Do you remember where you were when the Twin Towers came down? I imagine most of us over 40 years of age will. I was on an Arrow leadership conference in Melbourne and I was sharing a room with a really nice guy who was a terrible snorer. Every night was near impossible to sleep as he started to rattle & snort – until the night he didn’t come back to the room until the early hours of the morning. He told me that a few of them had been watching the drama unfold in real time and clearly it was big news.

Twin Towers – Melbourne – Arrow conference

Princess Diana – I was leading a church meeting in our lounge room when the news came in.

Aussie Boomers win a bronze medal… (yeah that was big) I was in the Kirra Caravan Park hooting and hollering like a man possessed.

Sam dies – a non-descript piece of gravel verge about 10kms out of Busselton.

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I was ambling thru K Mart when I saw Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks on the rack. Discovering it was a memoir for her husband who had died suddenly of a heart attack, I skimmed it and then decided instead to ‘audiobook’ it. (So that was the end of another month of my free allowance with Spotify…)

Brooks finished by stating that there is healing in re-telling a story – that the simple process of recounting events, facts, conversations, small details aids the healing process. I had already begun the post below – and I was feeling some of that. So if you have the stomach for it I am going to go back in time almost 12 months to the day Sam died and the moments immediately after we discovered this news. If not then this is your ‘trigger warning’ to stop scrolling now.

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It was a sunny afternoon in Busselton and I had just finished speaking at the Pingelly Baptist Church Camp. We had eaten lunch with the tribe from the church and strolled back to our campsite. It was a fun weekend and it was also ‘job done’ and time to relax.

I was evaluating options – surf, cycle or just take a nap in the caravan?

I had dropped down to the next campsite to check out the caravan I was going to work on the next day. By coincidence I had snagged a job installing a diesel heater while in town – meaning the time was profitable as well as enjoyable.

I decided on a quick visit to the toilet before cycling – the sheer crowds I knew I’d face when surfing was inevitably going to disappoint. So I chose something a little more controllable. As I walked up the grass to the campsite toilets my phone rang – it was the work line – so immediately I declined the call. Why do people call on Sundays?…

However having completed the wordle in record time and still on the toilet I decided to check the voicemail that had been left to see what was so important it couldn’t wait until Monday. As I did my stomach tightened. It was Cosi, Sam’s partner and she sounded panicked. I As best I remember she said something like this:

‘Hamo – this is Cosi, as in Cosi, your son Sam’s partner. He’s not breathing and we are waiting on the helicopter to come and rescue. Start driving to Mandurah now!’

I’m not one to panic. So l listened to it again and then strolled back to the caravan to let Danelle know there might be an issue with Sam and Cosi. We knew they had taken their kayak a few kms offshore to a spot in Dawesville where they were going free-diving. They had become very proficient at this and the photos of large fish that appeared frequently on Insta feeds were clear evidence of their growing skills in this new found passion.

When I arrived at the caravan Danelle was already a little anxious as Cosi’s mum had rung to let us know their epirb had gone off. Clearly something was up…

I played the voicemail to her and her face went white. Her anxiety meter was pinging off the chart and we had to make a quick decision as to what we would do – just start driving or pack up the caravan and then drive. In the end we figured we would just come back to Busselton once we had sorted out whatever the issue was.

But the ‘problem’ at hand seemed to be rapidly magnifying in gravity.

With the little information we had we jumped in the Ranger and headed north out of Busselton, praying, begging God for Sam’s safe full recovery, hoping and waiting for more information. The car was silent except for the prayers.

Then when we were about 10km out of Busselton, Danelle’s phone rang again. It was C, Cosi’s dad who had drawn the short straw and needed to pass on the terrible news. I was driving, but my insides were rattling with nervous energy as I waited to hear what C was ringing to tell us. He was going to tell us that they had revived Sam, all was well and we could turn around and go back to a lazy afternoon. Right? That’s how these things turn out…

It was only a spilt second before I realised what the news actually was. Danelle was yelling – screaming ‘NO NO NO this can’t be true!!’ And I was hoping against hope that what I was witnessing wasn’t what I thought it could be. For a moment I kept driving, refusing to believe and hoping for a change in her demeanour. Thru her rage she just waved at me to pull over to the side of the road. I did and she passed the phone to me. My stomach sank.

