Remembering the Fallen

There was nothing the unfortunate tram driver could have done to prevent the tram hitting Maggie at full speed and her injuries were so severe that she died at the scene.

James was absolutely devastated by Maggie's death. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he experienced feelings of shock, nausea and horror. He later told me he had no idea how he managed to function at all during the first days after Maggie's death. He broke down while telephoning her parents to break the awful news, sobbing uncontrollably as he tried to string some words together to tell them what had happened.

To make matters worse, Maggie and James weren't in a formal relationship with one another as far as the Austrian authorities were concerned. In their view, Maggie was simply his girlfriend. The two of them rented an apartment together, but Maggie was not his wife, common law or otherwise. Nowadays it would be different, but the authorities determined that Maggie's next of kin were her parents, so James had no say in what happened with her remains and any of her personal effects.

On the instructions of her parents, Maggie's body was returned to Scotland to be interred in the old kirkyard, where her family traditionally buried their dead. Maggie's father was wild with grief and blamed James for her death. Not only had he seduced Maggie and persuaded her to live in sin with him, but he had also foolishly given her the Sony Walkman that her father believed was the direct cause of the fatal accident. The old man forbade James from attending Maggie's funeral and only close members of her family were present when she was laid to rest.

James resigned from his job at the press agency in Vienna and returned to his parents' home in Glasgow, where he spent many months grieving for Maggie. Trying to come to terms with her passing, he visited her grave in Stirlingshire several times. For years he blamed himself for Maggie's death, accepting the damning verdict of her father without question. However, with a great deal of professional counselling, he eventually came to accept it was Maggie herself who had chosen to use her Walkman that fateful day and it was not his fault she hadn't checked for traffic coming from both directions.

James didn't achieve what might nowadays be called 'closure', but he resolved to honour Maggie's memory by continuing her work. He successfully applied for an executive position with UNICEF and made a career out of helping children in need in some of the poorest countries in the world. He never returned to Vienna, preferring to cherish his fond memories of life together with Maggie, rather than revisit where she died.

James believed his love for Maggie lived on in his heart and soul. He told me how he would wake up most mornings and reach for her, only to find she wasn't there. He couldn't touch her physically, but he said he often felt her presence. James wasn't a religious person and described himself as agnostic or possibly even atheist. He doubted whether he was being haunted by some sort of spirit, instead preferring to refer to what he was experiencing as 'phantom love syndrome'. James said he continued to feel Maggie's presence in much the same way many amputees continue to 'feel' a lost limb. Far from trying to overcome this feeling, James used it to guide his life, often imagining what Maggie would have said or done in particular circumstances.

In early 2021, not long after he retired and returned to Scotland, James died suddenly from a brain aneurysm. He had no living relatives and had named Helena and me as his executors in his will. The proceeds from his comparatively modest estate were to be left to children's charities and he had requested his body be cremated and his ashes scattered close to Maggie's last resting place.

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I omitted some of the more intimate details from the version of the story I told Annie in the little church that afternoon. Nevertheless, we were both in tears by the time I came to the end of my tragic tale. For a few minutes we sat silently together, weeping quietly for Maggie Murray and her partner and true love, James Aitken.

"So, now you've heard the story, will you let me scatter his ashes by her graveside?" I finally asked Annie.

She wiped her tears from her cheeks with a handkerchief and looked me in the eyes. "No," she said.

My heart sank, but before I could respond she added, "I think we can do much better than that. My grandparents are buried in the grave next to Maggie's, so they can have no say in the matter, and my mother is divorced and in a care home with dementia. I'm the head of the family now and I think it would be more fitting for James to rest in peace together with Maggie."

Thus it came about that a couple of weeks later, on a cold morning in early December, a few of us gathered together for a short service of remembrance in the old kirkyard. A lone piper played "Flowers of the Forest" while the mortal remains of James Aitken were interred in the same grave as the mortal remains of Maggie Murray.

If you look for their grave in that little cemetery in rural Stirlingshire, it is marked by that black granite headstone, engraved in gold lettering with both their names and dates and a short inscription.

That inscription reads:

In love the fallen are never left behind

They are carried forward in our hearts

By misfortune parted too soon in life

Now we are together for all eternity

Our love enduring for ever more

THE END

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Author's Notes

The Ford Anglia is a small family car, which was manufactured by Ford UK until 1967. A 1960 Ford Anglia 105E featured in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets".

UNICEF is the United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. Its headquarters are in New York and it has offices in around 150 countries, including Austria.

The Sony Walkman WM-20 was the first ultra-compact cassette-size Walkman. It was introduced in 1983 and was easily carried in bags or pockets. Headphones started to be worn in public and raised safety concerns about pedestrian accidents.

In 2008, a British teacher died in Vienna after being run over by a tram as he tried to cross a road while listening to his MP3 player.

"Flowers of the Forest" is a Scottish tune composed in the early 1600s to commemorate the 10,000 Scots slaughtered with King James IV at the Battle of Flodden in September 1513. It is the official lament of the Canadian armed forces, played to honour fallen soldiers, and the Australian War Memorial uses it during its Last Post ceremony. It was played at the funeral of His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, in April 2021.