Today, on the 10th anniversary of her daughter Martha’s death, Anne-Marie Cockburn will get married. The day will be emotional – elements of Martha and memories of her will be present, as they are every day – but joyful, too, which says so much about the way Cockburn has tried to live her life. This is an anniversary many parents might have dreaded but, she says: “It’s kind of this reworking and reshaping. But it’s all about love.”
On the afternoon of 20 July 2013, Martha Fernback, who was 15, took half a gram of MDMA, or ecstasy, and collapsed. She was at a lake near her home in Oxford with friends, and Cockburn received a call from the scene; she was told to head to A&E but Martha hadn’t yet been brought in. When she did arrive, Cockburn watched as doctors tried to save her daughter. She remembers calling to Martha in the same tone – raw and primal – that she had last heard from herself as she gave birth. Cockburn couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand. But there was also something else. “In the moment she died in the crash room, the words ‘I have a future, I have a life’ came into my head,” she says. “They were really loud, as if somebody shouted it in my ears, and I just thought: ‘How can you say this? Look at what I’m looking at.’ But that became my mantra: I have a future and I have a life.”
We meet at Cockburn’s house, not far from the lake where Martha died; Cockburn swims there frequently. Sometimes in winter, she will break a hole in the ice, she says with a smile, and “sit like a little frog in sub-zero and get that euphoria, and that connection with nature”. It’s one example, she says, of her bargain with bereavement – she calls it “the bereavement” as if it’s a thing, a capricious beast she has to pay attention to, or negotiate with – “to kind of say: ‘I will accept it, if I can have those moments.’”
I have interviewed several bereaved parents and most have a look of deep weariness and tension in their faces, but Cockburn has a quiet radiance. People expect her to be broken. “All I know is that I had this determination for life like I’ve never had before,” she says. “Martha can’t live her life any more, so all she has is any positive legacy that I put in place for her. Therefore I try really hard to do that.”
This has included talks in schools and prisons, and campaigning to change drugs policy. There is an art prize in Martha’s name and Cockburn, who has a history of community work, is going to start up wellbeing workshops for young women. In the early days, she says she didn’t know what to do with all the love she had for her daughter: “Wanting it to be purposeful and to have meaning because it’s too good to waste.”
Cockburn published a book – 5,742 Days: A Mother’s Journey Through Loss – the title referring to the number of days Martha had lived, and based on diary entries she made from July to October 2013 when her daughter would have turned 16. Writing was therapy – “like a force coming through me” – and it is a beautiful, excruciatingly raw account of the early days of grief, and the experience of losing a teenager. Cockburn didn’t have a partner and Martha was her only child. “Can a family consist of one person?” she writes. People tried to make her feel better, she says, and tell her she was still a mother. But, unlike a widow or an orphan, “there’s no word for me,” she points out.
Cockburn had Martha when she was 26, and had raised her alone from the age of 10 months. At that time, she ran writing workshops for people experiencing depression and anxiety, and later worked as head of finance for an international charity, which took her round the world. Martha went, too. “We had lots of adventures,” she says. “She had an amazing 15 years.”
Being a single parent had challenges. “You are the person who has to do everything, and you haven’t got the good cop, bad cop thing, because it’s all contained within one person. The last year of her life was difficult, for obvious reasons of adolescent struggle, me struggling with an adolescent – and being scared when I saw certain behaviour.” One day, Martha had left her Facebook account open on her mother’s laptop, and Cockburn read messages between her and her friends, discussing where and how they would buy drugs such as ecstasy.
She confronted Martha, who admitted it, which wrongfooted Cockburn, who was expecting a battle. “Then I came up with all sorts of bullshit,” she says with a smile. “You know: ‘I ate organic food when I was pregnant with you, and the sacrifices I’ve made, and why would you do this to yourself?’”
Martha had been struggling – with exam pressure, with her relationship with her father who lived abroad – but she was also an outgoing and curious teenager who wanted to have a summer of fun with friends, and experimenting with drugs was a part of that. “She was a child of her time – she wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t understandable for the era she was living in. I just didn’t know what to do about it.”
She did make Martha promise not to take any drugs, but she also bought a drug-testing kit. “I was going to start testing her,” she says with a grim smile. “That’s where I was at. Policing and monitoring her, rather than saying: ‘I understand why you would want to do this, that you’ll be exposed to things that I never saw in my childhood. I understand that you might have had a really great experience on it.’ I wish I had engaged with her in a more understanding, inquiring way. And if I couldn’t talk her out of it, maybe do some harm reduction.”
Now, she says: “It’s no different to talking to them about alcohol or suncream. It’s the tools your child needs to navigate their adolescent years.” When parents ask her for advice, she tells them to ask their child, repeatedly throughout their lives, what it’s like to be them – it gives them, she thinks, a sense that their parent is trying to understand them. “And really listen to the answer. I wish I’d asked Martha that question. It is simple, but I think there’s a power to it.”
She says she felt very ashamed that Martha had started to experiment with drugs. “I felt embarrassed and I didn’t know where to turn for help.” She approached Martha’s school, and looked online – much of what she read said it was probably a phase the child would grow out of. Martha was clever and had been researching the potential harm of ecstasy in the medical journal the Lancet. “That was a devastating moment for me because this little person was super-bright, searching for good information – like me as a parent. We were both trying hard to get good information.”
