A comma, not a full stop

In 2017, Nikki Bush's life was shattered when her husband was murdered during a home invasion. She shares her journey through grief, healing and finding purpose.

- ROBYN MACLARTY

Change happens by chance, by choice or by crisis. Sometimes we are sent life tremors… warnings or bumps in the road; and sometimes we’re sent a life quake that knocks us completely off our centre.

My family and I were sent such a life quake on 18 November 2017 at 3 am. Roxy, our dog, was barking like crazy at the bottom of the garden, which woke me up. My husband, Simon, was not in bed. Unable to sleep, he had been watching TV in the family room.

Wide awake but not overly alarmed, I walked up the passage to make myself some tea, and casually mentioned that Roxy was really making a noise, which he hadn’t heard over the sound of the TV. I then closed the passage door and went back to bed to read a few pages of my book. If he was suspicious, I assumed, he would hit the panic button for our security company to come and investigate. We had a clear agreement – having lost a number of friends to crime in this way – that we were not to step outside the house at night: this was what we paid our security company to do.

I will never know why, but he broke our agreement. He stepped out onto the patio and was rushed by two armed intruders. In reconstructing the scene later, we determined that he must have run back into the house and tried to slam the patio door. They jammed a foot in the door, there was a struggle, they shot him through the glass and they entered our home.

In those few minutes, I made decisions no wife and mother should ever have to make, for fear of being raped and killed. I didn’t go to my husband’s rescue and I didn’t wake Matthew, my 18-year-old son, asleep in his room; there was no time. My elder son was not at home that night.

On autopilot, I ran the plan that we had always taught our kids if something should go wrong: lock yourself in the bathroom.