A year without my son — I've finally opened his bedroom door

Times

10-07-2025

Saturday July 12 marks 365 days, one full year, since our gorgeous two-year-old, Finny, died after a nine-hour cavalcade of incompetence at the Whittington Hospital in north London. This past year has trundled along in a haze of misery. But somehow, we are still here.
As the anniversary approached, my wife Liz and I found ourselves at odds with the received wisdom of fellow parents in our bereavement group. Among this community of kindly misfits, anniversaries are a big deal — the year's emotional epicentre. Someone is always near an anniversary of a death, a diagnosis or some other wretched milestone, counted down with foreboding weeks in advance. Birthdays, especially, once the apex of happiness, are now the most confusing of painful occasions. The strategy seems to be that anticipating the trauma will either diminish its impact or at least allow for proper preparation.
There is nothing wrong with this approach, but we haven't found the idea of marking the anniversary helpful for our grief. We don't want to focus on the last, painful fractions of Finny's life over the joy that came before. Spending weeks dreading a date heaps suffering on to an already barely tolerable situation. I missed Finny neither more nor less yesterday than I will tomorrow.
• I yearn for his cuddles and kisses — Christmas without our son
Whatever the date, we are ambushed by memories. Finny is forever with us — tootling his little pink pram around the local shop (where he was a cheeky menace); having a disco tea party in the front room with his menagerie of teddies, plus Mummy and Daddy, of course. I can still recall the weight of him in my arms — his little head nestling in the crook of my neck.
There's comfort in these memories, but there's also the business of surviving day to day. Pictures and videos are still almost entirely off-limits — his ready smile beaming through so brightly remains too raw. Damn inconveniently, I can't walk down the road round the corner where, after much coaching, I taught him his first words: 'tree' and 'car' (after 'Daddy', of course). Nor have I eaten a bowl of pasta since — Finny's favourite and, as it would transpire, his last meal.
But you can't anticipate everything. Most recently, I watched Grand Designs revisit its first episode, seeing a baby born during construction in 1999 emerge today a happy twentysomething in a Dorset idyll, prompting spiralling thoughts about how Finny will never get to grow up.
While many insist that 'the second year is the worst' — thanks for that — they are surely wrong. I don't expect year two to be a walk in the park, for memories to fade, love to be dimmed, or sadness to be quashed, but there is precisely zero chance that the awfulness of the first days and weeks after Finny's death will return.
The unique horror of that day stands in isolation. After a family meal celebrating the start of the summer holidays, Finny woke up the next morning with a tummy ache. When Hey Duggee and a bath failed to work their magic, we took him to the GP, and still with no improvement, the paediatric A&E department at the Whittington Hospital in north London.
What ensued was a nine-hour horror show encapsulating the NHS at its very worst. He was discharged in the early hours of the morning to return the next day, but when we awoke, he wasn't breathing. I desperately tried to resuscitate him, myriad paramedics arrived, but nothing could be done.
If there is a secret to surviving thus far, it lies in one fundamental principle: never contemplate the long term. This approach has carried me through the initial abandonment by the Whittington in our deepest moments of need, past Finny's third birthday only a month later, and through our first bleak Christmas without him.
Immediately after Finny died, my contemplation horizon was 30 minutes. For an entire summer, I zealously followed this mantra, desperately trying to fill days to accelerate time's passage. Any peering above the half-hour parapet toward the long term brought stomach-roiling horror, where life without Finny became unbearable to contemplate. These days, I'm less paranoid about the timeframe. I am able to think whole days ahead. But I'm still terrified of absent-mindedly thinking about years. The future remains mostly pointless, so best not contemplate it.
Last month, testing all coping mechanisms to the brink, we endured the inquest into Finny's death, a double-edged disaster: you want accountability and answers, but the emotional cost is sky high. Hour after hour of stark medical testimony unfolded as the Whittington doctors who oversaw Finny's substandard care bumbled through events they hardly remembered, consulting notes they barely seemed to have read.
• I sat through an inquest into my toddler's avoidable death
The experience was, of course, singularly awful for us. The litany of mistakes and failures revealed in clinical black and white was heartbreaking: full observations never taken, inadequate staffing, communication between nurses and doctors near non-existent, required tests unavailable, anomalous blood test results ignored.
You assume your doctors are competent; they minister in the NHS after all, our national secular religion. But this faith proved misplaced. Ultimately, Finny died from a twisted bowel, a rare but recognised natural cause of death. The coroner's verdict was recorded as a 'narrative conclusion', which simply records the facts of the case. She added that 'it is unclear whether different hospital care that night would have saved Finlay's life. It would have given him a chance.'
Schools would be closed overnight by Ofsted were there an egregious breach of safety; it took 361 days to get a final response from the NHS regulator, the Care Quality Commission. As for the Whittington, we were earnestly told by one doctor that they have put up a poster addressing some of the issues we faced — so that's all fine.
The coroner wrote a Prevention of Future Death (PFD) report, something that occurs in about 1 per cent of cases. This may sound like a win, but it isn't. The same coroner issued two PFD reports for similar failings at other north London hospitals in recent years. Yet there we were, and here we are. Without meaningful enforcement or central mechanisms to control and disperse new edicts correcting harrowing mistakes — something the airline industry excels at so, in principle, it is possible — you might be lucky enough to avoid these issues. But luck is all you have.
Yet onwards we trudge. Writing articles and raising money on Finny's behalf has been therapeutically sustaining. We are so grateful to all the readers and donors who have responded so generously, and it's why I read all the comments, desperate to see people's reactions to how beautiful and sweet he was. It keeps our FinnBear alive, if only in people's minds, if only for a time.
The arduous work of living continues, one manageable fragment of time at a time, missing Finny at every step, but continuing, nonetheless. We opened his bedroom door after 324 days. We barely venture in, but it's enough for the moment that we can peek inside. Today's anniversary will pass like any other day without Finny, which is to say, badly — not because the earth has orbited the sun once more, but simply because I achingly miss my little boy so very, very much.
ForFinny.com has been set up in memory of Finlay Roberts and contains a link to donate to the Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood (SUDC) charity
A spokesperson for Whittington Health NHS Trust said: 'We offer our sincere condolences to Finlay's family. We have made changes and are planning further improvements around how we conduct and record observations. We are determined to learn from the heartbreaking events around Finlay's death.'