"........and now the poorest of all!"

Most of us cannot even begin to either encompass or understand the grief of a parent when a child dies through either violence or accident. That trauma is exclusive, fortunately, to a randomly selected group of people whose son or daughter has been taken from the heart of their family by a bullet or knife, by a speeding car, or by any number of ways that this careless society provides for the early termination of a promising young life. Equally fortunate is the process provided by nature which allows the families to assimilate their grief, and move on through life; saddened but not crushed, bent but not broken!

We should, therefore, I believe, spare a special thought today for one of life’s losers in the long list of bereaved; singled out not only because of his determination to prove the unprovable, but rather because of the high profile of his son’s death. I refer of course to Mr. Mohammed Fayed, the owner of, amongst many other toys, Harrod’s department store, and the grieving father of one Dodi Fayed, who died alongside Princess Diana in a high speed car crash in Paris. Without his presence alongside Diana in those photographs so greedily snapped and sold to the ‘pubic press’ he would have been unknown outside the circle purchased for him by his father’s great wealth. He was a playboy of the worst kind, with virtually unlimited wealth and few instincts about money’s worth; an inflated sense of his own talents and an equally inflated sense of his own importance, again purchased for him by Fayed’s cash. But for all of those failings, he was still a beloved son, and his death was a blow which would have flattened any ordinary mortal.

Unfortunately, Mohammed Fayed believed then, and still holds fast, to any number of ‘conspiracy’ theories regarding the death of his son alongside the woman with possibly the highest profile in the world, and has relentlessly pursued these rumours. Aided and abetted, it must be accepted, by those who would profit by such dreams because their own livelihood depends on their continued stoking of the ‘rumour mills’, and drawing ever more ridiculous lines upon which a grief-stricken father could pursue his phantom enemies! We read of the latest farce when Fayed took legal action in France against two former senior Metropolitan Police officers in his ever-lasting struggle to prove that someone, anyone, other than a drunken driver killed his beloved son!

Some kindly and disinterested soul, one who knows and understands this driven man, should take Mohammed Fayed to one side, hold his shoulder and tell him that it really is time to move on; to possibly establish an Charity bearing his son’s name by which he would be remembered, and to leave the gory headlines and silly conspiracies behind, as we all have to do!

Comments

[páid]

absolutely spot on. Mr Fayed is becoming the butt of jokes, which is terrible for anyone who has lost a child. Although he probably became successful due to his determination and single-mindedness, those qualities can be a double-edged sword.