‘Our daughter was spirited away to heaven’
When Nadim Ednan-Laperouse lost his child due to a food allergy, he claims to have taken comfort in the sight of angels. Was this his way of dealing with trauma, asks Peter Stanford
‘These five figures, like thin people, just appeared,” says the voice on the radio, “but with wings on their backs.” Christmas is, of course, a time for angel narratives, whether it be the angel Gabriel appearing to tell Mary she is with child, or the heavenly host alerting the shepherds watching their flocks by night to Jesus’s birth in a stable in nearby Bethlehem.
But this particular reported sighting, to be revealed in a Christmas Eve documentary on BBC Radio 4, is different.
It is contemporary for a start, and is taken from real life – part of a tragedy, not a celebration, and one moreover that touched the nation’s heart, when 15-year-old Natasha Ednan-Laperouse died in her father Nadim’s arms on a plane bound for Nice, after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a Pret a Manger sandwich.
It caused such headlines that it led to a change in the law on food labelling – Natasha’s Law, as it has become known – as the sesame seeds that killed her were not listed among the ingredients in the baguette she bought from Heathrow Airport.
Her grieving father spoke movingly at Natasha’s inquest, last year, of calling his wife, Tanya, to give her a chance to say goodbye to their daughter in the moments before her death.
But in Tuesday’s documentary, A
Bright Yellow Light, he reveals, for the first time, his extraordinary experience as he lost her so suddenly that fatal day in July 2016.
“It was looking terrible,” he recalls to presenter Emily Buchanan, as paramedics rushed on to the plane as it landed at Nice airport, fighting to restart Natasha’s heart and reopen her airways. “It couldn’t get worse.”
But then, he continues, in a calm, measured voice, as if from nowhere,
“this yellow light appeared – a strong, soft yellow light, rather like candlelight, but really intense; not that your eyes would squint”.
The light was being given off by “these five figures… in size they were about 20 centimetres tall, and thin, not chubby like a child, like a Renaissance painting, but like human beings. [There was] so much more detail there, the wings, the faces and bodies, all moving around Natasha. I’d never ever seen anything like that in my life, and I never expected to.”
Angels are a central and familiar feature of the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The last two both begin with an angel – in the New Testament, Gabriel visits Mary to reveal the arrival of Christ; in the Koran, Jibr’il (Arabic for Gabriel) comes to the Prophet Muhammad in a cave on Mount Hira to convey Allah’s message.
But Nadim, the millionaire owner of Wow Toys from Fulham, London, had been brought up entirely without such religious reference points.
The son of an Afghan Muslim father, who did not practise his faith, and a French mother who had rejected her Catholic upbringing to the extent that Nadim never set foot in a church, he describes himself in the documentary as an atheist.
“Our house was completely non-religious,” he says, with “no function nor requirement for God”. So he had little to draw on as far as angels go; no knowledge, for example, of the parable in Luke’s Gospel where a rich man watches as Lazarus, the dying leper at his gates, is cradled by angels and carried upwards into “the bosom of Abraham”.
Yet, in that moment, Nadim somehow knew enough of angels to wave them away. “It dawned on me that she [Natasha] might die, and I shouted, ‘it’s not her time’, and as I did that they were gone and Natasha died,” he says. “The paramedics sat back in despair.”
Of those that were gathered around Natasha that day, only Nadim saw angels, but in his suffering their light was, he says, “the most soothing light I have ever seen”.
And the angels themselves – in his description, sexless, expressionless, not flapping their wings but floating – had come to do a job. “They knew what they were going to do… to take Natasha away to heaven. They were there as guardians.”
You will need a heart of stone not to weep as you hear Nadim tell of how his terrified daughter, unable to breathe and losing consciousness in the plane’s cramped lavatory, had begged him, “help me, Daddy, help me”. But what to make of his vision?
Ours is a secular, sceptical era, when religious practice in the West is in steep decline, its institutions too often found wanting, and its symbols and narratives routinely dismissed as wishful thinking. Until that day in Nice, that was how Nadim saw it.
But while the ascendancy of science, reason and logic has answered many of the questions medieval believers used to rely on the Church to solve, it holds little comfort for those, like Nadim, who experience the cruel randomness of suffering.
In what he calls his “lowest moment”, Nadim found that comfort elsewhere: “God sent angels for me to see, to tell me it was OK,” he says. “Our child was spirited away to heaven with the angels.”
What he saw that day has changed Nadim’s life. Once an atheist, he, his wife and son now go to their local church, but the businessman insists to Buchanan, “I am the least likely person on the planet to have any sort of hallucination.” But his singular testimony is unlikely to shift the settled view of science that the angels were his own projection, the way his brain coped when utterly overwhelmed by the worst possible thing that could happen to a parent.
Except, it isn’t so singular. A 2016 poll of 2,000 people in this country by ICM reported that one in 10 of respondents reported experiencing an angelic presence and one in three said they believed in guardian angels.
Curiously, that is a greater proportion of the population than the 23 per cent who, in a YouGov survey around the same time, described themselves as “very” or “fairly” religious. To try to understand this contradiction, and the enduring appeal of angels in human history, I researched and wrote a book on the subject and this past year have been talking about it at literary festivals and in libraries and bookshops.
Without fail, at the end of every event, someone will approach me with a tale similar to Nadim’s.
There was, for example, the very sensible hospital consultant who told me how, when six months pregnant and pushing the pram that contained her two-year-old, whom doctors had just told her would never lead a normal life, a stranger appeared out of nowhere and walked alongside her in her hour of utter despair, and reassured her all would be well, which was how it turned out. Her visitor was, she just knew, an angel, though the experience hadn’t turned her into a churchgoer.
Or the couple who recounted to me how their daughter had been taken gravely ill while on a gap-year trip in Thailand.
It took 24 hours for her mother to get there, but when she arrived, the nurses told her about the person who had been holding vigil at her daughter’s bedside and who, minutes before, had disappeared.
The couple were convinced it had been an angel in everyday garb.
What I learnt to do when listening to these and the many similar stories heard on my travels, was to curb that 21st-century instinct to pick away at them, so as to make them fit with logic and reason.
Yes, of course, Nadim, when an art student decades before, might have seen a similar image to the angels he saw attending his dying daughter, and stored it in his subconscious.
But it feels glib to quibble with the power of this otherwise supremely rational man’s conviction that what he witnessed was real.
Is it so unthinkable to accept that Nadim and many others believe they have seen angels, as human beings have done throughout history, and not get caught up with the need to prove or disprove their testimony?
To leave open the possibility that, in times of greatest despair, there may also be moments of transcendence, when something inexplicable undeniably chimes with a deep-rooted human yearning for there to be more to life, this life, than meets the eye.
That, after all, is also what the Christmas story is about.
‘We were completely non-religious, with no function nor requirement for God’
‘I am the least likely person on this planet to have any sort of hallucination’