Worst nightmare
come over so I could tell them.
“Luckily, one of his friends who had been with him in Amsterdam phoned and spoke to Michael that evening and I then spoke to him and got a bit more detail, but essentially they had woken up and found him dead in his bed.”
Clare and Paul flew to Holland, while stories emanated saying Dutch police were investigating whether Charlie’s death was drug-related.
His death certificate says Charlie died of cardiac arrest and Clare says she is comforted by the fact that she knows his death was a tragic accident, and one that can’t be undone. What-ifs are pointless.
A mental health nurse for more than 20 years before she was elected an MSP in 2016, Clare is only too aware of how grief can become all consuming.
As she approaches the first anniversary of Charlie’s death, she considers how she has coped.
She said: “Honestly…i don’t know. I mean, I’ve always been the organiser and the coper and the keeper-on-top-of-things person. I’m a wee bit of a control freak and I like to just make sure things are there in place and I have, aside from Paul and the boys, family and some really good friends.
“You also don’t realise how much good there is in the world until something awful happens and sometimes I’m quite overwhelmed by the amount of goodwill and support that people, certainly round about that time, wanted to offer.
“For a time I just lived in the moment. I just existed, to be honest, I wasn’t really aware of trying to manage emotions, it was just trying to deal with what I had to deal with in the here and now.
“The initial thing was just to get him home, and then when we got him home, it was about planning a funeral. So, there’s this focus there at the start that keeps you occupied with things to do, busy, busy…
“When I got to see him in Amsterdam, he’d only passed away two days before so he really did look like he was asleep and I remember thinking how grateful I was to the people that must have cleaned him up so nicely given he’d had been staying in a hostel, because his fingernails had never been as clean since he was a little boy.
“And you know, in the circularity of Charlie’s life, the day that we brought him home and we closed his coffin was also his 21st birthday so, the first day I saw him was the 9th of August and the last day that I saw him was the 9th of August.
“I’m talking about it now like I can articulate the words, but the emotions behind that are still so raw. You take your comforts in small things; I know what happened, I know it wasn’t a deliberate act, I got to see him, I got to bring him home, I got to give him a funeral, I know where he is. I don’t have those unanswered questions that a lot of parents have when loved ones die abroad.
“You take small comforts from the things that you could do in a really awful, awful situation and you try and rebuild.
“It is every mother’s worst nightmare. Inner strength is probably the wrong word, it’s like survival, even at a time when you really don’t want to survive, but you somehow get through it and you are still here. I’ve got Paul and I’ve got the boys and I need to keep going for them.
“I was never suicidal but if I hadn’t woken up in the morning, you know it wouldn’t have mattered.
“It’s that sort of passive thing that you know you feel that way but you have reasons to go on and I have got reasons to go on.
“I know that my other kids will have lives and will develop and do things and that will bring some joy back into my life, I know that.
“I look back and think, ‘my God, I had a charmed life,’ and I just didn’t appreciate it. This puts a whole new perspective on to everything and the plans, whether consciously or unconsciously you have of how you think life is going to play out, that just all of a sudden, one part of that, has ended. “I was never angry with him [Charlie]. I find it quite hard to get angry with my kids apart from the trivial things like, ‘oh you left that there’ but it’s an emotion I never felt, I never felt anger. I’m not angry, I’m sad.
“On some levels I have accepted he’s gone and on a lot of levels I haven’t.
“I just miss him so much and I don’t think that will ever go away.
“We talk about Charlie in some context every day, whether it be a small thing like I was complaining about how many jars of chutney we had in the fridge, and I held one up asking what this was and Michael said that’s the one that Charlie liked.
“He’s mentioned in conversation all the time.
“He was a really, really, lovely young man.
You know how you hear people talk about their children dying and they’re like, ‘oh, he was just an angel’ and all that stuff, and I used to look at Charlie and think, I’ve got one of them, I have an angel because he just was the perfect child.
“He was so friendly with everyone, so loving, very chatty, very engaging, he could go in and work a room of adults when he was like three, you know, going in talking and chatting, being charming and they would say, ‘oh, he’s lovely’, and actually, he never really lost that.
“He was just a genuinely warm, friendly boy and he was always the one to come and give you a hug.
“He knew he was loved. He wouldn’t want me to be upset. He would be distraught at the pain he’s left behind. He would be mortified at being on the front page of the newspaper.
“He would just be so upset that it came to that, he didn’t like to be centre of attention.
“More than anything, I think he would be really sad at the pain and the heartbreak he’s caused, and he would be really sad at what he’s left behind.
“I have good days and bad days. I say good days, but they are better days and bad days, and there’s no rhyme or reason for why some day seems particularly bad.
“Yesterday, for instance, was a really awful day, one of the worst days I’ve had in months, and yet, probably about two weeks before I had a day where, actually, I thought, ‘oh my God, I actually feel almost normal for a whole day’.
“I think anyone who’s gone through what we’ve gone through would say similar, that it’s not something you get over, but you learn to live with it.
“I do have a faith, but it has been severely tested. I was brought up Catholic. I’m not a good Catholic in some respects but in times like that, that’s what I needed and I want to believe because I want to believe that I’ll see him again.
“I always thought if something had happened to my kids, I’d know, I’d just know. Gut instinct, I would absolutely know, and I didn’t. And that’s one of the other things that I sort of beat myself up for, ‘how did I not know’? “Logically, what could I have done to make things different? But it just came as such a bolt out the blue. I thought that I would have had an inkling that day that something was just not quite right, but I didn’t have that.
“But there was something…that morning, about 20 past five, Paul was woken by a loud thump in Charlie’s rooms upstairs. It disturbed him that much that he got up and he went through to the kitchen.
“Michael was in the kitchen doing his usual teenage nocturnal cooking and he said he’d heard it too so Paul went to check Charlie’s room. There was nothing, you know, nothing had fallen over or whatever.
“We think that’s round about the time that he died. I didn’t waken up, so I don’t know, but I’d like to think that was him coming home. I don’t normally believe in those kind of things, but I’ll take comfort where I can get it, and well, you know, it’s not going to do me any harm to think that way.
“We all have things that are difficult to deal with, whether it be relationship difficulties, or infertility problems, or whatever. You don’t necessarily know what’s going on with other people and we just assume that everybody’s life is much more perfect than ours. “We all think we are invincible and then things come along like this, or what we are all living through right now with this virus, and you realise how vulnerable we all actually are, how fragile it all is, but we can get through. You do recover.”