THE YOUNGEST OF our four children, Timothy, graduated from Magdalen College School in Oxford, where he had spent the last two years of his schooling after attending state schools, in July 1987. He had been admitted to St Hugh's College, Oxford to read geography, but was allowed to take a gap year, in which he planned to travel. In August, he participated in a cricketing tour of Zimbabwe, and in the later months of the same year, went inter-railing, together with two Australian friends, in several countries of Western Europe. In December, he secured a job at a Gasthof in the ski resort of St Anton, in Austria. Tim was a talented cricketer, sports mad, but he was also a culturally aware, ambitious and personable nineteen-year-old. He was the sort of young person who easily lifted the spirits of those around him.

On 23 December 1987, in clear weather and easy skiing conditions, this experienced young skier inexplicably skied off the snow onto rocks and was killed.

I will not attempt here to describe the long period of grief and radical disorientation that this wrought on his family, his girlfriend and his friends more generally. In the years that followed I was determined that his already remarkable life should not be forgotten, and wrote The Story of Tim, Paul Norbury Publications, 1993 (copies available free from the author: arthur.stockwin@sant.ox.ac.uk).

We learned several lessons from this devastating experience. You do not ‘get over’ such a loss in a mere six months, as a few of our acquaintances seemed to believe. Many people were most kind to us, but in general the average person is not well schooled in dealing with the grief of others. The death of a young person today is far more exceptional than it used to be, and for most people experience of it is lacking. I felt anger, to the point where I was frightened of my own reactions. I found that grief and anger overlap. Such an experience may also – and I am speaking mainly for myself here – radically upend your assumptions of what life is about and how the world is supposed to be ordered.