Jamie’s Mum

Jamie’s mum sits next to us on our flight from the UK to Egypt. She’s 68, looks mid-50s, did facials for Olivier and Richard Harris, still rides a motorbike and is loving her retirement.

“Have you been to Dahab before?” she asks.

“Not for about ten years,” I say, nodding at Z, who’s absorbed in a Horrible History next to me. “He was a toddler then. It’ll be interesting to see how it’s changed. How about you?”

“Oh,” she says. “I go every year. I’ve been going for the last eighteen years.”

“Cool!” I say. “Do you dive?”

“Not really,” she says. “I punctured a lung. I did it once, but it’s not for me.”

We chat a bit about places to stay, and where to go. There’s a camp where she stayed with her son, Jamie, when he was a little boy, and she was a single mum. And a dive store where he worked until…

Well, until…

“Jamie died, you see,” she says. “In 2003. When he was 24. He’d done all his certificates, was just finishing off the last one – he was going to be a Course Director, one of the youngest ever – but he always liked to push his limits. And he went down into the Blue Hole, with some Russians, and he just went down too deep.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say.

There’s a short, awkward silence of the sort she must have become horribly used to.

“How deep did he go?” I ask. The Blue Hole isn’t a dangerous dive, at least not for grommets like me, but there’s an arch at 50m-100m below the sea which is a magnet for technical divers, folk with the gas mix and the skills to go that deep, that has drawn many of them to their deaths.

“Oh, he always liked to go deep,” she says. “100 metres, I think.”

I look over at my only son. “Was he your only child?”

“Yes,” she says. “Is he yours?”

“Yes,” I say.

It’s a difficult thing to explain to non-parents, this, and you don’t really know it, because you can’t feel it, until you’ve had your first child. But there is absolutely nothing worse that can happen to you in all your life once you’re a parent than losing your child. Rape. Torture. Paraplegia. Your own death. You would undergo all these in a heartbeat just for your child to survive. Jump into a pit of cobras without hesitation to buy them even one more year.

And when it’s your only child, and they have no children, it’s worse because there are no more children to carry on for, and there will be no more children. Never.

“So it’s a pilgrimage,” I say, and regret the phrase as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

“I see his friends,” she says. “His best friend, who he was living with, is still there in the same house. His girlfriend… Well. She’s Swiss, she has her own business, as a ski instructor. And they were going to – well, he’d teach her his things, she’d teach her his, and they’d go into business together… Hard to tell if it would have worked…”

“I guess,” I say, a cloud of lost potential and vanished futures hanging in the dry airline air. “They were both so young.”

“We’re still in touch,” she says. “She almost married a year or so ago. But it didn’t work out.”

She shows me the picture in her purse. He’s about Z’s age. Neat school haircut, big ‘say cheese’ grin over the regulation uniform white shirt. A goodlooking kid who grew into a goodlooking man, and then…

Everyone still remembers Jamie in Dahab, she says. She has friends there now. Not just his friends, but the guy from the diving chamber who helped her out at first – it’s a difficult thing a diving death, because with no body, there’s no death certificate, and almost ten years on he’s still listed as missing at sea.

“You should meet him,” she says. “He can give you the inside story on the shark attacks in Sharm.”

He was popular at school, Jamie. Almost two hundred boys came to see his empty casket buried. Didn’t go to college – he’d thought about sport science but by the time he dropped into the Blue Hole for the last time he’d got the equivalent of a degree in any case.

Some might think it’s morbid, this annual pilgrimage to the place where her son died, the virtual equivalent of a fortnight putting flowers on his grave. But I’m not sure it is. She sees his friends, stays with some of them, and makes new friends. She goes on holiday to the place where her son lived and thrived and was happy, and is happy, at home and at peace, and keeps his memory alive.

“How do you ever get over it, though?” I ask her.

It’s not rhetorical – I genuinely want to know. In case — and I don’t even want to write this — but in case it ever happens to me.

“Well, you cry a lot at first, of course,” she says (she’s of the generation that still lives up to our British stereotype for understatement). “But I have an interesting job. I know lots of interesting, intellectual people. And that helps. It helps you get through it.”

And the time she dived? With her son, of course, in these self-same waters where he died, but 200 feet or so higher.

“He had to hold my hand all the way through,” she says, smiling. “I had to do these hand signs.” She makes a questioning thumbs up.

“That’s right,” I say. “Thumb up to go up, thumb down to go down.”

She waves her hand from side to side then curls her thumb and forefinger, extends the middle one. “And this for ‘Are you alright?’”

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes, ‘Yes, I’m fine,’” she says. “That means, ‘Yes, I’m fine.’”

