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This summer, I should be planning an incredible getaway for my family of five, a precious chance to spend time together amid the general busyness of life. My twins, Clarissa and Ollie would both be 22-year-old university graduates, looking forward to their new lives, and we’d be planning to wave my youngest Hugo, 20, off on sabbatical to America.
But all that changed on May 7 last year, when my beautiful daughter Clarissa died on a mountainside. One moment she was there, happily chatting as she walked up to a summit in the Gorges du Verdon in central Provence, the next she was gone, having fallen back into her friend’s arms.
She shouted, ‘Oh no!’, tried to scrabble to her feet then went out like a light, a suddenly stopping her heart for ever. Nothing — not CPR performed by an American woman out hiking, or a shock to her heart by the medic who arrived by helicopter — could save her.
Earlier that day Clarissa had stopped to take a swim in a lake. There is a picture of her standing facing the sun, drinking in all the beauty around her. It’s impossible to believe looking at that picture that just a short time later, she would be dead.
