Sabine Vandenbroucke remembers the first party she went to after the death of her 17-year-old son, Raphaël Pryor. When a fellow guest asked how she knew their hosts, she explained the link was their respective children. He then asked about Raphaël and she told him that he had died five months earlier.
“You could just feel he wanted to run a mile and felt he should not have touched on the topic,” Vandenbroucke recalls. “I almost grabbed him to say, no, I want to talk about him. He is, and will always be, my favourite subject.”
She explained how her only child had collapsed and died at Eton College, where he was in his final year, while playing the Field Game, a rugby-football hybrid created by the school. “I even started talking about the experience of finding a plot to bury him, poor man,” she says, smiling. “Then I moved on and said, ‘What’s your daughter studying?’”
Vandenbroucke, who is Belgian and lives in London, wants to be asked about her child and also to talk about her friends’ children too. “I really want to hear how they are because it allows us to stay in touch with that generation.”
Michael Pryor and Sabine Vandenbroucke, Raphaël’s parents
JACK TAYLOR FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Raphaël died of sudden adult death syndrome (SADS), sometimes known as sudden arrhythmic death syndrome. It is given as the cause of death after a cardiac arrest that cannot be explained by a post-mortem examination because the structure of the heart appears normal.
Exactly one year later Vandenbroucke, a company director, and her British husband, Michael Pryor, a property lawyer, want to speak about their experiences in the hope of guiding others to better support people in the depths of grief and raise awareness about SADS. I meet them at their home in London one sunny afternoon; a floral wreath on their front door is dedicated to Raphaël.
Pryor, 55, insists that people should not be nervous to talk to the bereaved about their suffering. “It’s unlikely that you can make it worse by what you say,” he says, sitting on a sofa covered with a large blanket showing a photograph of Raphaël’s smiling face. “The worst has already happened,” adds Vandenbroucke, 53.
Last year on Saturday, March 16, on Eton’s playing pitches, Raphaël was competing in the Field Game for the school’s second XI against a team of Eton old boys. Dating back to 1847 and unique to Eton, the Field Game involves two teams of 11 players and is played by the boys in the Easter term. Prince William and Prince Harry played it while at the school. On a neighbouring pitch his father, an old Etonian, was playing in a separate match for alumni.
The Eton Field Game dates back to the 19th century
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Pryor didn’t play the second half so he could cheer on his son instead. At 3.39pm he was watching as his son collapsed towards the end of the match and as CPR was immediately performed to try to get his heart beating again.
Shortly afterwards he called his wife, who was travelling back to the UK that afternoon from Switzerland, where she had been visiting a friend whose husband had recently died, to tell her what was happening. Raphaël was taken to Wexham Park Hospital in Slough where Pryor asked doctors to keep him alive until his wife arrived. Shortly after 9pm Vandenbroucke got to the hospital and ran to her husband while saying in Dutch “Hij is ons Alles” (He is our everything). They held their son as he lay in the resuscitation unit and wept.
At 10.30pm he was pronounced dead. Pryor’s last words to his child, shouted from the sidelines, were “well played, Raphy”. Vandenbroucke had last seen her son alive when she dropped him off at school the previous Sunday. “I remember afterwards thinking, gosh, that was a very grown-up hug,” she says. “Normally, you shy away from hugging, particularly when there are other friends around.”
A keen sportsman who enjoyed skiing, football, cycling and fishing, Raphaël had always been a fit and healthy child. His parents do not like sudden adult death syndrome as a term. “We have no difficulty with the concept that professionals can’t tell us what went wrong,” Pryor says. “But we don’t like the word syndrome because it sounds like a condition.”
As they await the coroner’s inquest, the couple have been supported by the British charity Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood. “That’s the better term — it’s unexplained,” says Vandenbroucke, who prefers the Belgian medical term negative autopsy sudden death. “On an annual basis, there are 40 children between the age of one and 18 in the UK who die unexplained.”