‘I’m so sorry Andrew,’ C said.

I had nothing in that moment. I live on a pretty even keel emotionally, I don’t panic… but my son had died, my wife was frantic. I was bewildered and devastated in a way I had never experienced before. I had no learned response to a situation like this, so I thanked C for calling and hung up.

We sat in each others arms on the side of the road for a few minutes, crying, railing, asking ‘why? how?…’ Somehow we were trying to process this unfixable new reality. This news that had in a split second shattered us. Our dearly loved boy had died and our life that had been so beautiful and joyful was suddenly ransacked and destroyed.

March 24th – 1.30pm we got the news. It was on a piece of gravel 10kms out of Busso. I doubt I will ever forget.

My google timeline marks the spot where we stopped. I have driven past it once since then and had chills as I remember the moment.

Of course the immediate question was ‘What now?’ What do you do when your son has died? While your emotions are exploding in all directions you still need to pause and make some decisions. Suddenly there are a thousand decisions to make and you are in no fit state to make them.

What of the diesel heater I was due to fit tomorrow? That’s a dumb thought I know – but how do you call someone and tell them your son has died and you won’t be there?…

And what about Ellie who was on day one of a surf trip down the east coast? She was surfing Noosa when we found out. We just can’t tell her this over the phone… How do we get someone to her?

What about the caravan? Do we pack up and head back. Do we just keep driving and leave it there?

On that same Sunday, Margaret River Baptist Church voted us into an interim pastoral role to begin later that year. Suddenly we just didn’t care about pastoring any more.

Who do we start telling this terrible news? And how?…

A barrage of practical questions were charging at us.

So we made one decision. ‘Let’s go back to the campsite, pack up the caravan and head for Mandurah where the water police would be bringing Sam’s body in.’

Sam’s body… you don’t think of your son as a ‘body‘, until he is dead. We weren’t going to see Sam – we were going to see his ‘body’. Sam was gone…

So we turned the car around and headed back to our campsite.

‘This is really happening to us…’ I found myself muttering. We are ‘those poor people’…

We remembered a conversation with Sam in the kitchen a couple of weeks previous where he had returned from a dive and spoke of getting a ‘fuzzy head’ while he was out there. He was teetering on shallow water black out.

‘Please promise me you won’t do this again …’ Danelle & Ellie pleaded. ‘Imagine us if you died...’ Literally… those words… that exact conversation. Sam had scared Ellie a few weeks prior, while diving at Cowaramup and then again at Mettams. He had disappeared under water for a very long time – on his own – Ellie had begun to panic. Sam had been pushing the limits, a very 21 year old thing to do, but in an activity where the margin for error was zero. He had been playing with fire and getting away with it.

We slowly packed up the caravan, trying to make sure we didn’t forget anything important in the fug that was now our reality. Then began the drive to Mandurah and the phone calls to relatives and friends.

How do you let someone know that your son has died? How do you give that news in any kind of gentle way. It just isn’t possible…

‘Hi S – hey some really bad news mate… Sam has died in a freediving accident. We don’t know all of the details but we are heading to Mandurah to find out more.’ It’s not the news you want to get in the middle of Adelaide airport, but where is a good place to give that news? Forever Adelaide airport will feel different for S & C.

Our top priority was to somehow get someone to Ellie and make sure she had a kind, loving human presence to care for her. Danelle let J know and she immediately booked the first flight to the Gold coast as well as flights back to Perth for her and Ellie. She was going to get to Ellie as fast she could. Meantime we called G & H, two close friends who live around the NSW border. It was a 3 hour drive for them to get to her, but they are dearly loved and trusted friends. They hit the road straight away. Friends just do that kind of stuff. Somehow we were going to get someone to her, but we had to make sure she didn’t get the news any other way beforehand.

We called other close friends and relayed the news. What can you say to news like this? There is nothing that could ever prepare any of us for the death of one of our kids. We asked A & S to meet us at the marina where Sam’s body would be brought. They had been young people in our youth ministry and we were their pastors. On this day they were going to be our pastors – people we knew without doubt we could trust with our lives in a time like this. They would meet us and somehow walk with us thru those first moments of intense, incomprehensible darkness.

I called my brother who felt it deeply. I could tell he was lost for anything to say. Our already very small family had lost a member – his nephew had died. He was deeply shocked.

