Flood victim Jordan Rice, 13, is buried in Queensland
Australia floods: In the Queensland town of toowoomba today, John Tyson laid to rest his 13-year-old son Jordan Rice. It was the first funeral for victims of the floods which hit Queensland last week.
There are few things so terribly sad to witness as a father burying his son. That is what happened in the Queensland town of Toowoomba today, where John Tyson laid to rest his 13-year-old son Jordan Rice. It was the first funeral for victims of the floods which hit Queensland last week.
To the strains of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”, Mr Tyson laid Jordan’s coffin on top of that of Donna, Jordan’s mother. They’d drowned in the family’s white Mercedes car last Monday, as a wall of water crashed through Toowoomba’s business district – a terrifying flashflood that Australians dubbed “an inland tsunami.”
Dressed in black, and flanked by Blake, his tearful surviving son, John Tyson said: “The fire in my heart will continue to burn until my time comes to join them… I don’t think I can put into words just how much I miss them.” He’d hailed Jordan as “my little hero.”
Australians have gone one futher, conferring on the teenager national hero status. Jordan, who was petrified of water and couldn’t swim, insisted that a rescuer who’d made it to their car, save his little brother first.
The Facebook page RIP Jordan Rice, serves as an online condolence book. The tributes to the teenage hero are moving. “Rest in Peace Jordan, I hope my son grows up to be even half the boy you were,” says one. “Rest forever in the protective arms of your mother in a circle of angels. You more than deserve your wings.”
An emergency services worker writes that Jordan’s is “the most Inspirational story of heroism I have ever heard about.” Another talks about how he’d “touched with world with [his] bravery.” One simply says: “Rest in peace little hero; a true Aussie hero.”
Among the mourners at the cemetery today: Warren McErlean, the man who’d rescued Blake and attempted – in vain – to save his brother and mother too. A reporter for Brisbane’s Courier-Mail wrote that “he threw a comforting arm around Blake.”
Shortly after the incident, a clearly traumatised Mr McErlean had told an interviewer: “It’s just terrible. I just kept telling the boy it was going to be all right and it wasn’t. I feel very sorry for the boy and his family and that we couldn’t do some more and that get them out.”
Today Jordan’s coffin was placed the grave on top of his mothers, to symbolise a child lying in his mother’s arms. Mourners released coloured balloons into the sky.
The music playing at the funeral was varied, but there was great poignancy in their playing Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” He wrote the song after losing his own son, Connor, in a tragic accident. In his autobiography, Clapton said he wrote the song to ask the question “will we ever meet again?” He went on: “When I try to take myself back to that time, to recall the terrible numbness that I lived in I recoil in fear, I never want to go through anything like that again.”
It’s that very numbness that John Tyson and his 10-year-old surviving son Blake will be feeling tonight, as the Facebook tributes keep on rolling in. The latest, as I write: “What an amazing person, I sit and watch as the floods go on, in my safe little home is Adelaide, and when I see this kind of courage, I know there’s good in some of us human beings.”
