‘I thought Con should have been home’

JANUARY 15, 1995, is a date indelibly etched into Frank Cormican’s memory.

It is the day his strong, healthy son Con died at the age of 21.

A passionate mountain climber, who dreamed of scaling the Alps and conquering Everest, Con drowned while on a caving trip to Northern Ireland.

A group of 13 students headed to the Marble Arch Caves outside Enniskillen.

They entered a cavern the size of a football pitch with a narrow tunnel into the next section.

What the group of relatively inexperienced cavers didn’t know was that the heavy rain of the previous few days was seeping through the porous limestone rock and would quickly fill the cavern with freezing cold, rushing water.

Three of the group became trapped by the rising floods in this smaller section of the cave. All three young men in their 20s, drowned, including Con.

“I was having a bath when I had this really heavy feeling and suddenly thought Con should have been home.

"The next moment I heard the doorbell ring and I heard voices. I knew something had gone wrong. You cannot imagine my sense of panic that hit me, upstairs, knowing that something serious was going on downstairs and not being able to get down quick enough.

“I went downstairs and there was a young garda from the local station in Howth, who told me and my wife Lorraine to ring the RUC station because there had been an accident.

"They told us three cavers were missing, and I remember thinking ‘missing, what does missing mean? It doesn’t mean dead.’”

But as he walked down the driveway to drive to Enniskillen, Frank knew he was going to identify a body.

It was the next day before Con’s body was found.

Having identified the body, Frank and his wife headed home to their two daughters, Edith, aged 19, and Liz, aged 17.

He believes spontaneous things the family did to cope with their grief helped them through. Frank, 47, works as an architect by day, but is also a counsellor at the Bereavement Counselling Service in the evenings.

“Sometimes it takes counselling for a person to come to terms with their grief. It is an essential service.”

Frank will be a speaker at the Bereavement Counselling Service open day next Saturday.