Father's memoir tribute to son who died after match

Liam Walsh said he found comfort in writing

A grieving father has spoken movingly about losing his son to Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC) to help other bereaved families.

Keen Swindon Town fan Liam Walsh has written about the overwhelming sense of loss after his son Patrick, 15, collapsed suddenly after watching a football match and never made it home.

Mr Walsh, who has written a book, Red Balloons, to raise money for the charity SUDC UK, said: "I was desperately looking for answers and meaning and found comfort in writing.

"I hope the book will be a comfort to those navigating their own grief as it is a story not only of loss but also of hope."

In January 2020, Patrick had been at a football match watching Tottenham Hotspur against Middlesbrough with his brother Euan.

As they hurried to catch the last train out of Marylebone, Patrick collapsed and died suddenly and unexpectedly, still without a known cause.

Patrick collapsed and died suddenly and unexpectedly in January 2020

SUDC is the sudden and unexpected death of a child, between one and 18 years of age, which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation is conducted.

Approximately 40 children in the UK are affected by SUDC each year.

Two weeks later Mr Walsh's father, Mick, who had previously been diagnosed with an asbestos-related cancer, also died.

Red Balloons traces the last months in the lives of Mr Walsh's son and father and how he endured the following ones.

It is the family's story told through Patrick and his grandfather.

Mr Walsh's father Mick died two weeks after Patrick

Like his father, Patrick was a keen football fan, first visiting Swindon's County ground as a toddler. He also enjoyed cricket, horse-racing, rugby and the Gaelic Irish sport of hurling.

"One thing that became obvious was that it wasn't just our loss, it was a community loss," said Mr Walsh.

"There was a huge level of comfort in that but also it took us quite some time to understand the scale of grief that was impacting hundreds around us, not just ourselves.

"The importance of what the club (Swindon Town Football Club) meant to us became really, really clear in the days and weeks afterwards and we continue to go to games," he added.

Patrick was a keen sports fan enjoying everything from football to the Gaelic Irish sport of hurling

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Red Balloons is a very personal account of loss but it is also about trying to find hope amidst the grief and looking forward.

"The grief itself doesn't go away but more things in your life grow around it," said Mr Walsh.

"If you take the analogy of grief as a marble in a jar on day one - that's the only thing in your jar.

"Over the course of three years, other things will go in the jar as well but that original marble is still there.

"That grief is still central to each and every day.

"Maybe the intense waves are a little less frequent than they have been but when they come, they come.

"I don't think it's something that will leave us," he explained.

Mr Walsh said the family were "immensely proud" of Patrick

While acknowledging that it remained difficult to look at photographs of Patrick as his grief is still raw, Mr Walsh said he had no regrets.

"Right from the outset we were immensely proud of who he was and we knew at the time (of his death) what memories we had created," he said.

"We felt we had nothing left unsaid and we'd lived absolutely everything to the full in what we did together."

Rob MacDonald, director of Halcyon Publishing, said: "We're immensely privileged to be publishing this story, to be helping Liam preserve his memories of Patrick and Mick for life and to be supporting a brilliant charity in SUDC UK.

"It is a book which passionately preserves them and the beating heart of their stories."

Nikki Speed, CEO at SUDC UK, said: "We believe that by shining a light on SUDC, we can better understand these tragedies in order to predict and prevent them in the future."

Red Balloons was released on Father's Day 2023 and a share of the proceeds from every copy sold will go to SUDC UK.

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