EYES hollow with despair and grief, broken mum Sharon Howard lies in a Bangkok hospital and prepares to tell the most harrowing story you will ever read.
Next to her bedhead are much thumbed and tear-stained pictures of her two treasured little boys and the beloved man she was to marry—three lives torn away from her by a giant wave of death.
For photos are all Sharon, 37, has left to cling to after the dreadful day the tsunami engulfed her family.
No bodies have been found. And she knows that the little faces of Mason, eight, and six-year-old Taylor—smiling at her from the pictures—are gone forever along with her 44-year-old fiancé David.
Inconsolable, Sharon today takes a tentative step towards an unimaginable future by telling—for the first time in her own dramatic, heartbreaking and achingly tender words —the full story of what happened that terrifying Boxing Day morning in Thailand.
ON HER SONS: "I saw the wave coming through the hotel room window. It seemed to reach the sky. I was hysterical, shouting, ‘The boys! The boys!' as I ran for the door.
"But it was too late because as I started to open it I was staring at a wall of water."
"I didn't even have a chance to kiss them goodbye that morning. They were so excited as they ran off to the kids' club. Now I just wished I could have hugged and kissed them one last time."
ON HER FIANCÉ: "As the water rose inside the room David kept pushing me up. There were bruise marks on my arm in the shape of his fingers where he so desperately tried to keep my head above the water.
"When all the fight in me was gone I called to David that I loved him and said goodbye and he called back he loved me too.
"I blacked out—and the next thing I knew David was floating lifeless next to me. I shook him and begged him not to die but it was too late."
ON HER SURVIVAL: "An Australian man threw some towels tied together to me from the roof of the hotel as I floated outside. I hardly had any strength left but I grabbed it and he hoisted me up to the second floor.
"I ran round the rooms to try to see the boys out of the windows. But all I could see was utter devastation.
"Someone cried, ‘There's another wave coming!'. I just sat down in despair and hoped it would take me with it. I knew my boys had died—and I wanted to go with them.
"The day the wave took away David and my two beautiful boys my life ended."
Like so many others of the thousands who died, Sharon was on a dream holiday with her little family— made even more blissful by commercial deep sea diver David proposing to her on Christmas Day in the Thai beach resort of Khao Lak.
They had been together five years and single mum Sharon thought David the perfect father for Mason, Taylor and her eldest son. 17-year-old Jack, who had stayed at home in Hayle, Cornwall.
"It was a wonderful day," says Sharon. "Mason had even asked David if he could call him Daddy that morning because he loved him so much and David was so so happy. We were all on top of the world." They had even splashed out on upgrading their second floor room for a bigger and nicer one on the first floor. It was a fatal decision. For next morning their world was to end in horror.
At 8.30am on Boxing Day, Sharon was back at her room after breakfast while David dropped Taylor and Mason off at the ground-floor kids, club near reception at the Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa.
"As they rushed out of the room I called after them, ‘See you later' and that I would check on them in an hour. They were in such a rush, as little boys are, to get outside.
"In a few minutes David came back to the room. He said Mason had decided not to go to kids' club and just wanted to sit by the pool and play with his Gameboy.
"We could see where he was sat from our hotel window so that was OK. Then from nowhere I heard this almighty roar.
"It was like the noise a 747 jet makes when it comes in to land. David turned to me and said, ‘What the hell was that?'
"The next second we looked out the window and saw this huge wave coming straight at us. It must have been 30ft high. Then it went pitch black. David shouted, ‘Oh my God'. The windows had smashed and water was fast coming into the room.
"David is used to being in water but I am petrified of it and am not a strong swimmer. I could not see him but I could feel David was beside me and he kept saying, ‘We will be all right, it will go down soon'.
"But it kept coming in and coming in and I was fighting for breath as I was sucked under. It was rising so fast we were pushed up towards the ceiling.
"It began to dawn on me the water would soon eat up the entire room and there would be no space to breathe. All the time David kept pushing me up. All the time I kept thinking of my two sons fighting for life without me.
"Like me, Mason is frightened of water if he can't touch the bottom and I knew he would be paralysed with fear, crying for his mum.
"Taylor was the more adventurous of the two so I prayed he would have a fighting chance of saving himself.
"Within minutes the water was almost to the top of the room and both David and I were trying to crawl up the wall in the pitch black. We were underneath the water by this time and my strength was fading fast.
"I always thought if I had to die, drowning might be a quick way to go. Now I know it is the most gruesome experience imaginable.
"I kept screaming to David, ‘I'm going down' as it got harder and harder to come up for air. Then, as all the strength drained out of my body. I was overtaken by what I can only describe as a sense of calm as I accepted the fact I was going to die.
"It was then that I called to David that I loved him and said goodbye. Then I said, ‘I'm going, I'm going'. I don't know how long I blacked out for but I woke as I started to be violently sick. By now the water had gone down to my neck and as I looked to my left I saw David.
"My foot was balanced on the side of a dressing table which was fixed to the wall. It meant my head was almost touching the ceiling.
"As I shook him I was crying so hard my chest hurt. But he was just lifeless and I knew if I was to have a chance of finding my boys I had to somehow get out of the room and go and get help.
"Leaving David there was the most painful decision I ever had to make. I can still hear my sobs now. I didn't know he'd be washed away."
She then fought for her own survival. "Some of the door came away and as I stared at the chink of light I knew it was my only hope.
"I crawled through it, vomiting all the time because of the amount of sea water I had swallowed. Everywhere around me I heard men and women shouting for help and children crying for their mummies and daddies.
