IN public, Gordon put on a brave face. But privately he had faced an immense and agonising personal struggle in the weeks and months following the explosion. Only his family and close friends were aware of the depth of the darkness which he had to come through. He was in constant demand for media interviews, and while these gave him a purpose and a sense of achievement, they also drained him.
Joan [his Widow] says: "The media kept coming, from France, America, Switzerland, from all over the world, and Gordon just couldn't refuse them. I hated all of that, but it was therapy to him. If it had been me I would have turned them away, but I felt sorry for them as people. They had a job to do, and - when Gordon invited them in, the least I could do was give them a cup of tea and something to eat. Anyway, there was no need for me to appear in the media, because Gordon did it so well."
The media also absorbed Gordon in a personal way. Julie Anne [his other daughter] recalls: "In the weeks after the funeral, he used to play and replay the video tapes of the Enniskillen bomb and its aftermath. Maybe it was a kind of therapy in its own way, but it also seemed like a kind of depression. It was almost a morbid interest in what had taken place. He was oblivious to this, and it got so bad that we put our foot down and took the tapes away."
The pressure of the interviews, the tapes, the thousands of letters waiting for a reply and his own frail physical and emotional condition took a cumulative toll. Seven weeks after the bomb, he completely lost his memory and was admitted to hospital.
Joan recalls the moment she knew something was terribly wrong. "He began to talk complete nonsense. He said to me, `When is Marie coming home?' Then he asked: `Why do I have this awful pain in my shoulder?' I was on the phone to our family doctor immediately, because I thought it might be the reoccurrence of a mild stroke he had several years previously. When the doctor arrived, Gordon turned to me and asked: `Who is this stranger in our house?' He had flipped completely. Without delay, we took him to the Erne Hospital for observation. It was really worrying."
Julie Anne takes up the story: "I feared that Dad was losing his marbles, that he was really starting to crumble. It was frightening. Everything was so bleak for us. I remember him vividly in hospital. He could not recall anything about the bomb, or about Marie, or why he was in pain. It was hard for us to deal with this. He was like that for maybe 16 to 24 hours, and the next morning he had recovered. I went into the ward, and he was sitting up and behaving just like normal. I threw my arms around him and said: `Dad, you're back with us again! Thank God!
AS a precaution he was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital for a brain scan, and was given the all clear. But the visit to the Royal, where Marie had been a nurse just a few weeks previously, was a stern test for Joan. She says: "It had so many memories of Marie. I got myself into an awful state, thinking of what it would be like to go up there and to see all these other young girls walking about in nurses' uniforms. Peter [their late son] drove us to Belfast, and I remember sitting in the car and trying to rationalise, trying to tell myself: `Don't be frightened. You're going to a place of healing. All these young nurses and the doctors and other people are doing all they can to make people better.' That kind of thinking helped me.
"Once we were in the hospital, I met an orderly who had known Marie. He said: `Many a day she helped me to wheel patients to the theatre, and many a cheery greeting and quip we had. She was a great girl.' That also helped me enormously. I should have known that it would be all right. I remembered also the reports of a Thanksgiving Service which was held at the Royal just after Marie died. We were too exhausted to go personally, but I know that the Reverend Sydney Callaghan gave a wonderful address. He talked about the burden that the mother heart bore too, in that Joan Wilson shared those closing hours with Marie. And we must not overlook that agony and anguish that any mother will understand in a way that no father can fully comprehend. I wad grateful for those kind and sensitive words."
The doctors concluded that the strain and pressure of the previous weeks had led to the loss of memory, but Gordon recovered quickly and without any further relapse. A family holiday to the Caribbean, which they had to postpone due to Gordon's illness, took place in February, 1988. It was a break which they all needed very badly.
Julie Anne reflects: "It was as if three different people went on holiday. We all needed our own space. Personally, it did me good to get away from Enniskillen and to realise that there was a big world outside and that this world was not shrouded in darkness. I met a lovely girl and we became friends. I was able to talk to her, and she helped me tremendously. We still stay in touch. I remember particularly that she enjoyed meeting Dad. She called him `Gordon' and Dad didn't seem to mind, though he was one of the `old school' and really didn't like younger people calling him by his Christian name. If you were younger than he was, you gave him his proper title. Even my husband John used to call him `Mr Wilson', almost up to the day he died!"
JULIE Anne also discovered a side to her father which he tried to keep hidden from the family, but which showed the depths of his private grief. "During the day, Dad seemed fine, and in company he was the life and soul of the party. But we knew privately that he could not sleep very well, and that he used to get up early in the morning and pace around the deck of the cruise ship. One of the passengers told me later that one morning he was also up and about early, and he observed Dad grieving alone by the ship's rail and crying out to sea. But it was never mentioned by any of us."
