Finny in the Sunday Times (07.2025)

Magpie Eye Photography

In the aftermath of the inquest into Finlay's death, we wrote for the Sunday Times about the whole catastrophe, and about just how much we miss our little baby boy.

This time around, we are raising money for the Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood charity

The Sunday Times article can be found here.

__ The UK’s coat of arms is quite something. A crown-wearing golden lion flanks one side of an ornate shield, while the other side is propped up by a unicorn — that stalwart beast of Britain — sporting a snazzy golden mane, golden horn, golden hoofs, and a chintzy necklace of crowns suggesting it has been domesticated for heraldic duty. There’s also another little lion, another crown, and assorted foliage, all atop some green turf.

I paid attention to these preposterous details, desperate for a distraction from the inquest into the death of our two-year-old little boy. Finlay — or Finny to his friends, and FinnBear to us — was our only child, and heartbreakingly beautiful; a cute little person with white-blonde locks, a 1,000-watt smile and a giggle to match.

As a family, we were revoltingly happy, having mastered the art of understanding precisely how lucky we were. Life bumbled along in a haze of love, watching FinnBear emerge into the sweetest of children — happy to toddle off to nursery, bash through his Weetabix, potter about with his friends, earnestly help with the sweeping up, and, upon seeing us at the end of the day, burst into a beatific smile and barrel into our arms every pickup time. We were smitten.

Then, one morning last July, Finlay had a tummy ache. When neither yoghurt nor Hey Duggee came to the rescue, we went to the GP who suggested A&E if things didn’t improve. Later that afternoon we took him to the Whittington Hospital in north London where, over nine gruelling hours, we ticked off the increasingly familiar list of deathly NHS misery and systemic failure.

Paediatric A&E was described as “exceptionally” busy by staff. At that time the Whittington’s internal policies judged their staffing levels “unsafe”, though this wasn’t communicated to the A&E department. The conditions were filthy, we spent most of our time in the corridors where Finlay was repeatedly examined on my knee. Throughout the nine hours, no complete set of observations was ever taken, which no one seemed to notice. We asked to move to Great Ormond Street Hospital on a number of occasions but were rebuffed.

Key diagnostic resources — an ultrasound and an in-house surgical consultation — were not available. The few tests they managed were botched: an X-ray was misread, and a wildly anomalous blood test remained unexplained. Carrier pigeons would have been more reliable communication methods between Whittington nurses and doctors, and between the Whittington and Great Ormond Street where a consultation was sought.

Still with no observations and no clue as to the blood test, we were discharged around 1am. When we woke up at 8am, Finny wasn’t breathing. I tried and failed to resuscitate him on his play mat. A dozen ambulance crew and police came and similarly failed. He was then taken back to the Whittington where he died.

It’s an odd thing knowing with serene clarity that you’ve experienced the worst day of your life. You are above all else an abidingly loving father, a besotted mother, a studiously worrying and caring parent. Then you’re not. One minute you were busily organising every facet of your life around FinnBear — feeding, reading, carrying, tickling, kissing, laughing, learning — until you’re not, and that entire reason for existing is wrenched away.

CS Lewis, writing of his own bereavement, remarked that grief is like losing a limb. Indeed, the physicality of grief took me by surprise — how the body remembers what the mind struggles to accept. For months after I could viscerally recall the phantom weight of carrying him: tilting my head to the right, his bonce nestling into the crook of my neck, his breezy hair tickling my chin; carrying his 11.9kg on my bent left arm, his legs wrapping around me, his little podge squashed into my chest; his taut right arm snaking around my back, his left around my neck idly fiddling with my collar.

In the face of this life-deranging calamity, the Whittington’s response was awful: cold, confused and incompetent. We had to beg for a referral for grief support. We repeatedly insisted that the Whittington could not investigate itself. This was just one piece of the wider NHS approach: sloppy correspondence with spelling mistakes and incorrect details, including our name.

