In the last few weeks, we heard of two foreign families of two men who were killed suddenly in an accident. They complained the authorities were giving them no information about what was happening.
Asger Emil Neidhardt, a 23-year-old Danish IT worker, was killed when he was hit by a car in 2023. His father told Times of Malta: “Ten days after the accident, my son arrived in Denmark in a coffin, and we never heard from the Maltese authorities about what happened to him” (January 16).
The father was advised by the Danish ambassador in Rome to contact the attorney general. He sent eight e-mails and all received the same curt reply: “Please be informed that the inquiry is not yet concluded.”
While the police claimed they had kept in touch with the family, the father insisted no one had ever made contact with them. They were left in the dark for 15 months.
Dieter Vink, 54, who lived and worked in Malta, died in hospital after his motorcycle crashed into a skip lying in the road behind a curve. The skip had not just appeared: it had been there for months and it had been reported multiple times but no action was taken.
His distraught parents complained to The Sunday Times of Malta (February 16) that “no one [from the authorities] has been in touch at all… We are utterly disgusted”. A magisterial inquiry is ongoing.
There will be other unreported cases, Maltese and foreign. Being foreign often means one has few non-official sources of information, the grapevine that builds up the picture of what happened.
Fallout of sudden death
As anyone who has sustained the loss of a loved one knows, bereavement is perhaps the most painful event one can go through in life.
I have looked after patients with terminal cancer for over 30 years and have met many who had suffered such a loss within the last few months.
Even though they were themselves months or weeks from death, sometimes suffering from severe cancer pain or severe disability, everything else seemed to recede for them: the bereavement occupied centre stage, the pain of everything else paling in comparison.
A death is always acutely painful, though not everyone’s life is disrupted in the same way. The death of a son or daughter far more so; the sense that this is the wrong order of things is overwhelming.
A sudden death of someone who should, by all accounts, still be very alive is massively worse, for nothing prepares one; there was no chance to say the things one wanted to say; to tie up loose ends; to give that death some sort of meaning, some form of redemption.
When that death is violent, voluntary or through negligence, the stakes are magnified again.
And when it happens in a land far away, one feels one was not there to protect the loved one, one cannot visit the body or the grave easily; if one visits, they have to wrench themselves away much too soon; one is flummoxed by the unfamiliar procedure which then of necessity takes over.
Casual callousness
What shocks is the casual callousness of the authorities who are unable to give the parents anything above a standard bureaucratic response. The parents are not asking for firm conclusions; they are asking for information about what happened as it is gathered.
It is nothing short of monstrous to treat people who have suffered such grievous loss with frosty distancing- Victor Pace
They understand that this may develop over time, that new information may come in that alters the picture they were first given. But they are met with this searing silence by petty (never has that word been more appropriate) officials hiding behind legalistic babble.
There is no legal reason why information cannot be shared with those who have just lost what was dearest in their lives, who will every day for the rest of their lives think of that loss and grieve for it.
Being given no information about the one thing that constantly occupies their existence amplifies the feeling, brought on by sudden senseless death, that their loved one was considered expendable in the big wide world. That is truly horrifying.
Desperate need for information
In sudden death, that phone call, that one sentence, forever divides life into a before and after. A profound sense of loss of purpose in life – Dieter Vink’s mother said there are days she struggles to get out of bed – is common, as are periods of intense anger, sometimes even directed at the loved one who died, guilt, fear and panic, and so on.
Life loses its anchor. Marital relationships may break down, mental ill-health is common and self-harm, suicide or early death of the bereaved are not uncommon.
The only things that help root one back into life are kindness and information. The Maltese approach fails abysmally on both.
So what is needed?
What is needed is a shift in structures and a shift in attitudes.
A former UK colleague, a child psychotherapist working in bereavement, used to give courses at the Police Training College in Hendon to police trainees about working with death and bereavement.
The police in many countries have family liaison officers whose job it is to support families who have suffered violent death, take them through the legal processes that need to be followed and keep them informed throughout new developments, exactly what the current inhuman system is failing to do in Malta.
But, above all, we need a shift in attitude. It is nothing short of monstrous to treat people who have suffered such grievous, senseless, life-altering loss with frosty distancing. Public servants need to recognise that a deep humanity is core to their job of service.
No law comes above health. Officials need to skill up and to appreciate their crucial role in supporting those so deeply scarred to recover some sort of faith in life and justice. They need to build the structures to facilitate this.
Someone in our country has not treated these families’ children with care.
As a country, we owe it to them not to massively compound the pain.
Victor PaceVictor Pace is a palliative medicine consultant working in the UK who frequently works with the bereaved.