Seeing Tom for the first time
I have no recollection of walking up the stairs of the Soroka hospital in Beersheva, Israel, where Tom had been taken. It was four days since he had been shot in Rafah in the southern Gaza strip. The director had told me that he had a ‘very, very serious head wound‘, a gunshot wound, and that the bullet had entered the left frontal lobe and exited at the back. I have only a dim memory of benches along a wall on which Arab men in white robes were sitting, smoking, and of stepping over sleeping bodies in what seemed like a waiting room. I did not know then that these people had come from all over Israel to be with Tom.
Tom, I don‘t think I breathed as I walked down the intensive care ward, past the semi-enclosed beds of the very sick. There were sounds but no sounds, smells but no smells. I approached your bed and recognised your face in spite of the bandages that were wrapped round your dreadfully swollen head and covered your eyes. A wide orange neck brace came up over your chin. You were still bleeding from your left ear. There were cuts on your nose and hands where you must have fallen. Your hands and feet were terribly swollen.
This was you, and yet it was not you. I was too frightened to touch you for fear of hurting you. Unable to whisper for the choking in my throat. I knew I could not reach you, however many times I called your name.
At that moment, life stopped for a part of me, as it had for you. My heart reached out to you, and I broke down. I was filled with terror at your absolute fragility and your uncertain future. I could not even pray.
I don‘t know how long I stood gazing down at my son in total disbelief. It was as if time had stopped, and the past, Tom‘s past, our past, had disappeared, to be replaced by a colourless space. A veil seemed to stretch round him on this bed, blocking out everything else. This was the centre of our existence now, nothing else mattered.
We sought answers to many questions. Was there any possibility of improvement for Tom? Had he any awareness of his surroundings? Did he feel pain? A doctor explained that they had carried out a Glasgow Coma Scale Assessment, which is used in traumatic brain injury to monitor the patient‘s level of consciousness. Eye, verbal and motor responses are tested on a scale from three to 15, anything below eight indicating a severe brain injury, and three being the worst, denoting that nothing more than the main organs were working. Tom was on three.
Meeting the boy Tom saved
When he was shot, Tom was trying to rescue a little boy from Israeli gunfire. On our visit to Rafah to see the place where Tom had been hit, I asked if I could meet this child. His name was Salem Baroum. Someone went off to find him and minutes later he appeared, led by a woman I took to be his mother. Clearly she knew who I was, and the interpreter told me she wished to thank me. ‘She weeps with you,‘ he said, ‘that you have lost your brave son who saved her son. She prays with you. She knows that it is only because of your son that her son is alive.‘
Little Salem hung back, withdrawn, behind his mother. He was a handsome, serious-looking child of about five. He was completely silent, utterly traumatised, I was told, by the shooting. He had not spoken since the previous Friday. I smiled at him and knelt down, taking his hand, speaking quietly to him, hoping the sound of my voice might reassure him. He stood mute and rigid, gazing at me. On an impulse I put my arms round him and lifted him up. When there was a flash of cameras, it alarmed us both, and I felt his body tauten. Perhaps it wasn‘t the right thing to do, but I was overcome by the thought that this was the last human being to touch Tom before he was shot.
The women came closer but the men stayed on the edge of the group eyeing me warily, even with a kind of cynicism. Whatever they were feeling, I didn‘t blame them. These incidents, I now realised, were a daily occurrence for them. How different was our life experience, how different the backdrop to our own personal loss. But from the women I sensed empathy, solidarity. It made me feel guilty - it seemed the wrong way round. They wanted to talk, to tell me their stories through the interpreter. I learned of a son killed on the way to the supermarket. Another shot through a misted window as he took a drink of water. A mother shot as she hung out the washing to dry on the roof. An engineer picked off as he tried to mend a rooftop water tank riddled with bullet holes, which was the family‘s only source of water. These were some of the multitude of stories held within these shattered streets, within their homes, their families, only reaching the world occasionally through the reports of courageous foreign correspondents: days and nights of loss, intimidation, humiliation and destruction.
The flight home
The flight home was another ordeal. A small section at the back of the plane had been divided off with a tiny, flimsy curtain, the backs and arms of several rows of seats had been lowered and Tom‘s stretcher had been laid precariously across them. Anybody walking down the central aisle could look over and see him. Clearly the Israeli government had wanted to keep its ‘goodwill payment‘ for Tom‘s flight as low as possible.
