This is about my daughter, Joanne, married to Craig with two lovely children, Brianna 6 and Ciaran 3. The day was fine this young family had moved to another part of New Zealand to start a new life. We were visiting and they took my wife and I to a local children's play area where Joanne tried out a small flying fox. She pulled a muscle in her right shoulder and it progressively got worse. The next day a visit to a local medical centre confirmed a small tear in the pectoral muscle. We left to go home a day later, the 27th of October. On the 28th of October we learned she was to be medivacced to Wellington Hospital to undergo as we thought surgery for this torn muscle. That evening we were asked to get to the hospital ASAP as Jo was in toxic shock and on life support. We were in shock now too and flew from Auckland to Wellington Hospital where we met Craig in ICU. The site was devastating - organs failing, blood pressure dropping. Total helplessness as a father to sit and watch the life ebb from our daughter until the whistle and bells from all the machines told us that it was finished some 3 hours after our arrival. She died on 29th October at 2:45 am - burned in my memory. She had, we later learned, necrotizing myositis. Poet John Keats(1795) said it all for us:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
It's loveliness increases
It will never pass into nothingness
No safer place than in Gods memory Jhn 5:28-29