Pryor looks back to March 16 last year. “I saw him running around. He was so proud of himself. He was so happy, so full of life. And then very shortly afterwards, there he was, just this dead thing on a hospital trolley,” he recalls, before describing himself. “I’ve got this spark. That’s the difference between those two things. We call it life. It’s something extraordinary and the very fact that I’ve got that is a good thing. Even though it’s such a sad one at the moment, I celebrate it.”
Vandenbroucke, who is Catholic, carries on with life — working, running, visiting the places her son loved, such as local restaurants, fishing spots, the Swiss Alps and the Belgian coast — in the belief that she will see him again. “When I see him again and he asks, ‘What have you done?’ I don’t want to have wasted my life,” she says. “Because we will see each other again, I need to do my best.”
Raphaël was a keen sportsman and had always been healthy
COURTESY OF THE FAMILY
In the weeks after Raphaël’s death, friends rallied around. The most helpful ones did not ask how they could help or if they needed food, they just brought over dishes and removed the decision-making process. One friend set up a WhatsApp group, which didn’t include Raphaël’s parents, to communicate with their wider circle about what could be helpful.
Immediately after the tragedy, their house was filled with flowers. The pair suggest that sending bouquets to bereaved friends in later months might be especially appreciated. “You’re a florist shop for a short while and then they all die at the same time,” Vandenbroucke says.
Letters poured in too. “The message received loud and clear in letters sent by Raphaël’s friends was that he was seen as a leader, and an empathetic one, rare qualities for a 17-year-old,” she says. “We did not see all that at home, but felt that he was a boy who managed, for most of the time at least, to be happy in his own skin.”
The couple are hesitant to tell others what to do and repeatedly stress that everyone deals with their own individual grief differently. However, they agree that writing to the bereaved, ideally a letter or card which includes memories and tales of the deceased, offers considerable comfort and will have more long-term resonance. “We will be reading those letters for the rest of our lives,” Pryor says.
Vandenbroucke does not like vague phrases such as “I’m sorry for your loss”. “It’s better to have written than not written but you’re not hurting me by calling it ‘Raphaël’s death’,” she says. Specific language around grief is an interesting subject. For some in mourning, Vandenbroucke included, rather than asking “how are you?”, it’s far better to instead ask “how are you today?”
Four days after Raphaël died his parents returned to Eton for a service of reflection in the school’s chapel attended by the students and staff. “The boys just came straight up to you, looked you straight in the eye, and said, ‘I’m really sorry’,” Pryor recalls. “There’s an awful lot of adults that would find that difficult.”
At the same time, the couple wrote a letter to the shellshocked school community, which was breaking up for the Easter holidays with exams just round the corner. Raphael would have sat A-levels in maths, history and French.
“Raphaël would want you to start having fun again — to celebrate good things and to enjoy your holidays. Raphaël would want those facing public examinations to roll up their sleeves, give of their best, and have no regrets about how much work they have done when looking back,” they wrote. “We are not suggesting you ‘move on’ or forget him, we know you will not do that. We are asking the boys in particular to start again enjoying yourselves and to refocus on your responsibilities towards your own futures. That would be natural and the right thing to do.”
One year later, the reaction of their son’s generation has given them hope. “They do empathy very well. They’re very concerned with what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. These people have looked at their emotions, they’ve not shied away from them,” Pryor says. “That’s not what snowflakes do. Raphy wasn’t a snowflake.”
Over cups of tea and surrounded by photographs of Raphaël, I hear about their happiest memories of him. The first time he caught a fish in Scotland, Christmases with his cousins and trips to visit his maternal grandparents on the Belgian coast where he’d drink hot chocolate, eat pancakes and swim in the sea whatever the temperature.
One Mother’s Day when Raphaël was young he gave Vandenbroucke a “Mum of the Year” cup. Every year the mother and son would joke about whether she had won the accolade again. “He would say, ‘It was very, very tight this year’,” she says, chuckling.