Then in the middle of our calling others, my phone rang and it was Ellie on the other end. We hadn’t spoken to her. Had someone else already leaked the news to her? What if she knew and I declined her call? Do we take her call or decline it? This was our split second decision… we had to choose, so I hit the green button and waited for her voice.

‘Hi honey, how are you going?’ I asked.

‘Really good!’ she said cheerily. ‘Just had a cool surf at Noosa and now I’m back at the caravan park all set up in my campervan. How are things with you guys?’

How on earth do you answer that? I knew I couldn’t fudge a conversation in this headspace so I just figured I’d cut to the chase.

‘Honey I have some really bad news – the worst news.’ I took a breath. ‘Sam has died in a free-diving accident. I’m so sorry to tell you like this.’

Ellie erupted into every kind of terror and rage you can imagine. She had already told us that the worst thing that could ever happen to her would be losing Sam. These two had the most beautiful friendship. And here we were giving her this news over the phone while she sat on her own in a small campervan on the other side of the country. It couldn’t have been any worse.

We were now about halfway to the marina. We didn’t call anyone else and just kept talking with Ellie, all of us utterly torn apart by this news. I remembered speaking at church two weeks previous on the subject of idolatry – the final verse of 1 John. ‘Dear children keep yourselves from idols‘ In listing potential 21st C idols I spoke of ‘family’ and how we so often worship at the altar of our children. ‘I’m not sure how I’d ever cope if one of my kids died’, I said… i meant it – I really couldn’t imagine how that would impact my life – our family’s life.

But we were finding out in real time. We couldn’t get to Mandurah fast enough – or slow enough. But eventually, in deep dread, we pulled into the carpark and met A & S, Cosi and C & J as well as a small crew of police and rescue crew.

Hugs, tears, disbelief – belief.

We were ushered thru to see Sam lying on a stretcher and covered up to the neck. Two stern faced women held a sheet as if to keep him out of view of others – not that anyone was around. It was a stiff formal moment – and we sensed they wanted us to make it quick – which is so hard when you are in a space like this. It wasn’t a ‘perfunctory identification’ to us. It was a time when we needed to have some freedom to be with him, hold him one last time and cry into his beard. Small bubbles were forming on the side of his mouth. I prayed – a quick desperate prayer – ‘if ever we could use a miracle Jesus then now is that time…’ Nothing happened. What use is the power to raise the dead if you can’t actually do it?

Sam was dead – actually really dead… We weren’t allowed to touch him. He was now ‘evidence’ if there had been any foul play that had caused his death. Look but don’t touch… How!?…

They say it’s good to see ‘the body’ as it helps you confront reality. Maybe that’s true, but it was also the most soul wrenching moment of my life and the sense of hurry up around the moment was very hard to swallow. Poor Cosi had been promised one last time with Sam after we came out, but for some reason I couldn’t comprehend that was rescinded.

In a sidebar of my consciousness were all of the ‘why’ questions, the anger that somehow God hadn’t worked a miracle for our boy. I understand how those questions emerge, but my mind is just too rational to sit in that place for long. For better or worse I couldn’t hang Sam’s death on God – although I couldn’t fathom why he didn’t step in and save him…

From the day it happened I felt like I knew why Sam died. He died because he ran out of air and he thought he was more capable than he actually was. He swam off alone and left his ‘buddy’. In cold terms it was ‘human error’. The very error he had been asked to never stray into by the girls.

It was a stiff, cold farewell, Danelle and I looking at out son on a stretcher while 4 others stood and waited for us to wrap it up. We said goodbye and wandered back out of the gates where Danelle slumped to the ground in a mess of tears and rage, and I went off and filled in the necessary forms for the police – stinking paperwork…

When all the required information had been gathered we were free to go – but go where and do what? Home to unpack the caravan and get ready for the week ahead? I had diesel heater installations booked for Tues, Wed & Thurs. I was glad there was nothing on Monday as I thought ‘I’ll need a good day to just get my bearings.’ Yeah I really thought that.

I wasn’t close to ready for the deluge of pain that was about to descend on us. Strangely enough Tuesday’s job needed to postpone, then Wednesday’s cancelled and Thursdays’ was a new caravan that hadn’t been delivered, so I finished up with an ’empty’ week. Some would say that was God’s providence, but I think it plain old good luck. If God’s providence could see me work-less for a week then he could have gone the extra mile and given Sam a cubic inch more air in his lungs, couldn’t he hey? I think we have a funny way of attributing some stuff to God and not others.

