‘The nightmare was the same, Brian trying to hold my hand as he disappeared into the flames’
Zoe Holohan was on honeymoon in Mati when her life was torn apart by the Greek wildfires. She tells Liadán Hynes about her journey to recovery
‘As soon as I saw him, I had that moment where you go, ‘Oh yeah, I like the look of him’.” Zoe Holohan first met Brian O’CallaghanWestropp in October 2014, having found each other through a dating website. This was Zoe’s last foray into digital dating, she tells the Sunday Independent.
“I’d had one disaster after another. But there was something about him that fascinated me. The fact that he had read my profile was a delightful change from what I’d previously experienced,” she smiles.
Now, she has written their story in her moving memoir, As the Smoke Clears. It covers the tragedy that overtook the couple four days into their honeymoon, and the subsequent heroic process of recovery that Zoe has undertaken, both physically and mentally.
Both Zoe and Brian were in their early 40s, and both had been married before. Brian, who was originally from Clare, had travelled extensively before moving to Dublin, where he worked as the general manager of Ready Chef, and volunteered with the medical charity Blood Bikes East. Zoe, who had lived in Dublin most of her life, had worked in media for over two decades, including for INM.
On that first date, the attraction was instant. Coffee turned into lunch, which turned into dinner. When the café closed, they went around the corner to Zoe’s local pub. “It ended up, I think, 14 hours,” she says. “It was basically three dates in one.
“There was an instant connection. He had a beautiful smile, the twinkliest blue eyes. You know someone who just exudes warmth; straight away you feel comfortable with that person? That was Brian.”
From that first date, they saw each other almost every day. “I had less than four years with Brian, which is very difficult to accept. We should have had a lifetime together, because we really were soulmates. But we made every second in that period of time count. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone as kind or as caring as Brian. I was just crazy about him.”
When Zoe’s beloved father Colm Holohan was diagnosed with cancer, it was early days in their relationship, but Brian was a huge support to her.
Then came their wedding in the summer of 2018. It was the perfect day. “I was surprised that it was almost more difficult to write about the happy times than it was to write about the really traumatic stuff. It still hurts now, thinking about it. Because we had it as good as you can get. The two of us were the perfect team; we did everything together. Thinking back on that time and knowing that’s no longer the case is very difficult.”
Two days after their wedding in July, the couple flew to Athens, and then on to the seaside town of Mati, about 40km north of the capital, and on the eastern coast, where they had rented a villa.
“On the morning of the 23rd, we woke up, had a beautiful meal, went swimming. We were like a pair of giddy teenagers. We even sat down and changed our Facebook status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘married’. We were just delighted with ourselves.”
We had it as good as you can get. The two of us were the perfect team
After lunch, they had a nap. Zoe woke with a sense of confusion. “Brian wasn’t in the bed beside me, he was calling me to come downstairs. There was a sense of urgency in his tone.”
Standing at the patio doors, Brian was gazing at the garden, transfixed. It was on fire. “Brian said, ‘run upstairs, grab some clothes, we’re getting out of here, right now.’ I grabbed a long, white, embroidered, beautiful dress I’d bought especially for the honeymoon.”
They dashed out to their car which was sitting in the driveway. “It was horrifically hot. You were just hit by this sheet of intensity. Even breathing was difficult; like swallowing acid, burning all the way down into your lungs. Your eyes were stinging.”
At the time, much of Europe was experiencing an extreme heatwave. The hot, dry conditions had led to wildfires to the west and east of Athens; while high winds meant the fires were spreading rapidly.
It was difficult to escape from the fires that surrounded Mati village because of the narrow roads and fast, changeable winds. Later, it became clear that no alarm had been sounded, and that the fire Brian and Zoe were caught in was at first ignored by emergency services who were dealing with blazes elsewhere. Zoe and other victims are involved in legal action against the Greek authorities.
Zoe recalls how “for a second there, I thought we were going to just drive the hell out of there.” But the electricity had been cut off, meaning the nine-foot electric gates were closed. An attempt to open them was unsuccessful; Brian and Zoe were forced to scramble over the gate.
“I remember, I asked Brian to reassure me that we were going to be OK, because, you know, he was the sensible one. He never lied to me, so I reckoned that if he promised me we’d be OK, we’d be OK. He said, ‘we’re going to make it. You and I together.’ And then we stared to run.”
They were met by a wall of fire. Even though it was afternoon, it was by now dark as night.
“There was this tremendous panic, we didn’t know which route to go. What snapped us out of that was I realised my dress was on fire. It was excruciating.”
Brian rushed to her aid, putting the flames out with his bare hands.
