Mummy’s gone, but I love you Daddy ...
The impossibly moving tale of a little boy who lost his mother and unborn baby sister in one terrible blow— but gave his father a reason to live
ROBERT STOBO was just two years old when his Mummy, Fiona, died. It was several months before the awful reality of her death dawned on his infant mind. His dad Craig recalls the night when his little boy had a waking nightmare. ‘ Robert was crying and standing up in his cot, bolt upright, and he said: “Mummy’s gone, Daddy!” ’ he recalls. ‘I just soothed him, and said: “But Daddy’s here,” and I repeated, like a mantra, that his mummy had loved him so much and wanted to stay.
‘It breaks my heart that Robert will never know his mum. She loved dancing and singing. She had a beautiful voice. And now there is nothing where she was; only emptiness.
‘Bedtime is the saddest of all. We sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star as Fiona used to do and sometimes I’ve cried. Robert will say: “Daddy’s sad.” ‘Fiona was a great believer in tight, squeezing hugs, and Robert will give me a hug and a little pat on the back as his mummy would. Then he’ll put his hand on his chest and say: “I love you with all my heart, Daddy,” and that’s when the tears almost choke me.’
Fiona Agnew died suddenly in August 2012, leaving Craig, 44, a tax consultant, to raise their young son alone. And in Robert lay Craig’s salvation: the little boy gave him a reason to live, to strive, to carry on. For the enormity of the tragedy that engulfed Craig that summer two years ago had almost floored him.
It started when he succumbed to sepsis, a virulent and life-threatening illness that arises when the body’s response to an infection is uncontrolled and it injures its own tissues and organs.
Then, within hours, his pregnant wife Fiona, a doctor, fell victim to the same condition — only to die of it, shortly after the stillborn delivery of their daughter. The whole terrible tragedy was played out in the space of just two-and-a-half days.
‘I was in profound shock,’ says Craig. ‘I wondered: “What is this hellish thing that has struck us?” Fiona and our unborn daughter Isla had died. I’d almost died. Yet 62 hours earlier we’d been absolutely fine.
‘Questions were crowding in on me. I couldn’t make sense of it. What happened had destroyed every plan, every dream and hope. Our future was blown to pieces. It was as if a bomb had gone off and debris was raining down on me. Every e motion was so i ntense and I was filled with panic.
‘And the thought that kept coursing through my mind was: “How on earth am I going to explain all this to Robert?” But it was also Robert who gave me hope. After Fiona died I thought: “I have to get better for him. He’s relying on me now. I can’t turn my face to the wall.”
‘I wanted to see him more than anyone else in the world, to hold him as close as possible. But my brain was running away with me. I thought: “How am I going to keep going? What shall I say to Robert now . . . and in the future?” And I had to stop myself because that’s the road to madness.’
THE
day after Fiona’s death, her parents Elspeth and Donald, who had been looking after Robert, brought him into hospital to see his father.
‘He was just a toddler then, a happy cheerful wee boy, and he jumped onto the bed and gave me a big cuddle, but I didn’t tell him about his mummy then. I waited,’ says Craig. Discharged from hospital four days later, he framed the words he would use.
‘We’d evolved a bedtime routine. If I was away on business I’d always say goodnight to Robert on the phone. And if Fiona was away, she’d do the same. So for a few days, I just showed Robert Fiona’s photo on my mobile and we said: “Night-night, Mummy”.
‘Then, a couple of nights later, I told him. I said: “Mummy had to go away, but she didn’t want to, and she loves you very much, but she can’t ever come back.” Then I told him she was a clever mummy and she taught Daddy how to look after him.’
The words were loving but stark, dreadful, uncompromising; two-yearolds do not understand euphemism or metaphor. Craig knew that Robert — despite his bright, questing mind and growing vocabulary — could only take in so much. And he knew he must be truthful; that half-baked platitudes such as ‘Mummy’s gone to sleep’ would hold out false hope.
‘Robert seemed to accept what I said,’ he says. ‘There were no tears, no questions, because that isn’t the way a toddler’s mind works.’
Robert’s little world resumed its course and his mind would, intermittently, flip back to his mummy.
‘He would see objects he associated with her — the black rucksack she used for all his baby things; the floating thermometer she bought for his bath — and he’d point to them and say: “Mummy,” then I’d repeat the words I’d already said.’
Six months on, Robert had that nightmare: the finality of his mother’s death had even invaded his dreams.
Craig and Fiona had a blessed life until their world began to unravel with horrific speed. They were both Glasgow University graduates — Craig had read law; Fiona medicine — and, having been friends for years, they’d fallen in love in 2003 at a party.
FIONA
worked part- time since Robert’s birth. Their home in Edinburgh rang with l aughter and song: Fiona — bright, kind and dedicated to her dual roles as mum and doctor — was a talented singer.
She was 35 weeks pregnant with their second child when, on August 23 2012, Craig became ill. His symptoms were flu-like: he ached and shivered, then later suffered uncontrollable nausea and a thumping head.
He came home from work and Fiona insisted he go to his GP — her insistence, he says, saved his life. He was rushed to hospital in Edinburgh with cellulitis (swelling and inflammation of the leg) but — although he did not know it yet — he had also developed life-threatening sepsis. ‘I felt as if my body was spiralling out of control; as if everything was breaking down,’ he says. Craig was hooked up to an intravenous antibiotic drip in an acute ward. Fiona was at his bedside until late that evening. She and Robert stayed with her parents a 50 - minute drive away in Stenhousemuir, as she was due to attend a GPs’ course nearby.