They describe a young man on the cusp of adulthood who found joy in life’s simple pleasures such as one afternoon after Covid lockdowns lifted when he presented his paternal grandparents with a trout wellington that he had made himself.
Raphaël, who spoke fluent Dutch and good French, had planned to work as a ski instructor in Haute-Nendaz, Switzerland, over the winter after leaving school and hoped to study history and French at university.
“He was on an absolute upward curve. We were totally at ease with him and he with us,” Pryor says, smiling. “It means that the slate is terribly clean and you’re grieving and remembering him from a platform of real happiness.”
After having Raphaël in 2006 the couple tried for years to have another child. They told their son that they had tried their best to give him a sibling. “We definitely wanted more children, but the two miscarriages, the ectopic pregnancy and seven failed IVFs were never a real problem during Raphael’s life as we had our happy healthy boy,” Vandenbroucke says. “When he died, the pain of that period of my life hit me properly for the first time.”
They have sought out other parents whose only child has died to share their experiences. “I don’t want to say it’s uniquely awful, although it may be. It’s just different,” Pryor says.
The couple’s joint in-person counselling sessions with a “wonderful” therapist, Valerie, from the charity Child Bereavement UK have helped them navigate their contrasting approaches to grief. The details of how they frame their loss or the best ways to cope differ: while Pryor was keen to accept social invitations early on (crying at events, or “bleeding the radiators”, as he calls it, is fine), Vandenbroucke was aware that she needed time alone.
“You’ve got to understand each other’s differences,” Pryor says. “You’ve got to give room for that and respect it because if you don’t, well, we all know where it’s headed. The statistics for couples sticking together after a thing like this aren’t great.”
Next month, on April 6, Vandenbroucke will run the Brighton marathon to raise money for Child Bereavement UK. She only started running after Raphaël’s death and began training using the NHS app Couch to 5k in the summer. She can now run distances up to 21 miles and has found that the long runs along the Thames help to clear the mind: “It is having a structure in an unstructured grief world that helps.”
If there was a magical pill to take away her pain she would not take it. “We feel the grief so viscerally because we loved him so much,” Vandenbroucke says. “We don’t want to get rid of the grief because the flip side would be we get rid of the love. I never loved anyone as much as him and I will never again.” Her voice catches and her eyes fill with tears.
On Sunday, on the one year anniversary of Raphaël’s death, the couple will visit Eton’s playing fields. In the autumn they gave his friends daffodil bulbs to plant and now they are in bloom.
Their son’s death has taught them lessons about life: the need to accept that there are things you cannot control, the importance of living in the moment because tomorrow is not a given and the value of empathy. “I don’t know how much empathy we had before he died, we’ve got a lot more now,” Pryor says.
Raphaël’s parents want to help other bereaved families
COURTESY OF THE FAMILY
We head upstairs to Raphaël’s small bedroom which is as he left it, full of PG Wodehouse books, family photographs, sports medals and treasured mementos. When her husband is away, Vandenbroucke sleeps in her son’s bed next to his fish cuddly toys.
The night of Raphaël’s death, after driving home from the hospital, they thought they would sell their house, in which Raphaël had lived all his life. The following day, they felt differently: this was a place packed with precious memories.
Early on, they took a friend’s advice to not make any big decisions in the first year of grief. “You realise you’re never going to stop loving with the same intensity so you’ve got your grief for the rest of your life and it’s not going to get smaller,” Pryor says. “Understanding that, in a sense, is a release.”
Vandenbroucke begins crying as she hands me her son’s bookmark. It has a quote attributed to Winnie the Pooh: “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
To sponsor Vandenbroucke for her marathon go to her JustGiving page at https://www.justgiving.com/page/sabine-vandenbroucke-raphy
Visit the charity Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood at www.sudc.org.uk or the charity Child Bereavement UK at www.childbereavementuk.org
