In September Star News reporter Lia Spencer told the heart-wrenching story of the death of her twin sisters in a road accident in Canada. This week her colleague, Cameron Lucadou-Wells, reflects on the loss of his brother, Patrick. A head-on smash on a slippery road in Tasmania changed the Lucadou-Wells family forever.
AT 19 my brother Patrick had his life ahead of him.
He was mad about the water. Most days he would be fishing, surfing and snorkelling, or at least dreaming of those pursuits.
From memory, he had the snowiest of blond hair and smiling blue eyes, and loved hanging with his mates.
As several friends will attest, he was a great young man – one that had just begun to study marine biology.
If he was lucky, his life wouldn’t have ended due to a split-second mishap on an often empty road in the far north-west outskirts of Tasmania on 20 August 1995.
For every fatality, how many times have drivers cheated death on the roads?
I could have died several times before my brother through stupid rushes of blood behind a wheel.
But as Patrick found – through little fault of his own – sometimes you don’t get a second chance.
Patrick was in the front passenger seat, his friend – for reasons we don’t know – was driving our parents’ spare car.
We’d all assumed that car, a 1979 Ford Falcon, was indestructible.
They were on their way back from a day trip to Marrawah’s surf coast, about two hours from my parents’ house in Burnie.
Police say there was no evidence of speed, alcohol or driver distraction involved in the crash.
The country road was notoriously treacherous in the wet. Responding police nearly slid out of control on their way to the scene.
Patrick’s driver was of course much less experienced than them.
As the car slipped wide through a corner, the driver apparently over-corrected. The vehicle spun onto the wrong side of the road and may have at most times of the day come safely to rest.
But on this basically deserted road there was a Hilux with a bullbar coming the other way.
I can’t help thinking what terror must have struck Patrick in his final second of consciousness, just before he took the brunt of that oncoming bullbar. That frozen, helpless moment in time.
The poor Hilux driver, or it might have been someone else, heroically resuscitated Patrick at the scene.
The driver, the ambos, the police officers undoubtedly did their best but will be surely haunted by this event.
Patrick was airlifted first to Royal Hobart Hospital on the opposite side of the island.
His friend was conscious and picked up by the state’s only air ambulance several hours later.
By fate, my parents Anne and Anthony and myself were already in Hobart.
Mum and Dad were visiting me during my fourth year studying at University of Tasmania.
We’d just returned to my share-house from a sizeable lunch feed and a walk in the dappled sunshine by a calm Derwent River.
My house-mate Will had been already visited by police and was sitting on the appalling news.
He watched my family and I amble through the front gate.
He saw our faces transform as he broke the news. Patrick has been in an accident. He’s seriously injured. They’re flying him to Hobart hospital.
We had no idea how badly hurt our son and brother was.
We waited for what seemed hours for his ambulance to dock, and a further eternity to see him in the hospital bed.
We waited many hours by his bed, studying him, holding his warm hand, willing his eyelids to open and his lips to breathe just a word.
He just seemed asleep – as he clung to life support.
We asked so many times for him to wake up.
The brain scan came back late that night. There was catastrophic brain injury.
Patrick won’t wake up.
We stayed by Patrick as long as we could. I hoped for a Hollywood moment, that Patrick would defy medical wisdom.
We stayed while we heard the driver in the next bed ask the nurse what had happened.
The time came to say goodbye when Patrick’s organs were about to be harvested. He was a registered organ donor.
As we drove home in disbelief, I just wanted things to go back to the way they were.
For as long as I could remember, Patrick would have been sitting in the back of the family car next to me.
Often I’ve thought who Patrick’s family might have been, and whether my son could have grown up with Patrick’s kids.
What he might have thought of his beloved Fitzroy Football Club being reincarnated as a three-peat powerhouse Brisbane Lions.
And of the Australian cricket team finally becoming world beaters after years in the doldrums.
There would have been many an adventure ahead of him on the ocean. We scattered his ashes in his beloved sea the following Christmas.
To young drivers and young passengers, I just say that it is so easy for things to go irredeemably wrong.
I didn’t believe it could happen when I first got a licence. Cruising with mates who dropped donuts and fishtails, or came millimetres from driving off a mountain pass.
Even after I sat in a flipped car as it slid out of control down a major Hobart street one Friday night.
I was momentarily shaken after being held upside-down by my seatbelt, watching sparks flying and hearing the screech of the roof on tarmac.
But still deep down I never thought the worst could happen.
That was until it really did happen to Patrick.
A lot of us – not least my devastated parents – wished that it never happened.
It’s a hard lesson learnt about being responsible on the road, about not taking life, family nor friends for granted.
But that won’t bring Patrick back.
