I didn't realise he was dying' - losing my fiancé, and then his family
This is what I remember about waiting at the temple in Ko Pha Ngan that August: cold, bitter black coffee. I can still taste it 15 years later. It must have been around 2am. Women were passing out the cups, and a small group of men gathered around a red Toyota truck in which the body of my fiance lay, wrapped in a white sheet.
Two Israeli girls sat next to me on a low wall. They had been with me through the most terrible moments of my life, but I didn’t even know their names. We were waiting for a key. At the clinic, it had been explained to me that Sean had to be put in a box at the temple, the only place on the island where his body could be kept cold. But they couldn’t find the key.
The nights had been uncomfortably hot since Sean and I had arrived in Thailand six days earlier. But, as I waited, the cold began to creep up from my bare feet on the tile floor, seeping through my thin sundress. Sean had bought it for me on Khao San Road in Bangkok, and I was naked underneath. We had spent the last two months travelling through China, where I’d declared some days too hot for underwear. Sean liked to joke that there was only a thin piece of material protecting my most intimate parts from all of China.
Hours earlier, we had been holding hands, walking back to our cabana. Darkness was starting to fall, though it was still warm and sticky. I headed for the ocean to take a dip, and Sean joined me. I hugged him and he held me in the warm, waist-deep water as I wrapped my legs tighter around him. We kissed and I felt something large and soft brush against my thigh. I flinched and gave a short yelp. Sean asked what it was; he was nervous about sharks. I was studying to be a marine biologist and knew how unlikely a shark attack was, especially in Thailand. I kept assuring him that he was more likely to be struck by lightning.
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“I just felt something,” I began, but hadn’t finished the sentence when Sean dropped me. I was thinking that he was going to hear about this later, dropping me into whatever had frightened him. But he was already making his way as fast as he could to the beach. His movements were urgent and awkward, his elbows held high, his fingers splayed. I followed him to the water’s edge. He sat down on the wet sand.
“It’s all over my legs.”
I bent down in the fading light and made out a faint red welt rising on his ankle. “It’s probably a stingray,” I said. Whatever bumped me in the water had felt substantial and solid. After the ray brushed my thigh, Sean must have inadvertently stepped on it.
I had seen people stung by stingrays before and knew how excruciating it could be. So I wasn’t surprised when Sean said, “My head feels heavy. I’m having trouble breathing. Go get help.” He was quiet, calm, coherent.
“Come with me,” I said, looking down at him, his dark hair wet, his long white legs now covered with sand. I’d never heard of venomous marine life in Thailand. I thought he was being squeamish.
“Come with me,” I said.
I waited for a splutter as Sean came to and gasped for air. I still thought someone could save him
We met, and immediately began flirting, at a cheap hostel in Barcelona. I was 24 and he was 22. He had a broad Australian accent and blue eyes that wrinkled at the edges when he smiled. His entire body bent double when he laughed. We travelled together for months, zigzagging across Europe, before I returned to a job teaching diving in the Caribbean, and then a PhD at Santa Cruz in California. Meanwhile, Sean had a working visa for Ireland. I rang him from rusting payphones on the islands of Sint Eustatius and Saba, and we wrote letters and postcards. We talked about getting married, until the time and distance apart overtook us, and after seven months we broke up.
Less than two years later, we were back together, as soon as we managed to make our long distance a little shorter. Sean had gone home to Melbourne, and in June 2001 I moved from Santa Cruz to Kangaroo Island to study the threatened Australian sea lion.
The next year, we decided to travel again, first around China, where we got engaged, then on to Thailand. I was now 28 and he was 25. On the long train rides, we discussed our plans. We talked about finding jobs and buying a house, getting married and what we would name our children: Jack, after his grandfather; we found it harder to agree on a name for a girl. I had lived in seven countries, and still hadn’t figured out where my home was in the world. But it was easy for me to see our life together: Sean felt like home.
Shannon Leone Fowler: ‘Having my own children has changed the way I feel about Sean’s death and his family.’ Photograph: Sophia Spring/The Guardian
Sean started to sink down on to his elbows in the wet sand. “The key is in your shoe.” It was the last thing he said as I turned to go. I was topless. I didn’t realise he was dying. I went to our cabana, peeled off my shorts and threw on the thin sundress. By the time I ran back outside, he had collapsed face first into the sand.
