My old life ended when my son died in an unfathomably random accident at 21, shortly after graduating. Now, three years later, I’ve finally been able to give him the adventure he missed out on

Late September, in Egypt: after a 45-minute journey through my emotions – not to mention back through thousands of years of ancient culture and architecture – I find myself leaving the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. 

As I scramble back down the (46-metre-long, 8.5-metre-high) Grand Gallery, a much younger woman – slender and fit-looking, half my age I’d guess – is moving upwards in the opposite direction.

She pauses, grabs my arm and looks straight into my eyes. I sense she is nervous, though not of me.

‘Excuse me, please don’t take this the wrong way,’ she says in English (she must have heard me talking to my son, just ahead of me, as it’s clearly not her first language) ‘but you are a lot older than me and I’m struggling. How did you manage to do this?’

No offence taken. I meet her gaze: ‘I’ll tell you how – because I have waited 54 years to get here, and I don’t have another 50. So push yourself forward, you won’t regret it.’ She beams (‘Thank you. Yes!’) and moves on.

It is the briefest of interactions and I know nothing about her other than, perhaps, that (like me) she is claustrophobic, suffering from the oppressive heat deep inside the pyramid, struggling to clamber through all this extraordinary history under the weight of (and I tried not to think too much about this!) an estimated 2.1 million tons of limestone and granite.

Our paths will never cross again, however I suspect neither of us will forget this moment because there are few days in our ordinary lives that are so vast, with emotions that we can barely contain. 

While that young woman was on her personal ‘journey’ on Sunday 20, September, I was on mine: this was the third anniversary of my 21-year-old son Jackson’s accidental death.

I have chosen to spend each of these three painful anniversaries away from home, in places that present me with different horizons – real and metaphorical. On the first anniversary in 2024 I went with Jackson’s younger (though catching up…) brother, Rider, to Marrakesh; his first time, my fourth. 

Last year my partner and I had a long weekend in Riga, Latvia (his choice), a gorgeous Baltic city that is the closest I expect I will ever again get to Russia (I last visited over 40 years ago when it was still in the USSR). And then this year I took Rider to Cairo, and we brought along some of Jackson’s ashes, too.

For the past 18 months I’ve felt able to start to give Jackson the gap year he was about to embark on when he died shortly after graduating; I call it his ‘gap afterlife’. 

This began when I took some of his ashes with me to Australia last year, along with those of my Australian father, who had died in 2019. It had always been the intention for me and both sons to scatter Dad in Byron Bay, NSW (as he’d requested) on the first anniversary of his death: July 2020. 

Then Covid scuppered that plan, so we rescheduled it for summer 2024, the year after Jackson graduated and Rider would have finished his A-levels. And then that plan also fell by the wayside after Jackson’s sudden death.

Last year Rider went to Australia for his post-A-level gap year and I crashed it, briefly. We made our way to Byron over the Easter weekend and, as a tropical rainstorm hovered offshore, we headed to the beach, casting Pa’s mortal remains to the wind along with some of his beloved grandson’s.

This felt both completely wrong because my vivid 21-forever son should not be dead, and yet, given the fact that he was, it felt entirely right, too. 

Afterwards we sheltered from the rainstorm in a little Thai restaurant, knocking back a lunchtime beer and a great curry alongside (surreally!) the small town’s most famous resident, Chris Hemsworth, who was there with his kids.

I have only ever had 50 per cent of Jackson’s ashes (the rest remain with his father). However, since our trip to Byron, he has been scattered at the Great Barrier Reef by me and Rider, in Thailand by Rider and some of Jackson’s friends, by me in Latvia and Mallorca and by his friends in Portugal and Corfu. It is my intention to eventually scatter all of (my half of) him around the world in places we know he would have loved. I’ll save a tiny bit of him to take with me whenever it’s my turn to go.

I was fortunate enough to see the personal effects of another man who died too young – Tutankhamun was just 19 – way back in 1972 at The British Museum. Queuing for six hours with my pa was worth every second. 

Now, in Egypt, it was a thrill to visit King Tut again at the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza (put it on your bucket list, it’s extraordinary) with my son. However, it has been my dream to visit the Great Pyramid since I was a child and read about Napoleon’s experience after a night spent alone, inside it. About which he would never speak, before, allegedly, on his deathbed saying ‘you wouldn’t believe me!’ (Sceptics counter-claim that this is apocryphal and Napoleon never visited the pyramids, though I know which story the eight-year-old me found more compelling!).

So, finally, on September 20, Rider urged this claustrophobe onwards as I stooped and shuffled through the first narrow tunnel, before practically sprinting up the steps inside the tall skinny Grand Gallery, eventually emerging from a final crawl-space into the King’s Chamber.

Inside, I was… well, ‘overwhelmed’ will have to do; it is extremely hot, even with portable air-con units, while pictures do not remotely do it justice. And because it was (according to our lovely guide Amani, who was waiting outside) ‘a quiet day’ at this Wonder of the World, for several minutes Rider and I were alone in the chamber. Except for the kind man who spends eight hours a day in this awe-inspiring space and who voluntarily took our picture, urging me to sit for a while on the floor on the other side of the famous red granite sarcophagus; it felt like an enormous privilege.

When we eventually emerged, Amani said she’d been ‘a little worried, you were a long time!’ I told her this was because I’d been waiting a long time to get there, and while some people do arrive in the King’s Chamber, grab a snap for their socials and immediately leave, box ticked, I wanted to really feel this place. 

Not just for me, for Jackson, too, who was just as fascinated as I am by the pyramids so it was yet another perfect spot not only for him to be with us both, but for Rider to scatter more of his dust-to-dust in the Sahara, against the backdrop of buildings that have stretched our meagre human imaginations about as far as they can go for thousands of years. What a privilege it is to visit fascinating places and let my son fly away across space and time, with all our love…

We did other things in Cairo. We visited its Coptic Christian churches (witnessing both a very moving service and a christening: ‘You’re so lucky, this is a very rare thing to see!’ said Amani), a beautiful old synagogue and a gorgeous mosque, too. Because this vast, ancient, ever-evolving city has something powerful to show people of nearly every religious persuasion or, indeed, none. 

Cairo is relentlessly noisy and polluted, yet even as its chaotic present threatens to overwhelm the casual visitor, the Nile’s silvery spine calmly and timelessly connects you to Egypt’s epic history. Oddly, after four nights in the city, I found myself becoming not (as I’d expected) more jangled, but less.

On the balcony of our hotel I could see, to the left, that great river with its fashionable bankside restaurants, bobbing feluccas and party boats; to the right a wildly congested eight-lane highway; and directly below there was an exceptionally good view straight into the gardens of the Russian Embassy. All of which felt like a distillation of – and metaphor for – all of Cairo’s crazily seductive, chaotic charms.

Now home for several weeks, none of this experience has left me, nor even faded. As my son’s ashes continue to swirl around the Sahara, I can’t help wondering about that young woman inside the pyramid, and hope that by the time she gets to my age her life is also unexpectedly bigger and richer, even if it has been suffused with sadness and loss, as so many lives are.

Meanwhile, my biggest hope for Rider is that, for however long it lasts, his will be a life well-lived, with few regrets, just like his forever-21-year-old brother’s. For more than that, few of us can ask.