Personal journey
When her son William died in a tragic accident, Sarah Reid wanted to remember him in a positive way. Now she and her family and friends have raised thousands of pounds to build a school in Zambia in his memory
From the moment my son William arrived in the world – 12 minutes after I got to hospital – he was always in a hurry to get on with life. As a child growing up in Edinburgh, he’d get up at 6am and ask what we were going to do that day.
When he was three, he had an accident. His foot went under a lawnmower and his tendons were severed. He was in hospital for three nights and, feeling he was not as sick as the other children on the ward, busied himself by giving them books and sweets. When he came home, he told his dad and me that he wanted to be a doctor.
His brother, Cameron, was born two years after him, in 1996. They were there for each other when their father, Hamish, and I divorced in 2002. I was 16 when we’d met and we had grown apart. Hamish and I found new partners – he married Anne, and I met Steve – but we were always committed to co-parenting our children.
William was nine when he first visited Africa with Steve and me. He adored seeing animals in their natural habitat and he’d tick off the ones he’d seen on a list. We went to a Masai village in Kenya and he gave the children pens and notebooks. He always said he’d love to go back and help the children there. As a teenager, he went to Zambia with his father and they built a well and went down the Zambezi River together.
Hamish is a GP and we were both so proud when William started at the University of Aberdeen Medical School. William was always very organised and the kind of son who never forgot about Mothering Sunday or my birthday – often giving his brother a nudge, too. He always gave me big hugs and had a great sense of humour. He loved being around people and wasn’t the type to be on his own.
At university, he met Kirsty Summers, who was studying law. They were inseparable, even after he graduated and moved to Newcastle to take up his first placement. I liked her a lot and was delighted when he told me one night over dinner that they were planning to get a flat together and he wanted to marry her.
TERRIBLE LOSS
The last time I saw William was just after Christmas 2019. He had a few days off work before going to France to spend New Year skiing with Kirsty and his father a
