Lost Lives

"Lost Lives. Lost Lives is, in a way, the most shocking book I’ve ever opened. At its heart is a list that starts ‘No1: June 11, 1966’ and gives the name of the first man to be killed and a short biography with the circumstances of his murder. It then lists 3,697 individuals who lost their lives in the Troubles. The last death recorded in my edition (the third) was on November 21, 2003. He is there at number 2,134. Before him, coming in at 2,133, was my beloved old Grandpapa. I remember holding this book and just feeling horrified to find them as straws in a haystack. And I turned the page to look for Granny, Doreen Brabourne, but she wasn’t there. The next person after Nicky, was Paul Maxwell, number 2,135, this lovely Irish teenage friend of ours. But my grandmother’s absence was because she survived for 21 hours. She’d been in intensive care next to me and at 8.57 the next morning her heart stopped. Between my grandfather, my twin and Paul dying and her dying there came the IRA Warrenpoint bombs and the 18 soldiers killed that afternoon occupied numbers 2,136 to 2,153. Every person is dealt with in order. And every death is provided with a pocket history of that person’s precious, unique life. And as you read on you despair at the pain, and the loss of ‘precious human intimacy’. And the authors of this book go further, highlighting any lost life that directly or indirectly was connected to any other in the book. Under my twin it says: ‘See also 1,536 Ross McWhirter,’ Norris McWhirter’s identical twin, murdered by the IRA. After I had gone back to school, Norris McWhirter happened to be a guest speaker at the school, talking about The Guinness Book of Records, which he had edited with his twin, until Ross was killed on his doorstep by two IRA gunmen. ‘Not a bereavement,’ Norris later said, ‘an amputation.’ We met in private and he, as a lone twin, helped me understand some of the terrain ahead of me. I later wrote about that, causing Lost Lives to link my twin’s murder with Ross McWhirter’s. Lost Lives is a beautifully embroidered quilt linking people’s lives and deaths in a compelling, sometimes shocking way. As well as a breathtaking piece of writing, I felt it was also an act of love, a form of tribute to those who had been killed, on all sides. And a reminder we have to deal with every single lost life in its own terms, as its own painful story. Each chapter covers one year of the Troubles, and is introduced with penetratingly powerful quotations and facts, adding context and insight to the quagmire into which you feel you might otherwise sink."