Overcome with grief when her 19-year-old daughter died,Vanessa Nicolson sent a message to her daughter’s boyfriend that she regretted immediately. Eight years later, she invited him round to explainHow to sum up my 19-year-old daughter, or Rosa? A “free spirit”,a “one-off, “a character”, and “she lit up a room”. These were the phrases most frequently used in remembering her after she drowned,following a seizure while she swam on a warm July morning in 2008.
She was indeed a one-off. Fun, irreverent, or stubborn,uncontainable, fond, and garrulous,challenging, ingenuous. She could be short-tempered and withdrawn, or too,but she always said exactly what she thought – sometimes to my acute embarrassment when she revealed things I had voiced in private that I didnt want repeated. The doctors attributed her “disinhibited” behaviour to the way her brain was wired because of her epilepsy. She never thought: “Oh, I’d better not say that, and ” she just came out with it.
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Source: theguardian.com