Materialistic Assumption 4: It is Impossible to Change

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dAYS OF SEARCH

The death of my brother, Peter, smashed into our family like a comet hitting the earth. And the repercussions of that tragic event are still operating over fifty years later. That happened in 1960 and I was 15 years of age; my brother had just turned 14.

Cycling home from work one bright summer’s day I saw a crowd of neighbours gathered around our home in Ely, Cardiff. They were not looking happy, a few tried to prepare me for the shock to come. I raced inside the house, my mother was being comforted by friends and my brother, Peter, was on the floor receiving artificial respiration. This was not the modern, mouth to mouth resuscitation, but the arms being pulled over the head and placed back by the side. Peter was breathing, or so it seemed to me, as I heard air coming out of him; but this was just the result of the respiration process. I thought he was joking around again as he often did this, to my annoyance, and I remember getting angry with him. But it was no practical joke this time. The ambulance arrived, and he was taken to hospital to get better, so I thought. So, I broke through the arms of the neighbours who tried to restrain me and cycled like mad, trying to catch the ambulance. Peter was dead even before respiration was applied, which was confirmed at the hospital after I arrived. I don’t know how I got back home, everything went black and hazy. I do remember my father arriving home from work and being told the shattering news that his son was dead. He ‘lost’ it, couldn’t process the information; it took four men to hold him down as he started to rip a door off its hinges.

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