I sprinted to him. “Sean! Sean!” There was no response. It was difficult to turn him over. As his head and shoulders touched the sand, there was a brief rush of air. At the time, I thought it was an inhalation. I rushed to the bar, several hundred feet down the beach, crowded with August tourists. “My boyfriend’s been stung! He’s having trouble breathing.” I was having trouble breathing myself. When we got back to Sean, he had no pulse. A young female backpacker began compressing his chest. I waited for a reaction, a Hollywood-esque splutter as Sean came to and gasped for air. I would tell him how much he’d scared me. I still thought someone could save him.
“Can someone get an ambulance?” It didn’t occur to me that Ko Pha Ngan wouldn’t have one. Finally, a truck was reversed down the beach and Sean was moved into the back. With his head in my lap, I continued mouth-to-mouth all the way to the clinic. Sean was carried through a tiny waiting room to a bed against the far wall.
“Has he taken any drugs?” the Chinese doctor asked. “Has he been drinking? We will work on him for 20 minutes.”
I watched as, twice, a thick dripping needle was plunged into Sean’s chest. There was hardly any medical equipment: no defibrillator, no bottle of vinegar (a common treatment for jellyfish stings), certainly no antivenom. There was nothing there that could save Sean.
Twenty minutes passed in an instant, and my heart seized as the doctor walked over to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. He was already dead when he got here.”
“How are you going to pay?” the receptionist asked me.
Two young Israeli girls who had pushed their way through the crowd outside looked at me. The three of us turned to the receptionist. “She needs to be allowed some time alone with him,” they told her, pushing me towards the bed and pulling the curtains shut behind me.
I touched the side of Sean’s face and told him I was sorry and that I loved him. I hadn’t known he was dying. I kissed him, told him I loved him again, and tried to close his eyes before walking numbly back through the white curtains. But the doctor ushered me back towards a desk. “Please sign the death certificate,” he said, pointing to a line near the bottom of a document. The words were all in Thai; I didn’t understand.
One of the Israeli girls walked into the room. “This needs to be translated,” she told him. The other girl followed closely behind.
“It will be very difficult to find a translator at this time of night,” the doctor replied. “She needs to sign it tonight.”
“She’s not signing until it’s translated,” one of the girls insisted.
He sighed and translated the death certificate himself: “This is the time you brought him into the clinic. This is the time we stopped CPR. This is the official time of death. This is the official cause of death.”
“What’s the official cause of death?” The two girls looked over his shoulder.
“Drunk drowning.”
“But I told you he wasn’t drunk. I told you he didn’t drown. He was stung.” My voice sounded high-pitched and strange.
The girls agreed. They had seen him on the beach, too, among the crowd who had followed us from the bar. They pointed to Sean’s legs, where thin reddish-purple lines wrapped themselves around his calves, over and over. The welts seemed to be swelling and darkening before our eyes.
It hadn’t been a stingray. Sean had been holding me in the water, my legs wrapped safely around his waist, as jellyfish tentacles wrapped themselves around his legs below me.
The doctor sighed again. “He must have had an allergic reaction to jellyfish, then. He was just unlucky.” I had no way of knowing at that point that it was a deadly box jellyfish that had killed Sean. That he wasn’t the first to die of a sting there, and wouldn’t be the last. Or that, the next day, the Thai police would deny he was stung, suggest again he was drunk or on drugs, and insist on having four male witnesses to his death. The doctor crossed out a short jumble of characters and scribbled next to it. The only words I understood on the entire page were my name, misspelled: Ms Shannan Fouler. I wanted that woman to have to sign this piece of paper. I wanted it to be her fiance lying on the bed.
The girls told me I should ring Sean’s family. The only number I had was for his parents’ home in Melbourne, written inside his passport. His mother answered. The conversation was horrible, anguished and brief.
“I told him to be careful.”
“I know. I am so sorry.”
“I’m all alone. I have to go.” And she hung up on me. I never spoke to her on the phone again.
The couple in Perth in 2002: ‘I didn’t belong with his family and friends. I wasn’t Australian.’ Photograph: courtesy Shannon Leone Fowler
Exactly one week later, I flew into Melbourne with Sean’s coffin. The doors from customs parted with a gasp and my chest tightened when I saw the faces of his parents. I stepped towards them on unsteady legs, hugging first his father and then his mother. We had met many times, but it was the first time I’d hugged either of them. His mother and I couldn’t stop shaking.
