Andrew is my cousin, but we grew up in Hong Kong, close as brothers. I had his back when we were in Buster Browns and flip-flops. We lived together when he came to London for Uni and I had his back in Willesden too. When he came to visit me in Zambia, apart from some minor incidents with an empty dive tank, a perilous cross-country motorcycle ride and smallish crocodile, I still had his back; like my little brother.

He was way ahead of me when it came to getting married and starting a family and there were years when I would come back to London and watch with such pride the father that Andrew became. His love for Jesse and Luke, his engagement with and inclusion of them in the passions of his life, and his formidable wit and humour were all gifts of nurture which his sons embraced and part of what made them both such fine young men. My visits were too infrequent and I watched the boys grow from toddlers to men in snapshots, sometimes years apart, but I was always inspired when we met again by the bond of profound and unconditional love they shared. Andrew is my role model as a father, and the best that I can give my sons was distilled from watching him.

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jesse in Zambia and it was like time-travel, like teaching his Dad how to ride a motorbike again, thirty years on; there is so much of Andrew in his boys. I wish more than anything I could have had the same opportunity with Luke, to have him to myself for a while and become his friend, man-to-man. And to perhaps know the dragons he fought with in his mind every day. I might have been able to show him that impossible and exhausting as it feels to have a mind like an unreliable car that you have to get up and fix every bloody morning before you can drive the crappy thing, it is possible to get beyond the rockiest patch of road and make it to the next pit-stop; even on two flat tyres with your gearbox dragging on the road.

I know that Fiona and Andrew, never for a moment gave up on Luke, however hard his struggle was. Their love and support and that of Jesse, Kate, his new little brother and sister, all his adoring close family and his real friends who cherished him in the light and tried to keep him from the dark, must have given his heart so much comfort and strength. But our minds are wonderful, scintillating and sometimes treacherous things from which there is no escape.

Fiona, Jesse, Andrew .... you never failed Luke. Not for a moment.

You had his back. But “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
                                                                                                                                                         ― John Milton, Paradise Lost