Angela Mollard: My tears have come hot and fast amid a summer of lost boys

My tears have come hot and fast this summer, not because I know what this suffering feels like but because I don’t, writes Angela Mollard.

It’s been a summer of lost boys.

Beau, Luca, Lance, Hadi.

16, 15, 28, 23.

Those are their names and ages, young men whose stories have hung heavily over our hot summer.

Beau Horan, 16, died in late November after being bitten by a brown snake in Queensland. It could’ve come straight from a Bryce Courtenay novel – didn’t even know he’d been bitten when he walked into his Gladstone home saying he felt unwell. He collapsed, smashing his head. Paramedics found the snakebite on the back of his foot. Ah, said a local snake catcher, brown snake bites can be painless. Not for the mum and two sisters Beau has left behind.

Beau Horan, 16, who passed away after a snake bite in November, has spoken out about their first Christmas without him. Picture: Supplied

Luca Bennett, the 15-year-old boy who went missing off the coast of North Avoca on Christmas Eve. Picture: Instagram

Then it was 15-year-old Luca Bennett, a star basketballer at one of Sydney’s most prestigious

schools. As we were wrapping gifts on Christmas Eve we learned he’d been swept off the rocks at Avoca Beach on the NSW Central Coast. A surf lifesaver had fought to save him but a rogue wave had swept the teen out of his grasp.

Have you, like me, swum at our beaches this summer and thought of Luca and his thwarted rescuer sobbing in despair on the beach? Of his teenage friends who were climbing on the rocks with him? Of his heartbroken family for whom Christmas will never be the same?

Lance Appleby, 28, who is believed to have been fatally attacked by a shark. Picture: Facebook

Nine days later and 2000km away on another coast, South Australia’s Streaky Bay, it was the

dusk disappearance of surfer Lance Appleby that left us chilled. A great white shark – our

national nemesis – was seen dragging the 28-year-old under water. Again, a lovely young man

beloved both in his home state and on the Gold Coast where he’d moved to work as a builder.

Caring, compassionate with a smile broader than this country is wide, Lance’s memorial will be held on Monday. From his family, six beautiful words: “Forever young, forever surfing, forever loved.”

And then, on Wednesday afternoon, the wonderful news that Hadi Nazari, 23, had been found

alive after going missing two weeks earlier while hiking in Kosciuszko National Park. We’d been holding our breath, fearing that the Melbourne student had also been snatched by elements as harsh as they are quintessentially Australian.

Missing bushwalker Hadi Nazari with NSW Police after being found in Kosciuszko National Park. Picture: NSW Police

My tears have come hot and fast this summer, not because I know what this suffering feels like but because I don’t. It seems incongruous to be laughing in the waves, revelling in the cricket, marvelling at the cacophony of the cicadas and flinging one bare foot over another as these boys’ beautiful lives are snuffed out. Or, in Hazi’s case, saved at the 11th hour.

I want their families to know that we ache for them. That we don’t simply read their names and look at their pictures and move on to the next barbecue. Rather, we note the details. That Beau liked gel blasters, whatever they are, and that Luca had Wiradjuri heritage and loved Frank Ocean songs. That Lance had nieces and nephews who adored him.

We think of the young girls too. Of the families of Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles, both 19, who died of methanol poisoning in November after drinking contaminated alcohol in Laos. Even journalists like me who’ve reported on these tragic losses all my career, and have sat with parents as they’ve tearfully paid tribute to their children, don’t think of them as news stories.

They are people in pain and they stay with us beyond the pen and the keyboard. What, I

wonder, does a bereaved parent do with a lost child’s Christmas stocking?

And so I ask. Mary Leigh Miller, who lost her darling son Cole when he was the victim of a one-punch attack in Brisbane on January 3, 2016, has been one of my Facebook friends since I interviewed her over the 18-year-old’s tragic death. Another boy lost in the summer, each year she posts pictures of Cole on his birthday and the anniversary of his death.

Cole Miller was a victim of one-punch attack.

Last week marked nine years. She doesn’t cry every day, but many. “I have had to learn to

accept that a part of me is always going to be missing and that I will always carry the sadness,” she tells me. A group of Cole’s school friends still visit. It’s comforting but also difficult. Their grown-up aliveness reminds her of what she has lost.

But she carries her son with her. A lock of his hair in her handbag. A set of rosary beads because the night they saw him in hospital the priest had left a blue pair wrapped around his hands. And then there is Fergie, the family’s French Bulldog. Mary Leigh couldn’t believe it when the breeder told her he’d been born on January 4, the day Cole passed away. It delights her that she had to drive down Coles Road to collect her.

As a nurse, she tells me, she gains great comfort caring for others. And then she sends me a

quote by poet William Stafford. “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.” It gives

her hope that, despite her grief, she will one day land safely.

ANGELA LOVES

Hat clip

Following my column last week on travelling only with carry-on luggage, a lovely reader wrote to recommend a colourful hat clip which attaches to your handbag and which you clip your cap or sunhat to when not in use. They’re $24.95 from Klipsta and look fab.

Tin Triumph

I’m loving fresh lychees this summer but was making a huge tropical fruit salad for a party and so used some tinned ones. They’re really good chilled – and at just $3 a tin you can use them year round.

Thriller read

Friends had told me about Dervla McTiernan’s What Happened To Nina and it’s turning out to be a cracker.

Originally published as Angela Mollard: My tears have come hot and fast amid a summer of lost boys