mountains.
“You could see down to the bay in Knoydart where Jo and I got married. It is moments like that when it still feels completely surreal.
“There are a constant series of moments when I have to remember Jo has gone. I’ll often go to send her a text message when I’ve come out of a meeting or met somebody interesting and then I remember...
And there are all the places you go for the first time since we went there together. I went back to Wales quickly so it was done and then there was the first time we went back to the boat and then all the other places... It’s a constant series of moments.
“I am maybe 20% down the road of dealing with it. There are still things every day that make it bite deeper.”
Writing the book has been Brendan’s personal attempt at coming to terms with what has happened. And regrets?
“I guess there are a thousand little things that if you knew something was going to happen you would do differently, but with Jo we were always clear about the fundamentals. And we were unbelievably happy, Jo in particular with the job she had wanted all her life and with the kids.
“When Jo died I said she lived her life to the full and wouldn’t have regretted any of her major decisions and that was definitely true.”
For Brendan, though, it seems too soon to work out what his future path might be. “No, I don’t think I can see that,” he says. “Not for me. Yeah, I don’t know where... I don’t know.”
In the meantime his focus remains the children and organising the Great Get Together – thousands of community events up and down the country to be held on the anniversary of Jo’s death and to mark her belief we have more in common.
Brendan says: “I would like Jo’s death to count for something and she has come to personify a set of beliefs she fought for all her life – that people have more in common than divides them.
“In her dying moments she told her assistants to get out of the way because she didn’t want them getting hurt and that was her heroism, together with her values and her patriotism that I hope is remembered.”
It seems Brendan is existing to do justice to everything Jo was. Isn’t that an enormous pressure?
“Well I’m not sure if I think everything is going to be OK,” he says. “But I definitely feel a responsibility and an opportunity to give Cuilin and Lejla the best possible start in a life where they are full of energy and vitality. And I am excited by that.”
As certainly their extraordinarily energetic and vital mother would have been too.
The hardest decision was letting the children see Jo’s body ...but it was right to do it