In the end Martha took “pure” MDMA powder, probably because she thought it would be safer than taking a pill that might contain other, unknowable ingredients, not realising that she was taking a massive dose.
Cockburn is appalled at successive governments’ failure to tackle drugs sensibly. She is involved in Anyone’s Child, a campaign largely made up of families who have been affected by drugs, for the drugs policy organisation Transform. “All the families have to wake up every day and be brave, and all we’re asking is that the people, the MPs, who represent us be brave in return and make decisions based on what’s going on around the world, and what they know to work.” We need, she says, “a robust and brave drug policy based on science, evidence and reality – based on modern society”. In the meantime, drug deaths have risen in the UK – in 2021, almost 5,000 in England and Wales, and 1,330 in Scotland. “Martha was one – and look at the devastation, not just in me, but in my extended family, who will never recover from this.”
She points to drug decriminalisation in Portugal in 2001, which has resulted in a drop in drug-related deaths and a drop in use by younger people; in the US, Oregon has decriminalised drugs but not quite as successfully. She would like to see regulation, with drugs controlled by the government, not criminal gangs, and so they could be bought, sold in plain packaging like cigarettes, with a label showing contents, maximum dosage and the dangers. Martha took up to 10 times the “safe” dose. Had she known, she would have taken much less: “It’s as simple as that.”
In those agonising, bewildering days after Martha’s death, Cockburn survived with “just basic building blocks of life. It was like the routine you would give a newborn.” Food, water, sleep. She remembers the exhaustion of early grief. “It requires so much and I had very little energy and it was so greedy, the bereavement, it was constantly asking of me.” Friends rushed in, with food and company. “On rotation because I couldn’t be left alone for a while – it was too much.” The space that Martha – funny, loving and spirited, the girl who would confront bullies at school – had filled was empty, “and that amplified the agony”. She was lucky, she says, to have friends to whom she could explain what was going on in her head, and her fears that she would drive them away with her grief. “To bring them on that journey with me has been amazing. I get such generosity from friends.” One friend brought her dog for Cockburn to stroke; another brought her new baby for her to hold. “Little things like that, just beautiful gestures of human nature.”
Her grief forced her to live in the moment. For the first couple of months, she took tranquillisers until she realised that experiencing every emotion, good or bad, might help. She understands being “scared to feel the terrible things you have to feel as a bereaved parent, barely surviving the moments of pain, trying to hope that you can get through the next moment, because I was at the mercy of all of it. I didn’t really know if I was going to make it, but I also had this survival mode that kicked in so strongly – it was both of those things.”
Her painfully blinding new perspective was also quite liberating – most things, she realised, simply did not matter. Martha’s death made the newspapers, and under one online story, riddled with errors – potentially harmful ones, about the type of drug Martha had taken – she read comments saying it had been Martha’s own fault, and attacking her mother. “I just thought, fuck you – you do not know me, you do not know my child.” She adds: “They did me a great favour. I was like, OK, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
She never felt guilty about moments of laughter or happiness, “because the other [painful] moments will come and they did, and they do”. When punishing thoughts surface about what Martha would be like now, and what her children might be like, Cockburn says: “I give myself a moment. It is completely understandable to have these thoughts, but I always try to say: ‘Look at what you have, rather than what you don’t have.’ You meet a 26-year-old and your mind goes to a certain place, and then I bring myself back into being here and being in my life.” She gets great pleasure from Martha’s friends; she recently spent an evening with Martha’s boyfriend of 10 years ago, who has just qualified as a doctor, and his parents and another of Martha’s friends. “We had this wonderful evening and I thought, these young people are amazing and I’m just so glad they are living amazing lives.”
Cockburn never felt anger towards the 17-year-old boy who sold Martha the drugs, nor is she jealous of parents who will never endure such a loss. “We don’t own anybody,” she says. “Our children come through us, but I felt from day one that Martha was her own little person, she had this look on her face, this determination, and I was just there, trying to guide her and do my best. I feel that about everyone’s children – I really do believe: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ There’s no point thinking, why should they have children and I don’t? Why did this happen to me? It’s not going to do me any good. I’m glad I’m not cynical. That would be such a devastating outcome of all of this, to be bitter.”
Still, there is no way to describe the impact, says Cockburn. “I will never not be devastated, my final breath will still contain the devastation of losing Martha and not being able to keep her safe. It’s inevitable. But that doesn’t mean to say that I cannot have a good life.”
It would have helped her to hear that in those early days. She met Andy, who will become her husband today, eight years ago and they took their friendship slowly, getting together a couple of years later. “I was thinking: I’m not trusting anybody with this life, because look what’s happened to me – I can’t trust the universe. I’m on my own.” Now she has Andy, and two young adult stepchildren she is close to.
Over the years, Cockburn became interested in other people who put their lives back together, who started again. What is it that allows them to do that? She thinks for a moment. “Desperation, and hope that they can salvage something. It’s that thing in all of us, which is sort of: ‘I don’t know how, but I’m going to try and do this.’” Simple, but far from easy. “I don’t really know what it was for me, but I knew that I was clinging to the wreckage rather than letting go.”
• In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, SAMHSA’s National Helpline is at 800-662-4357. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
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