I had been to their house before. His father, Keith, and I shared an interest in seafood and enjoyed introducing each other to obscure wines.
Now there was a trapped stillness in the house while we waited for the funeral. I helped Keith choose the music for the service: the Beatles, Ben Harper, David Gray, Crowded House. Sean’s friends brought over bottles of whiskey and Kahlúa, and we drank Jack and Cokes and white Russians in the middle of the day. I sat with his older brothers in the backyard by the swimming pool. Their eyes were the same shade as the flat blue water, the same shade as Sean’s.
But I didn’t really belong with his family and friends. I wasn’t from Melbourne, I wasn’t Australian. I hadn’t grown up with him, or known him as long as they had. We hadn’t had the chance to get married.
And I wasn’t pregnant any more. Months before, Sean and I had taken an early morning bus from Xī’ān to Huá Shān. It was a few minutes before 8am, but already muggy and hot. I was shifting in my seat, trying to find a position that put less pressure on my bladder, when I realised: I’d forgotten to take my birth control pill. But it was only the one, and I took it as soon as we got to Huá Shān.
By the time Sean died, I was three weeks late and he was three weeks nervous. He adored his two nieces and was looking forward to being a father, but not just yet. We were too young.
I had assumed I’d have a relationship with his family. But his parents stopped returning my phone calls, my emails
The nausea, insomnia, dizziness and stomach aches started after his death, and I thought they were the consequence of shock and grief. I kept forgetting I was pregnant. And then I wasn’t any more. Four days after losing Sean, I miscarried in a Bangkok hotel room. I was terrified; I had desperately wanted that baby. Losing it meant losing my last piece of Sean.
The night of the funeral was awful. I knew the next day would be even harder. Since Sean had died, there had been jobs for me to do: dealing with his insurance company and the Australian consulate, getting his body to Melbourne, deciding what to say for my eulogy. The day after was when I had to start figuring out what to do with the rest of my life.
I had assumed I’d have a relationship with his family. But after I left Melbourne – after I’d hugged and kissed Audrey and Keith goodbye – his parents stopped returning my phone calls, my emails and letters. On my last visit to the family home, over a year and a half after the funeral, Audrey didn’t come out of her room.
Maybe I was too terrible a reminder. Maybe they thought I could have saved him; maybe they blamed me in some other way. Maybe they couldn’t help but wish it had been me instead. Maybe, even though I thought of them as family, all they could see when they looked at me was their dead young son. In the end, I lost Sean and the only other people on Earth who felt the same way about him.
I have now loved Sean longer dead than I knew him alive. I still can’t help but sometimes wonder, what would our children have looked like? Would we have been happy?
Some things might have been different if I hadn’t had the miscarriage. Maybe there would have been Christmases with the Reillys in Melbourne. “That Jack Reilly, he’s got a bit of dash,” Sean used to say, picturing our future son. It took a long time for me to let go of that life, of the family I thought I would join. It wasn’t until I finally had my own child, eight years later, that I could truly understand.
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I know how incredibly lucky I’ve been. I was lucky to have loved Sean, and to have been loved by him. I was lucky the two Israeli girls – Anat and Talia – chose to walk through the door of the clinic on Ko Pha Ngan instead of walking away. I was lucky to meet my husband five years later, in 2007, and although our marriage didn’t last, we now have three healthy and happy children.
I look at my kids and imagine what it must have been like to get that phone call. Some girl on the other end telling me that my 25-year-old son is dead. Some girl, when I carried him for nine months, nursed him for 18. When I changed him and rocked him and sang to him and was there to catch him when he fell.
After Sean’s death, my life split in two: before and after. But my life split again when I became a mum. Someone mentions an event, and I immediately know if it was before or after I had my first son. More than anything else, having my own children has changed the way I feel about Sean’s death and his family. So while it’s Talia, now a lifelong friend, who thinks of me on every anniversary (“Believe it or not, but I never forget,” she recently emailed), it’s Audrey, Sean’s mother, I find my thoughts turning to each Mother’s Day, his birthday, Christmas and each anniversary of his death. And all of it has changed the way I feel about love.
This is an edited extract from Traveling With Ghosts, by Shannon Leone Fowler, published next week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
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