The rest of the day is something of a haze for me. We drove home talking to Ellie most of the way until G & H arrived to meet her. When someone goes the extra mile like this for one of your kids you cannot be thankful enough. J arrived in the Gold Coast or Brisbane – I can’t remember – and went to get Ellie and take her home. She had hit the ground running as soon as she heard. She booked tickets and organised everything – so good – it was one ‘thing’ we didn’t have to stress over and we knew that between G & H and J, Ellie was in the best of care.

A & S came home with us and sat with us for a time. I was all at sea emotionally, but that tends to show up in me looking dazed and distracted. I have no issue with shedding tears, but it just isn’t in my make-up to cry a lot. It’s probably one of the few things I have found myself concerned about over the year – not that I haven’t cried enough – but perhaps that I have been perceived to not care as much because my default response is more stony silence than tears. Danelle couldn’t do much but cry. She was broken and distraught. Her boy was gone – possibly the worst thing that could have ever happened to her had just taken place. Danelle was created to be a mum – and after 8 or 9 painful years of infertility, to have two beautiful kids was everything she had dreamt of. Her life was organised around these two and she nurtured them beautifully. When people tell me I have wonderful children, I will openly say ‘all down to her,’ and mean it. The fact that I am a functioning human being is largely down to her as well. I didn’t bring a full kit of relationship skills to the table when we married, but after 34 years she has helped me grow in such a way that you wouldn’t be aware of what I was like in my early 20’s. (It wasn’t pretty…)

When A & S left we crawled into bed and curled up together for a time. Danelle barely slept. I think I could probably sleep thru the second coming if no one wakes me up, so I nodded off, but woke several times to sudden terror of the new reality we were facing.

The next morning I woke, got my bowl of museli and cup of coffee and went to sit on the couch to pray. It’s my morning ritual and it seemed as good a place as any to start the day. But how do you pray here? For sanity? For understanding? For just the capacity to get thru this single day. I honestly don’t know… I just sat and told him what I was feeling.

Yesterday had been so shocking that I felt like maybe adrenalin had carried us thru to bed time. But now we had another day to face the reality again – and we had a mountain of stuff to do. Family were coming and friends also descended on our home. People we didn’t know were texting and messaging. I had no idea that Sam’s life was going to impact so many people.

Early in the day P rang – a good mate of many years – his voice shaky. ‘Hamo I’m hearing that Sam has died. Is this true?’

‘Yeah it is mate.’ I replied.

I could feel his devastation at our loss. We both wept thru a brief conversation. What can you say in these moments?

Ellie arrived with J after a late night flight. She had barely slept. We just stood and cried together, somehow trying to process that the brightest spark in our family had been extinguished in a heartbeat – or a lack of one.

Texts and messages rolled in as the word spread. I did the obligatory facebook post, using the same photo of Sam that the newspaper used. His shirt was off, he was running across the beach, with his abs rippling… Forever now we would remember Sam in this way – the kid who was born with a six pack… but also with serious intellect, big IQ and EQ… all gone…

Just gone.

And here we are almost one year on. And he’s still gone. A few days after he died I was scrolling thru my phone and in the ‘notes’ app was a note entitled ‘if I die‘. It is some info for the family should I die suddenly, but what stood out to me was the word ‘if’, as if there is another possibility. I have changed it to ‘when I die’, just to recognise the reality of death. And yet somehow as a 60 year old with maybe 20-30 years to live (if all goes well) death feels less like a terrible end and a bit like a doorway to a realm where I will one day see Sam again. And in that thought there is both hope and joy.

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This is my ‘version’ of what happened in that first 24 hours. Danelle will inevitably correct me on the bits I have got wrong, left out or just forgotten. But the detail is all a bit meh in light of the brutal reality of what we experienced. It’s like getting bludgeoned with a sledgehammer and then trying to remember the brand of the hammer.

If you’ve made it this far then it’s probably left you feeling some of the devastation we felt that day and that remains with us to this day. Thanks for sharing the load. There have been many who have genuinely sought us out and cared for us. 12 months really doesn’t feel very far down the road in this journey