After a three-month cooling-off period before we could join grieving groups — honestly, that’s what most impose — we found others who have been similarly transformed by death. Now sad but amiable misfits, we feel a permanent sense of aloofness in society, at work, and with friends and family. We meet sombrely to focus on our departed kids and our subsequently dishevelled lives. This sounds depressing but it is warming not to be alone, to be quietly and entirely understood, and to actively be in a place where I can and should speak about FinnBear.

In our small flat, his door remained closed for 324 days, probably on the quicker side of average. Through all those days, as the exquisitely painful first weeks bled into merely awful months, distraction became essential. Time horizons narrowed to hours, with any peeping into the longer term returning a vertiginous feeling of horror and absence. When the future holds only emptiness, you learn not to look.

The grieving heart, it turns out, operates by quantum rather than classical rules, existing simultaneously in multiple emotional states. Us misfits retain an enduring pain and sadness. FinnBear is forever on my mind — I burble his name as I cycle around London, memories crash through to reality daily, taking your breath away, and, having not moved flat, everything reminds me of him. Indeed, we do not get over our losses, we just learn, hopefully, to carry the loss with more equanimity, relegating the scorching sadness to the peripheries. So, over time, amid the endless hum of misery we endure like emotional tinnitus, competing feelings appear furtively. I cannot find or admit that anything has joy any more, but I can recognise that something or some situation is objectively good. That is as far as I can go right now, and that’s fine.

Earlier this month, alongside my wife, I brought my hard-won, totteringly unstable, patched-up equilibrium to the inquest and into the maw of the British institutions that deal with life and death. Do your very best to imagine the kind of protocols that produce a system where every email has as its subject line: Finlay Joshua Roberts (died on: 12/07/2024) (ref: 12345678) and, in bold in the email the line: “NOTE: Please do not edit the subject line when replying to this email.”

One doesn’t need a PhD in human decency to grasp that this will be traumatic for families. You’re managing your day, the hum there as ever, perhaps it’s even a not-entirely-awful day, you flick onto your email and BANG! Doubtless, some apparatchik would explain why this works this way, a system engineered for bureaucratic efficiency at the expense of basic humanity.

The faux formality of the inquest also grates. It is a serious business, but the standing, bowing, ma’am-ing, assigned seating, clipped admonishment of those in the room reeks of performance over necessity. Mercifully, our inquest lasted only one day at St Pancras coroner’s court, a grand little room carrying the unmistakable whiff of a minor public-school chapel, complete with aggressively uncomfortable pews.

Surprisingly, it turns out that the frolicking unicorn is less absurd than the inquest system’s approach to preventing future deaths. Coroners can issue prevention of future death reports to hospitals or NHS trusts, essentially anyone with authority to implement change. Yet these reports amount to little more than bureaucratic theatre: they carry no legal force, exist without central coordination, and routinely vanish into institutional indifference. Our coroner had already issued two such reports to local hospitals — unbeknown to any medical professionals at the inquest — about similar problems that had contributed to deaths elsewhere and were present in Finny’s case.

Ultimately, the coroner wrote a “narrative” verdict. After putting the boot into the Whittington’s ineptitude, she concluded: “However, it is unclear whether, if all care had been delivered as it should have been, Finlay’s life would have been saved. He would have had a chance.”

At the time of writing, the coroner is still considering whether to issue another PFD notice.

Systems should be defined by what they do, not what they are supposed to achieve. The PFD system, it seems to me, exists more to document repetitive disaster than prevent it. And so, tomorrow, or next month, or next year, another family will learn that their child died in reasonably preventable circumstances, from causes already flagged by coroners, through institutional failures long documented in previous PFD reports. They will sit through the same ceremonial farrago, learning that their devastating loss was neither inevitable nor unforeseen, but recorded, bureaucratically forgotten, and condemned to repeat.

We neither expect nor seek “closure” — that peculiar modern delusion. Rather, we turn now to remember the other 99.9 per cent of his life and the near-three years we had of mundane minute-to-minute magic of kisses and cuddles for which we remain grateful, if we shall be forever desperate for just one moment with our little Bear.