"When I got outside I couldn't believe my eyes. Trees, tables, cots and debris were just floating everywhere. I just dreaded the thought of seeing my little boy float past me too.
"Then a fear started to grow in me as I realised the chances of Mason and Taylor surviving were non-existent. I kept shouting their names at the top of my voice.
"Then an Australian man could see I was struggling to stay afloat and called down from the roof of a building. He had tied some towels together and begged me to take hold of them so he could pull me up. I told him I did not have any strength left. But in a calm voice he told me I had to trust him so I held on and he hoisted me to the second floor."
As the water level subsided sobbing Sharon waded down to reception on her way to look for her children.
"When I got there I could see people sat above me balancing on a beam in the roof and I thought I had to get up there to safety. Someone had said there was another wave coming.
"As I sat there I cried thinking of how the boys had died petrified without their mummy to look after them.
"I always said I would be there for them and when it mattered I felt I let them down."
After a while, as the threat of a second wave seemed to recede, Sharon climbed down off the beam and began looking for her children again.
Even though she knew they were most probably dead she wanted to hold their bodies one last time.
She began running as fast as she could through the obliterated grounds of what was once a luxury hotel. All the time she called her boys' names as she glanced at bodies.
"I was dressed in only my bikini and had no shoes. There was debris everywhere ripping through the soles of my feet but I knew I had to keep on looking.
"I knew there were dead bodies all around me but I could not bear to look at their faces. I just looked for the clothes the bodies were wearing to see if they matched the boys'." Then she plucked up all her remaining courage to face the horrors that she believed awaited her in the kids' club.
"As soon as I got to the area below reception I knew poor Taylor could not possibly have got out alive," says Sharon. "At first I was too frightened to go down the stairs into the room, terrified of what I might find.
"My legs were like jelly. But I went down. One look at the room and I knew my son was dead. The windows were smashed in and water was everywhere. The roof at the back of the room had started to fall down. And bobbing in the water were coloured balls from the ball pool. Then there were scores of children's play mats, felt tip pens which they had been colouring with and even an air hockey table all floating in the water.
"But there were no bodies—they had all been swept away. Mason had been round the pool and so I knew he was gone too.
"So I ran down a dirt track which led away from the hotel and begged a Thai man to give me his shoes because the skin on the soles of my feet was ripped to shreds. And thankfully he did.
"Then someone pulled me onto their moped and whisked me away to a medical centre." She was taken up to Takua Pa Hospital 10 miles away inland. "The hospital was like something out of a horror movie," she says. "There was blood and bodies everywhere.
"I kept checking each one desperately hoping to find my family. At one point I saw a little white leg poking out of a body bag and my blood ran cold.
"But when I pulled it back I realised it was someone else's dead child. Then I found someone with a mobile phone and begged them to use it.
"It was then I called my sister Beverley and told them I was OK but that I had lost the boys and David. I was inconsolable and screaming with grief. I told her to phone my friend Johnny in Bangkok and tell him to come and get me." For the next 24 hours Sharon sat huddled on the roof of the hospital dressed in a muddy skirt and jumper she had found at the side of a road.
Hour after hour she would trawl the hospital looking for David and her boys.
"I sat on the roof that night praying for David, Taylor and Mason. I have never felt so traumatised. Everywhere people were sat, their eyes full of fear.
"Then there were the people who were reunited with their loved ones and as much as I hate to say it I felt so, so jealous. Jealous that they had everything while I had nothing."
Amid the wailing and weeping in the darkness Sharon's mind wandered back to the wonderful last days she had shared with Mason, Taylor and David, desperately holding on to the memories. "I could see the boys running to the pool without even waiting for their trunks to be unpacked and stripping down to their underpants and just diving straight in," she says. "They were in seventh heaven.
"Then there was a magical Christmas Eve when we watched as Santa arrived on a boat, handing presents to children on the beach.
"On Christmas Day morning the boys jumped on our bed at 6.30 screaming with excitement.
"All of us sat cuddling up together and, as ever, the first thing I said to the boys was that I loved them as I gave them a kiss. Then we all exchanged our presents.
"I had wrapped the boys some new outfits to wear on Christmas Day and some Gameboy games which they are crazy about. And David had given me a handbag. I gave him a shirt. We were just sitting relaxing after we had eaten pizza for lunch when David said to me, ‘How do you fancy picking out an engagement ring when we stop at Dubai on our way home?'
"Immediately I shrieked yes. I had been praying he would one day ask me but as we both have been through divorces I never dreamt he would.
"He is not the type of man to go down on one knee but it was everything I dreamt it would be."
Sharon still lapses into the present tense when she talks about her lost loved ones. She was still too grief-stricken to let go as she sat under the stars on that hospital roof.
And she still is today as she recovers in Bumrungrad Hospital, Bangkok after being flown there by her friend Johnny.
She remains on morphine and antibiotics for the infection in her cuts and anti-depressants to cope with the bottomless wounds of grief. At her bedside is her stunned sole surviving son Jack who flew out to be with his mum.
Since he has arrived, Jack has done his best to lift his mum's spirits. Although part of her wishes she had died with Mason, Taylor and David, Jack gives her the reason to go on.
"Jack is all I have got left and my only reason for living. Without him I don't know how I would cope," says Sharon
"We have sat and cried together and talked and talked about the boys and David. He has been brilliant."
Now Sharon is waiting for the day she can go home. But she is so torn. For there is still a large part of her that wants to stay in this devastated land.
"I really don't know how I can ever go home," she says, "knowing my little boys and David are lying out there, somewhere, all on their own."
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