Memories
The following words were read out at Laura Turner's funeral.
Our Laura
The older brother of a friend of Laura’s recently said: “I liked Laura, she wasn’t a lemming”. How true. She scorned the classic interests of her age group: pop music, fashion, make-up. She had never watched Top of the Pops or read a girls’ magazine. Instead, she loved adventure and fantasy; she devoured fiction; her copies of the Harry Potter books are falling apart and she could recite whole pages off by heart. On television she would endlessly watch taped episodes of “Charmed”, fascinated by the mixture of relationships, mystery and magic.
For any here today who only saw a single aspect of Laura’s life, we will describe the different faces she showed to different people.
In our road, where she had always lived, she was a very familiar sight over the years. She never minded delivering leaflets from the Residents Association, and then went on to deliver the local paper. On her way round she made time for the full range of people from young to old, and would always stop for a chat and smile. The younger children saw her as their friend too, and she and her mate Hannah considered a particular local baby to be their personal property and would knock endlessly at his front door offering to help.
At school, she always offered a friendly listening ear and sensible advice; from her earliest school days she couldn’t bear to see someone unhappy and would try to sort out disputes between friends. She understood loyalty and always kept secrets. Amongst her friends she was witty and funny because she loved words. She would tell us sometimes that funny things to say would bubble up in her mind and out they would come unchecked: her sparring partners will remember that sarcasm was her weapon of choice.
Laura had moved away from the friendships of early childhood in the last year or two. For a while she felt adrift, but she finally found a group of like-minded friends, who were a constant delight and support to her. At the end of holidays and weekends she just wanted to get back to her “mates”. We know that these were her true friends; they are here today. We value the website in her memory that was set up within hours of the news of her death; the condolences of her peers make us cry and laugh.
Laura loved school; it was her natural environment. She revelled in the academic side and pushed herself to do her best. Her favourite subjects were history, geography and science. The science was a recent passion: at the Year 9 parents evening her biology teacher told her that she was good at science – she had considered herself to be only average. It was as if someone had turned the light on. Her enthusiasm was infectious, biology and chemistry in particular fascinated her – she even found the periodic tables interesting.
Laura had tremendous stamina and persistence. Not that she enjoyed sport, far from it, but she would complete a physical task even in adverse circumstances. She would walk, swim or cycle the extra mile without complaint; blisters or other discomfort would not cause her to fall by the wayside. On her Duke of Edinburgh practice walk the group got hopelessly lost and walked twice the planned distance and had to pitch their tents and cook in the dark. Some were tearful, Laura relished the experience and couldn’t wait to do it again. She would undertake tasks at school that some of her classmates shied away from – sheep’s hearts to be dissected in biology and no surgical gloves available? It would be Laura who would be in there getting messy. If a present was needed for family or a special friend, Laura would trawl the shops and internet like a bloodhound until the right thing was found.
At home, she was the usual teenage mixture of wonderful and irritating: offering to cook a meal one moment, fighting with her brother the next. There was sibling rivalry, but with Laura it always had an underlying note of humour. She looked up the meaning of their names in a book and complained frequently: “why does my name mean a green shrub and David’s means darling?” She was secretly pleased that David would go to Heathside, but said “He’s not getting the train home with me - I am not standing on the platform next to a smurf who is TALLER THAN ME! He can catch the bus."
At this point we would like to share a poem by Philip Roth with you. This is not about death, we gave these words to her a year ago to support her through some difficulties, and she pinned it on her noticeboard. It still seems apt.
Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
And let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.
The support of our family, friends and neighbours has sustained and uplifted us, and we would like to thank everyone who has helped us by word, touch and deed. Many people who have not been in our daily lives for several years have written to us with their thoughts and memories about Laura, in her short life she made an impression on many.
We do not accept the loss of our darling girl. There can be no platitudes, nothing makes any sense. That she should be taken from us so cruelly has broken our hearts. We miss the sheer physical presence of her: the thundering feet on the stairs. The messy homework, screwed up tissues and sweet wrappers strewn all over the computer desk. The piles of discarded clothes mixed with clean ones laying around in her room. The empty water glasses spread around the house that she never returned to the kitchen. The sound of her voice saying “love you” as she passed. She was so little in a tall family, when we hugged her our chins rested on the top of her head. She complained endlessly about her height, saying “How will you ever take me seriously when I’m down there”. Her hands and feet were so small that she would lie about her shoe size to her friends.
As well as our terrible grief for the loss of the Laura we knew, we also mourn her lost future. What would she have done and achieved? Where are the As that she was striving for in her GCSEs, and the Duke of Edinburgh Award that she wanted to earn? What other lives would she have touched? She was on the cusp of womanhood. Who would she have loved, what about the children of her own that she so looked forward to. There are no answers. However, every parent knows that they will eventually have to “let go” of their child: these familiar words by Kahlil Gibran taken from “The Prophet” remind us of this:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable
For us, the “letting go” of our beloved child will not be into her future life.
We are grateful that we had Laura for almost 15 years, after all, she was nearly snatched away from us at her birth. How much worse it would have been to not have known the child and young woman she became. We know that she will live on in our hearts and minds, our precious memories of her will be kept polished and bright. And when we are greedy for a sight of her dear face, it will smile on at us from her photographs.
We have no religious faith, and no firmly held beliefs about another life after this one, but we would like to think that the sweet essence of Laura shines on. We will close with these thoughts taken from the works of Dr Edward Bach:
“…the short passage on this earth, which we know as life, is but a moment in the course of our evolution.
…our souls, which are really we, are immortal”
Mike, Annette and David Turner
20th January 2005
Laura died of a seizure on 7 January 2005, a death which should have been preventable. Ten years later, there are still sudden deaths in epilepsy (SUDEP).
Funding the WADD (Wearable Apnoea Detection Device) is a project to sponsor Professor John Duncan of UCL in his plans to refine a wearable apnoea detector, which can detect when someone stops breathing and raise the alarm. It's not yet been tested on people with epilepsy and that needs to happen to be sure if this would be an effective means of preventing some SUDEP deaths.
Thank you for your support.
Mike, Annette & David Turner
January 2015