“Yes,” I say. Yes, you’re doing fine. Yes, it does mean ‘I’m doing fine’.

Jamie’s mum gives us a lift from the airport with her friends, and tells me the name of the camp where they used to stay, when Jamie was a little boy with a whole long life ahead of him, loving his books and computer games.

“I took him on a cruise once,” she says. “And all he wanted to do was stay in this little room with the games. And I thought, ‘There I am spending all this money, and you just want to play these games…’”

“We trekked for days through the jungle to meet hunter-gathering nomads,” I say. “And when we were walking out, he said, ‘About that game on Kongregate…’”

Jamie’s dad wasn’t around that much when he was little – a rock ‘n’ roll lyricist, he took the 60s lifestyle a step or so too far. But he put up a plaque to him on the rock by the Blue Hole. It says: “Don’t let fear stand in the way of your dreams.”

It’s as good an epitaph as any, I think. And we’ll find her around town over the next week. Just go to the dive store where he worked, and leave a message for Jamie’s mum.

22 Responses

  1. Gappy says:

    God it’s unthinkable isn’t it. What a sad post. Oddly optimistic too though.

  2. oh my gosh. what beautiful, powerful writing. and yes, that is something i think about every single day.

  3. MaryAnne says:

    You’re making me cry. At 8am on a Sunday. Just weeks after we came back from that stressful week of rough diving off the coast of Thailand. Remember when I posted that post about my diving there? My mother called and quietly suggested I maybe ask Doug to get a new hobby for me to tag along to…Macrame, maybe. Or bird watch.

    I can’t even begin to fathom how stressful it must be to worry about your children when they’re at impossible depths under the water– and then if they never come back up. Awful.

    • Theodora says:

      I cried writing it, MaryAnne. I carefully emphasised the general ease of diving round here for my parents’ sake, given they’ll have a) a child and b) a grandchild going down in these waters…

  4. My husband died suddenly when I had five small children. (One was on the way.) The only thing that gave me nightmares was the thought of losing one of my children. That was the thing I didn’t think I could get through.

    • Theodora says:

      Oh Jesus, that must have been hell on earth, Kate. But then people do get through it. God only knows how.

  5. Phil says:

    Sad, beautiful and somehow uplifting post, Theo. Incredible what can happen in the span of a random conversation.

    • Theodora says:

      Well, she clearly saw something in us on the plane, I guess. And plane conversations can be fascinating. Been having a lot of interesting chats with people about the future here, too.

  6. Katrina says:

    Touching, sad, but beautifully written, as always. Thanks for talking about one of the things that is hard to face.

  7. ailsa says:

    Beautiful but devastating, it is truly the worst thing in the world.

  8. Heartbreaking, and beautiful. This must have been difficult to write.

  9. Catherine says:

    How awfully sad but agree with the others that it is beautifully written.

  10. Louisa says:

    I saw Jamie’s plaque today, as I dived the Blue Hole site for the 3rd time, twice in this week. The plaques are personal and there is nothing to say what happened or who the person was. Having watched a diver die this week, all we could think of was her parents, so this post struck a chord with me. I am not a parent, so I can never imagine the worry or the potential devastioof losing a child… Beautifully written and Jamie’s mum is indeed an inspiration to us all…

    • Theodora says:

      Oh god, Louisa. So many people die at the Blue Hole, it’s untrue. A friend of mine was in the hospital for one single weekend: saw two bodies brought in. As I’m sure you know, one problem is the journey time to the deco chamber — it’s doable if you’re only mildly bent, but obviously not for most cases. And, of course, the numbers are kept extremely quiet.

      How awful to actually watch it happen.

  11. Heather Warby-Cooper says:

    Hello, James was one of my closest friends when lived in Hurgada, and his mother and I spent some wonderful time together. I had moved back to Australia when Jamie died, and I have searched the Internet regularly to try to find some way to contact her and speak with her. His death still devastates me. She used to have a beauty or hairdressing shop in Mayfair or Park Lane or somewhere like that, I have searched to no avail. Please, please if you could pass my details on to her. She came to visit me in hospital in El Gouna when my first son Adel was born, tell her I am Dodi’s wife (ex now) from Divers Lodge in Hurgada. I still remember Simba and James going everywhere together, even sleeping in the same bed. Please, if you have any contact details for her, can you please let her know Heather is looking for her xxxx

    • Theodora says:

      I don’t have current contact details for her, I’m sorry, Heather, but I know she goes to visit the folk at Fish and Friends in Dahab – so they could probably help you out. Their url is here – http://www.fishandfriendsdahab.com/. He was well-loved around Dahab, as well. Lots of people still remember him there. She also has friends in Sharm, but I can’t remember their names, let alone their contact details.