Gareth Eve needed no reminder that his wife had died too young, but the process of clearing her wardrobe provided one anyway. ‘It was all wrong,’ he says.
‘I remembered my dad doing it when my grandad died, but then they were sorting out an old man’s suits and cardigans and walking sticks — the sort of things you should be dealing with in this situation.
‘You aren’t supposed to be faced with bright bikinis, yellow high heels, dresses that still have the labels on them and Kylie Minogue T-shirts.’
Lisa Shaw, an award-winning radio presenter on Radio Newcastle, was just 44 when she died in May 2021. Until she was admitted to hospital she had been fit, healthy and fizzing with the sort of energy her job on the morning show required.
Her devastated colleagues had to announce her death on air, but it was down to Gareth, now 43, to tell their six-year-old son Zach that his ‘mam’ wasn’t coming home. ‘I told him the morning after Lisa died. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
‘He climbed into our bed for a cuddle and I said the doctors had tried everything they could but they couldn’t make her better again. He cried, but you don’t know how much kids understand.
‘I’m not religious, but I told him Lisa was in Heaven, which was a perfect place where she’d see Grandad again, and Sally – my dad’s dog.’
Zach is now eight, still too young to have the full facts of his mother’s death explained to him, but there is no question what killed her. In August 2021, Newcastle Coroner Karen Dilks recorded that Lisa had died ‘due to complications of an AstraZeneca Covid vaccination’.
‘That word AstraZeneca is on her death certificate,’ points out Gareth.
Lisa had been vaccinated on April 29, but started developing headaches a week later. On May 13, she was admitted to hospital where Gareth, reeling, was handed a print-out explaining what ‘vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia’ was.
It’s a rare condition (‘but not rare enough that they didn’t have a print-out,’ he says) leading to clots on the brain.