They took a different route and came upon a group of five children, one young enough to still be in a nappy. A car pulled up, and Zoe and Brian helped the children in. There were already three adults inside, so the couple clambered into the boot.
“We wrapped ourselves around each other. We couldn’t pull the lid of the boot closed, so we had to hold on with our hands. At this stage the car took off at some serious pace. The flames were licking at us through the open boot; as fast as the car was driving, the fire was faster.”
Zoe’s dress was on fire again, as was her hair, which was melting onto her face. “The pain was unbelievable. Brian was trying to comfort me and to put the flames out.” He was talking, but the roar of the fire was so loud that it was impossible to hear him.
Suddenly, the car hit a tree, which fell on the now wide-open boot.
“Brian got an awful shock, and he let go,” Zoe says quietly. “We had been holding hands. And he let go, and in shock he just rolled out of the boot. I tried to stop him. I tried to hold onto him, but I couldn’t. He rolled out onto the road, and he just screamed, ‘why’. This really high-pitched scream, that I heard in my ears for a long time after that. He just rolled into the flames.”
She stops to gather her emotions. Understandably, it has taken long hours of therapy with a clinical psychologist for Zoe to be able to talk about the events of this horrific day.
“I kept calling out to Brian,” she says. “I remember thinking that I wanted the last thing that he heard to be his wife of four days calling his name.”
She isn’t sure if it was seconds or minutes later that a man in firefighting gear, Manos Tsaliagos, appeared. At first, he thought she was dead, but she blinked. Lifting her out of the boot, he carried her to an emergency hut. By now in severe shock, Zoe managed to communicate that she needed to be cut out of her clothes.
“They were smouldering. You can feel it burrowing into your flesh. I remember being transfixed by the image of my hand, because at that stage the skin and the flesh had just started to melt off right in front of my eyes... I could no longer see out of my left eye.”
She was brought to a public hospital that was overwhelmed with victims from the fire — the eventual death toll was thought be 102. She was placed in a bed and left alone. No painkillers were offered. “It was pandemonium. Screaming and crying. I was in absolute agony.”
Eventually, she was awoken by an official from the Irish embassy, who organised for her to be moved to the Mitera private hospital in Athens, and placed in the care of Georgios Moutoglis, a leading plastic surgeon. He was, she recalls in the book, the first person who made her feel safe,
“He was so gentle and kind and compassionate. They kept saying, ‘you’re safe now’.”
Zoe had third- and fourth-degree burns. Her legs were so severely injured that it was unclear whether she would ever walk again. For the first few weeks, she was in and out of surgery every two to three days.
“I wasn’t even aware of that; I was in a constant daze. I knew I was fighting for survival. The level of care that I received there was just phenomenal.”
It was only when she was moved out of ICU into a room of her own that the reality of what had happened began to sink in.
“I probably had a little bit more time on my own. It was then that I started to realise all that I’d lost. It was overwhelming. That’s when the tears started to come.
“I allowed myself to register that Brian was gone, and that everything we’d planned was deleted. I wasn’t sure at that stage if I’d ever be able to walk again, or use my hands.”
I kept calling out to Brian. I remember thinking that I wanted the last thing that he heard to be his wife of four days calling his name
Zoe, who had suffered from depression in the past, began working with a psychologist, Dr Tsopelas. “The grief comes when the grief comes. It just exploded from me when I got up there.”
She spent many long nights, crying, unable to sleep, and when sleep did come, it was no refuge. “Sleep equated to torture. The nightmares were always the same, Brian trying to hold my hand as he disappeared into the flames.”
Talking to Dr Tsopelas for hours almost every evening helped.
Three weeks after Brian died, her father Colm, who had been suffering from bowel cancer for some years, died suddenly from a heart attack. Zoe describes how a fog of grief descended on her. “It was like my emotional trip switch had blown.”
She was flown back to Ireland on August
23, a month after her wedding. But another huge blow was to come. By the time she arrived at St James’s Hospital in Dublin, she was unconscious and delirious, suffering from a fever. She had contracted a rare condition called toxic epidermal necrolysis or TEN, which affects one in a million people each year.
“My life was more in danger as a result of contracting that than it had been because of the fire. The odds of me surviving were extremely low.”
Her skin started to blister in areas that had not been affected by the burns, bursting open in parts. “This was a really cruel turn. I had huge slash marks across my chest, and on my back.”
She suffered sepsis, pneumonia, was put on dialysis, and given a tracheostomy. When she began to experience multiple organ failure, she was put into an induced coma. She recalls that she could hear the voices of her family.
“A parallel universe is probably the best way of describing it. I felt my mum’s touch on my face. I knew she was there, and I knew my two brothers were there. That was really, really comforting.”
