Our daughter,
Nicky, died a month before her 19th birthday in February 2006.
She died suddenly and unexpectedly whilst watching an episode of “Friends”
with one of her housemates in the house that she shared with four students.
Despite the
best efforts of everybody - the housemates, paramedics and doctor - Nicky
was pronounced dead shortly after I arrived at the house to be with her.
The cause of
death was dilated cardiomyopathy. She was asymptomatic and when my husband
and I saw her earlier on the day she died, she was full of zest for life,
talking non-stop about her job, friends, university and plans for the
following academic year after she finished her Art Foundation course.
With hindsight,
the only hint of something amiss was that she mentioned she felt tired and
looked pale, but like many students she burned the candle at both ends so
there was nothing alarming about that.
Three and a
half years on, we are all still missing her. My husband, our other two
daughters and I have all had different experiences of the grief that losing
such a precious person brings.
Nicky
painted some beautiful pictures. This one (left) is called “Blank
Canvas”. It is one of a series of four paintings that she produced for
her Art A-level, for which she got a grade A. We called it Blank Canvas
because she was longing to have a tattoo and she described her body as a
blank canvas waiting for the tattoos to be drawn upon it.