Next evening — on Friday — Fiona visited Craig again: it was the last time he saw her conscious. ‘She said: “I feel a bit tired, so I’ll drive back to Mum and Dad’s and have a rest,” and she gave a little shiver,’ he says.
That evening, however, Fiona was admitted to Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert, with symptoms similar to Craig’s. She had a form of streptococcal i nfection, and — although she hadn’t caught it from Craig, as the condition isn’t contagious — she too developed sepsis.
The first intimation that his life was unravelling reached Craig at 11.30 that night, when the hospital called to tell him his daughter had died in the womb. He was still reeling from shock at the news when a second call came: Fiona was very unwell.
‘I said: “I have to be with her.” But the doctors told me I was too ill to leave my hospital bed.’
Later that night, Craig learned that Fiona was critically ill, and this time he was permitted to see her. ‘I knew it must be extremely grave,’ he says. ‘The doctors would not have changed their minds about my going to see her unless she was nearing death.’
The scene that greeted him was unimaginably awful. Fiona was unconscious, and doctors had decided to deliver her baby — the baby they knew was already dead — naturally, rather than by Caesarian.
‘It was ghastly to see her hooked up to every hospital machine imaginable and in such distress,’ he says, ‘yet 12 hours before she’d been fine.
‘I sat with her and told her I loved her. I tried to reassure her. I held her hand. Although she was unconscious I knew she would hear me. I was
thinking: “My God, how has this happened?” I felt this weird combination of numbness, shock and bewilderment — and I was still very ill myself.’
Craig held his still born daughter. ‘ She was absolutely beautiful: 5lb 3oz and perfectly viable, with a mop of black hair and a button nose like her brother, but she had died of sepsis.
‘It was like some ghastly pastiche of what should be: you’re holding this bonny wee thing and she’s still. I just willed her to move. But she didn’t. I completely broke down and sobbed.
‘It was, at that point, the worst moment in my life. I really was in hell, but the next 18 hours became no better.
‘They asked me if I had a name for our daughter and I said Isla Elspeth Elizabeth. Fiona had chosen Isla and the others were our mums’ names.’
Craig was still being treated with regular intravenous antibiotics, but as his condition improved Fiona — her immune system lowered by pregnancy — deteriorated catastrophically. ‘She was unstable and critical,’ he says. ‘She was on dialysis and had been given 56 units of blood, but it wouldn’t clot, which is a symptom of sepsis.
‘It was awful. They did their best but nothing was working. And I was begging her, willing her, to get better: for Robert, for herself, for me,’ he says. ‘But I knew she was just a footstep from death.’ Fiona died, aged 38, in the early hours of Sunday, and Craig struggled to make sense of what had happened.
He learned from a consultant that he, Fiona and Isla were victims of sepsis, which kills 37,000 people in the UK each year.
Since then, he has campaigned to raise funds to fight the disease and has set up a charity, Fiona Elizabeth Agnew Trust, in his wife’s name.
Meanwhile, there was Robert, unaware of the disaster that had changed his life irrevocably, and too young to grasp its implications.
‘All the routine in Robert’s life had been destroyed and I knew just the bare bones of how to look after a toddler,’ says Craig. ‘I’d been a modern dad. I’d changed nappies. I’d got up to share the night feed. But I’d only spent two full days on my own looking after him. And now I was on my own.
‘I had to train myself to stop panicking and thinking: “How on earth will I cope?” I had to learn to get through minute by minute.’ Craig recovered physically, and moved with his son from Edinburgh to rural Perthshire.
He gave up his full-time job and began working, three days a week, as a self- employed tax consultant. Robert now attends a nursery part-time and Craig i s caring f or his l i ttle son with the help of his mum Liz, a childminder. ‘Robert is the reason I keep going,’ he says. ‘His welfare is central; it’s what his mum would have expected. It’s heartbreaking that he’ll never know her and she won’t be there to mark his milestones.
SOMETIMES the lack of her feels like a physical void, and I find myself talking out loud to her. If something’s perplexing me — like when Robert went through a phase of having silent tantrums; he’d lie down and refuse to move — I’d ask: “What do I do about this, Fi?”
‘Fiona was just lovely: caring, kind, and Robert is a caring wee soul too. He’s bright l i ke his mummy and a little charmer, and he soaks up everything in the world around him. He loves kicking and throwing a ball and getting mucky. He’s started to count. He recognises letters.
‘Fiona is buried at a cemetery in Edinburgh so, in time, Robert will be able to visit her grave. We’ve had a service of thanksgiving. I told him: “We’re going to sing songs for Mummy,” and he joined in Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. He pointed at the photo of Fiona, too, and said: “Mummy.” ’
Robert is almost four now, and one day soon Craig will have to try to explain to him the unfathomable mystery of death. There may be questions, too, about the little sister he never saw; but they have not come yet.
‘One day, I know, he’ll ask where his mummy has gone; he’ll grasp the concept that other children have mummies, and I know he’s on the cusp of that. So I’ll try to prepare as best I can. I’ll explain that she was ill, that she died, and I’ll say: “Some people believe Mummy’s in Heaven”.’
Meanwhile, Craig — stoic, levelheaded and pragmatic as he is — also grapples with the great metaphysical questions that perplex us all. And when he does so, he finds solace in his love of astronomy.
‘I look at the stars and it strikes me that the universe is not without purpose,’ he says, ‘but I’m just too small to understand what it is. I’m not religious, but I am spiritual and I do feel comfort and hope.
‘I think in some way shape or form we will see Fiona and Isla again. If I’m wrong, I’ll never know. And if I’m right I’ll be very happy indeed.’