But she also experienced nightmares during this time, which left her, when she eventually regained consciousness, feeling paranoid and confused.
“When I came out of the coma, I had a whole new set of challenges. If I was childlike in Greece, I was like a baby now. I was back to square one, except square one was way far back. All the work I had done learning how to walk was deleted.”
Delusions left over from the nightmares compounded the sense of otherness. “I started to feel very alien to everything and everyone around me. Or alienated. I use the word ‘alien’ because I kind of felt everyone else was human and I wasn’t. There was this tremendous separation, even from the people who were closest to me; my family and my amazing friends.”
She began to become more aware of the
effects on her body of all that she had suffered. “All my hair fell out. My eyebrows, my eyelashes. Eventually all my nails fell off. It was like my body was withering. And I remember thinking, ‘that’s it, that’s the last vestiges of my femininity gone’. I didn’t recognise myself anymore when I looked in the mirror.”
She was no longer the person she had been, but was struggling with who she was now. “I didn’t want my friends to know that I was feeling this, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but there was this huge chasm between us now. They were talking to me like I was pre-fire Zoe. And it’s wonderful that they could still see me at that stage, as pre-fire Zoe, because I can tell you one thing, I sure didn’t look like her. But they had their husbands or boyfriends, they had their children, their careers, everything that was normal. And all of that was gone for me. And I could see no way of ever getting back there.
“How would I begin to ever try and explain to them? I still probably live with this strange dichotomy of pre-fire Zoe and post-fire Zoe.”
Now, she says there’s nothing better than when her friends slag her off. “Through them I see a little flash of pre-fire Zoe. It makes me feel really good inside. Postfire Zoe is very different. I’m never going to look the same. I’m scarred forever; emotionally and mentally dramatically altered.”
When she left hospital in October 2018, Zoe went back to the apartment which she and Brian had shared near the Phoenix Park. As Christmas approached, she found herself badly struggling.
“I just didn’t want to be here; I couldn’t see a way forward. Or maybe I could, because I asked for help, so I probably wasn’t quite there yet, but I was well on my way. I talk about the coin toss in the book; I had this little skinny coin in my head, for weeks and weeks, of heads, you keep going and keep fighting, and tails, you just give up.”
No one around her knew what was going on. “It was like an Oscar-winning performance. I was always afraid that people would get upset around me, so I would paint the smile on my face. That’s my way in general, the way I handle things in life.”
Help came in the form of Dr Sonya
Collier, principal clinical psychologist in St James’s who diagnosed post-traumatic stress, complex grief and body issues.
“At that stage I didn’t want anyone to look at me. I would have been extraordinarily happy if I could have gone around with a big paper bag over my head,” she smiles. “I had the wig, I had six inches of make-up on my face. My burns are much better on my face now and they’re easy enough to cover with makeup but back then that wasn’t the case. I was learning how to walk, I was covered in bandages, there was a lot. My physicality was very distressing for me. How I looked was very upsetting.”
She had come to believe that anyone she loved would die. “Even my cat had died. The grief was overwhelming. I couldn’t make sense of the fact that I was still here, and those that I loved were gone. I kept thinking ‘who’s next?’ The guilt was absolutely horrific.”
“You’re on high alert all the time,” she says of PTSD. “Any second, you’re going to die, or something terrible is going to happen. There was nothing I could do about changing what happened that day. But I could change certain beliefs. For instance, if I’d held on tighter to Brian, he wouldn’t have fallen out and wouldn’t have died. That was a huge thing for me. That’s why I kept having nightmares.”
Eventually, their work together meant the horrific flashbacks she was suffering, which were often triggered by a change in the weather, or sleep problems, began to recede. Her anger was, she recalls, eating her inside out, so they worked on that too.
“If you asked how I am now, I have moments in my head of red rage. But I deal with it a hell of a lot better. I take my very long walks in the Phoenix Park. And I talk to people.”
While her book builds a picture of a close, loving family and a wonderful group of friends, she also admits to having lived essentially a hermit’s life since coming home from hospital. Just before lockdown, she was beginning to feel ready to go back out into the world.
“I was kind of thinking ‘OK, come on,
Zoe, put your big girls’ pants on; you’re ready to go back out into the world.”
Now, she is champing at the bit to get going, she says. “To start whatever this new life will be. I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t turn on my heel and go straight back and hide under the duvet again.
“I don’t see myself ever going back to the way I used to be. Without sounding melodramatic about it, she is dead. She is gone. I can’t be her anymore.” But she says,.“I do want to enter the real world again. Stand on my own two feet, literally.”
‘As the Smoke Clears’ by Zoe Holohan is published by Gill on Friday, March 5, €16.99