Anthony, Tom‘s father, and I sat next to Tom on one side, and the anaesthetist and the nurse sat close to him on the other, continually monitoring him. I was rigid with tension as we took off, knowing that this was a dangerous moment for Tom, and even when we reached cruising altitude I couldn‘t relax. From time to time I went round to check with the medical staff that all was well, desperately needing reassurance. People walked up and down the aisle, peering over at us with undisguised curiosity. I felt we were a sort of show. It was a raw and shocking experience.
Goodbye to my son
Back in London, Tom was transferred from the Royal Free hospital in north London to the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability in south-west London. It had once been called the Royal Hospital for Incurables. It was now nine months after Tom had been shot and we could see that he was growing weaker. He had developed pneumonia and his breathing was laboured and shallow, however many times his chest was cleared. The morphine was having less and less effect, and he shifted restlessly as if in pain. I sensed as I sat beside him that he had now entered a shadowland, a place nearer to death than to life. I longed for Tom to be free of all this horror, but I could not imagine a world in which he was not physically there, in which I could not see him and touch him. All the manifestations of his physical being seemed so precious now - the T-shirts and tracksuits piled up neatly on the shelves, his toothbrush, his shampoo, the small possessions we had brought with him to the hospital.
On January 12 2004, Anthony and I were both with him in the afternoon. Anthony was standing beside the bed and I was sitting with my hand beneath Tom‘s arm when I felt a kind of energy in his body, and something changed in his face, which was illuminated almost with a look of recognition. Anthony saw it too. It was as if, with an enormous effort of will, Tom was summoning up all the last energy he had to be with us. Though his eyes were unable to focus, I had the sense that he was looking down at me as I sat in the chair beside him. I do believe - perhaps I want to believe - that at some level there was recognition.
That evening when we got home there was a message from the Foreign Office to say that the soldier who had been arrested for Tom‘s shooting had been charged with aggravated assault. He was also being charged with obstruction of justice for shooting Tom and then seeking permission from his commander to kill him on the grounds that he was carrying a gun. A second soldier was under arrest for allegedly corroborating his account.
Next day, January 13, was my birthday, and I went to the hospital early. Anthony had been there through the night. I leaned over the bed and put my face beside Tom‘s on the pillow so that I could hear the beating of his heart, feel the quick rise and fall of his breathing. How often I had soothed him like this when he was a small child, unable to sleep. I told him about the soldier, and I promised him that we would make sure justice was done, that we would hold the army‘s chain of command to account. I told him that all his suffering had not been in vain and that what he had done had touched and inspired people across the world. I told him what a good person he was. And again and again I told him how proud we were of him and how much we loved him.
By late afternoon I sensed that Tom had reached some turning point, and I knew that I must tell Father Hubert, our local parish priest. When I phoned him he was about to say Mass, but he put everything aside and at 5.30pm he came. He began the prayers of the departing, and made the sign of the cross with oil on Tom‘s forehead, beside the livid wound. His beautiful, enduring words were like a bell gently tolling in celebration of Tom‘s life. I stood looking down at his dear face, so closed now, so remote, and felt a deep thankfulness for the 22 years we had had him with us. And such pain as I have never felt before or since, and such loneliness.
It was dark when Father Hubert left. I walked with him to the main entrance, and we stood silently with my hands in his before he disappeared into the night.
I walked back along the quiet corridor. The canteen was closed, but I sat down in it and took out my mobile phone. There were people I felt I should send messages to - people who needed to know that Tom would not be with us long. I was just starting when the phone rang. It was one of Tom‘s nurses. Almost without hearing what she was saying I picked up my things and fled up the stairs and along the corridor towards Tom‘s room. The nurses were standing round his bed. I flung my coat on the floor and ran towards Tom. Someone put a hand on my arm, and I heard someone else say: ‘He‘s gone.‘
I stood looking down at my dead child. And I knew that I was also looking at a young man who had lived a worthwhile life, and whose heart had been in a good place. Whatever his human frailties Tom had essentially been a deeply good person, a courageous person who had risked himself for others, and who had made a difference. And all I could say was, ‘Well, done, Tom. Well done.‘ Over and over I kept repeating it as I held him. ‘Well done, darling, well done.‘
The nurses must have wondered why I was saying it but I couldn‘t explain. It was because of this. When I had been going through Tom‘s things I had found a folder labelled ‘Memories‘, and some small, folded bits of paper had fallen out. On one was written: ‘When my mother says, ‘Well done‘.‘ It took my breath away, that sharp reminder that everything you say and don‘t say as a mother means something. ‘Well, done, Tom. Well done,‘ I said, again and again and again.
· Extracted from Defy the Stars by Jocelyn Hurndall, published next month by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p call 0870 836 0875