Please give back treasured photos of my late husband
Widow’s heartfelt plea for return of stolen laptop and camera
A MOTHER has made a heartfelt plea for the return of a stolen camera and laptop containing photographs of her late husband – who lost his battle with cancer just five months ago.
The woman, identified only as Cora, described the shock of finding out her house had been broken into on Monday as she was returning from the school run with her five-year-old son.
The mother of one, from Killiney, south Co. Dublin, was left devastated when gardaí told her the bad news over the phone.
She said: ‘It was around 1pm in the afternoon and I was returning home from the school run with my son when I got a call from the gardaí. The back- door glass was smashed and the house was upsidedown. There wasn’t much to rob in my house – £50 sterling – but they got away with my most treasured possessions, which are photographs of my recently deceased husband, because they were on my laptop.’
Cora added that ‘they stole a laptop, my Canon camera and an old iPhone’. The laptop and camera contained images of the ‘precious’ final months of her husband’s life.
‘My husband had cancer and was diagnosed four years ago,’ she revealed. ‘He passed away in October. My husband believed he was going to beat this so that’s why the stuff wasn’t backed up.
‘We were living as if he was going to be around – we weren’t preparing for him to die.’
During the robbery, the thieves also opened the lid of the urn containing her husband’s ashes.
‘The ashes were in the house as well and the thieves actually opened the urn, but at least they didn’t knock it around the room,’ Cora revealed.
She believes that the computer and camera may have been thrown away in the Killiney area.
‘My hope is that they abandoned the bag, and that someone else will find it,’ she said.
Speaking on the Ryan Tubridy Show on RTÉ Radio 1, Cora said: ‘I was finally starting to feel a little more normal last week and then this happened, so it’s kind of put me back. It’s like a second death.
‘I know people say they are just photographs, but it’s videos as well that I was keeping for my son – because he is so young, it’s going to be hard for him to remember Daddy.’
Recalling her life following her husband’s diagnosis, she said: ‘We were kind of living as if he was going to be here and that he would beat that disease.
‘In the back of my head I thought it might be gone at any minute.
‘We were just going to live our lives. While we couldn’t ignore the disease, he had a couple of years of remission before and two stem cell transplants. ‘He got treated and it went away. ‘We were in Edinburgh when we got news that the cancer had returned – and these photos [from the Edinburgh trip] are gone. ‘Six weeks later he was gone.’ Cora is appealing for anyone who may come across the possessions to hand them in at Dún Laoghaire Garda Station.
‘Hard for my son to remember Daddy’