A father's words of loss

22 July 2014 - 02:00 By Helen Brown, © The Daily Telegraph
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After Thomas Harding's 14-year-old son, Kadian, died in a cycling accident on a sunny day in 2012, he became enraged by the phrase "There are no words".

It was said by people doing their best to reach out and avoid exactly the offence they were causing. But for Harding, there are "so many words . Like 'Our world is broken', or 'How is it possible to keep on living?', or 'Kadian was the most beautiful boy', or ''Why the f*** is this happening to us?'."

Confronting every parent's worst fear, the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf: the German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (2013) found a channel of survival in words. First he began writing poems that came straight from his animal brain. "I feel like I'm a tuning fork/ Vibrating after someone has hit me/ And I can't stop shaking." He began posting the poems on Facebook and friends told him to "keep them coming". He kept writing and his "brain dump" became this book: a heartbreaking record of a beautiful boy and the first stages of a father's grief.

Like Harding's thoughts, the book flickers between the accident and its aftermath and memories of his son's life. Bikes were always an integral part of the family. Harding met his wife, Deb, when they took part in Bike Aid, a coast-to-coast charity ride across the US, in 1987.

In the gently sloping lane behind their rural Oxfordshire home, they removed the stabilisers from their son's turquoise bike when he was four. Black plastic knee-guards were pulled up over his brown corduroy trousers. Harding recalls the child's delight as he wobbled, straightened and gathered speed: "I'm doing it, I'm doing it!"

At the time of Kadian's death, Deb was the chief executive of a bicycle business.

But it was a bike that failed them. Although Kadian had taken his bike to have its brakes repaired on the day of the accident, he was unable to stop as he sped down a hill into the path of a van and was killed instantly, 30m ahead of his father. By the time Harding got there, his son looked vacant. Like a much younger child. "My brain is observing, detached, helplessly trying to catch up," he writes. "Time has ended. There is only this moment, this spot."

As Harding sinks into grief, that spot becomes a dark well. Deb orders books on bereavement, but the self-help assumption that the sudden loss of a son is something from which you can "recover" does not speak to Harding. It feels disloyal. He tears up the most offensive books and dumps them in the woodshed behind the family home. He becomes "an expert in hugs" and "an aficionado of grief expressions" as people grapple to help or cross the street. A local tradesman is incredibly sensitive in fixing the bag Kadian made for his sister: no charge. We should all remember that little things matter.

Harding takes advice from a neighbour who lost a child. This man tells him that the hurt will not subside, so he must "accommodate it". Harding can work with this. It feels right. He can grow around his loss "like a tree grows roots around a cold, inert boulder".

For a man in such raw, intense pain, Harding writes with remarkable precision. He frets that his book does not do his son justice. But though I cried and shook as I read it, I also felt Kadian Harding's 14 years shine brilliantly from its pages. I felt his love of dolphins and chocolate and Apple products. I felt his quirky humour and his bravery in the face of school bullies. I felt his love for his parents and sister. Thomas Harding has been generous in sharing his boy with me and I am grateful he found words. Although everybody grieves differently, I hope his words help others to find the right words for themselves. And, as he advises us to say, I am sorry for his loss.

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