World Asthma Day - One man's story of loss

HE said “I’m sorry.” Two words that I thought were only spoken in films, and when I hear them now in that context they bring a lump to my throat.

Those two words will stay with me to the day I die. A short sentence from a stranger to signal the end of a life. My brother, Mick, was dead.

It was 4am on a Saturday morning in October, 1983. The GP was standing on the upstairs landing of my parents’ house, telling my father that his 17 year-old son was dead. Mick had died an hour earlier, of an asthma attack. None of us knew asthma could kill.