Joan remembers the cruise as a breathing space and as therapy: "It was good for all of us, just to get away from it all and to be our own people. I met a lady who had lost her husband in an air crash, and she was most understanding. I remember walking with her on the beach at St Thomas, where she shared her experience of bereavement with me. She said: `The grief is like the waves rolling on to this beach. Sometimes the grief will come over you in waves, and they will threaten to overwhelm you. Then they will recede. They will come again at longer intervals, but eventually, with time, they will begin to ease, and you will find yourself better able to cope. That was sound advice, and she gave me great help."
Back in Enniskillen, Gordon and Joan grieved differently - sometimes together, and more often privately. She says: "He was able to cry long before I was. He used to go into a room and I could hear this terrible sobbing behind closed doors, and I did not intrude. It was an intensely private thing. He never talked about it, and I never let him know that I heard it happening. It helped him, and that was what he needed. Gordon cried alone, and at night. I did my crying outdoors. My crying was dreadful, but it made me feel better. The first time was the worst, but after that I was not afraid to let myself go."
Her father had always urged her to keep a stiff upper lip. People of his generation did not cry; it was seen as a form of weakness. "One day, however, I was walking along the lovely paths at Castle Coole, and I saw the snowdrops pushing up through the ground in the middle of a long winter, with their promise of spring. I could not help thinking about our own long winter of Marie's death, and I just cried and cried, in the privacy of nature. I could hardly stop the flood gates. But I knew that this was a necessary part of my healing. I would now say to anyone in the midst of bereavement: `Don't be afraid to cry. Let yourself go. It's all part of your healing'".
Gordon and Joan went to the graveyard together, but on many occasions each of them visited Marie's grave alone. Joan says, "Sometimes I used to go there straight from school or from shopping. I used to stand there and just think of her. Marie's 21st birthday was dreadful - the 29th of April, 1988. I took flowers to her grave and I spoke out loud, as if she had been there. I said: `I'm sorry, my darling, that I can't bring you a special present for your birthday. All I can bring you is flowers for your grave.' I cried and cried. Gordon was quiet. He simply said: `Marie's gone. We'll just have to do the best we can.'"
"There were other times when we grieved together, very often on long car journeys. We talked about Marie and we used to ask ourselves: `Why did it happen? Why did it happen to us?' But we would also ask ourselves: `Why not?' We were not the only ones grieving. There were 10 other families in Enniskillen, and families all over the British Isles and further afield who were grieving because of the suffering of the Troubles. Gordon would also say to me, from time to time: `I've been through a bomb'. It was almost as if he could hardly take in the fact that he had lost Marie and he had been in the explosion as well. He was also very conscious of the others who had been killed and injured. He often wondered why people standing only a few feet from him had died, and he had been spared. It was all part of his sense of mission at being left to tell the story of Marie and of the suffering."
AFTER the bomb, Gordon lost interest in his business. Joan says: "He now saw life in a totally different perspective. Things which ad been important to him previously did not seem to matter any more. Any how, he was just not fit for it. Luckily, he had no money worries, and he just wanted to let it go at the best price possible. Peter had taken on the major brunt of running the business, and this was not easy for him. He had his own challenges to face. Eventually, the business was sold, and Peter went out on his own. It seemed the best solution in the circumstances, because there was just no way that Gordon could continue."
He found some solace in the ordinary things of life. He resumed his regular morning coffee sessions with his friends in Enniskillen, and his golf partners coaxed him back on to the course. Joe Prenter, who himself had undergone heart surgery, recalls going with Gordon to the golf course merely to look. They discovered that Gordon had a five iron and some golf balls in his car. They both tried their swing, and to their surprise and delight, they could still hit a ball just! Joe says: "That was the beginning of our come back!" At first Gordon could hardly hold the club, but he persevered, and golf at his beloved Murvagh course again became a part of his life.
However, there were some things which he could not change. Joan recalls: "After the bomb, he could not stand any loud noises. If I dropped even a knife on the floor, his nerves would jangle. He could not even bear a child's toy screeching across the floor. He always said that the bomb had been a dull thud, rather than a loud blast, but he could not bear anything loud. He became very, very sensitive to noise. I took account of that and tried to guard against dropping things or making a loud noise."
Their shared trauma brought them closer. Joan says: "I felt that I had to take even more care of him, because after the bomb he tired very easily. We were also conscious of cherishing our time together and of living each day more fully. It made us more aware of the sufferings of other people, when we heard about other tragedies on the news, or closer to home. We really felt for people. When you have experienced a deep trauma yourself, you have something special to give to others who are caught up in suffering. It made us realise how important it is to try to share the burden. We received tremendous help from people's letters and especially from their prayers. Gordon used to say that we were surrounded by such a wall of prayer that you could almost touch it."
