For the love of Maudie...
TV star Jason and his wife confront loss of daughter on camera
BARELY holding back their emotions, Jason and Clara Watkins undertake an unimaginably harrowing task on camera.
In heartbreaking scenes, they steel themselves to sift through their daughter Maudie’s belongings for the first time since she died in 2011.
Maude’s death from sepsis on new Year’s Day came after doctors sent her home with what they thought was croup. She was two.
She was found the next morning by Mr Watkins, an award-winning TV actor, and his wife after their daughter Bessie told them she could not wake her sister.
A friend of the couple, emma, later packed up Maude’s clothes and toys and stored them in her loft. ‘I found it very difficult to go in to Maude’s bedroom and just see all her stuff as if she were still going to come in,’ says Mrs Watkins in the ITV documentary Jason & Clara: In Memory of Maudie shown last night.
‘So emma took it all out and has been looking after it in her loft for 11 years. As time has gone on those things have taken on value to me. now I feel compelled to go through them.’
Mrs Watkins, a fashion designer, broke down in tears as she unzipped a bag containing her Maude’s ‘little shoes’, while her husband picked out a Peter Rabbit toy. ‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ she said.
‘There’s a part of me that wants to put my hand in the bag and just grab something... just to try to make myself keep them.’ Mr Watkins said: ‘The fact that it’s so physical... it’s the closest you can get to having her with us.’
Scenes of the couple preparing to move out of the flat where their daughter died were interspersed with images of Maude, and the couple going to therapy for the first time.
The couple helped launch the Mail’s end the Sepsis Scandal in 2016 after baby William Mead died at 12 months after errors by doctors and nHS helpline staff. Our campaign led to the first- ever guidelines for health professionals to recognise, diagnose and treat sepsis, known as the ‘silent killer’.
It happens when the immune system overreacts to infection and damages the body’s own organs.
It can be treated with antibiotics if caught early but five people die from sepsis every hour in the UK.