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My grandma died 19 years ago… When will the pain go?

When I was 8 years old my mum gave birth to my little sister, in august. We were living in Brisbane and my Grandma (mums mum) living in Hervey Bay. My Grandma hadn’t seen my sister so in October she planned to make a trip down to meet her, a meeting that would never happen. My Grandma was such a family person, and tho she had seen pictures, she still had to meet her.. We would have been seeing her at Christmas but she couldn’t wait any longer. She booked a bus ticket and we were going to meet her at the shopping center when she arrived.

We were all ready, My mum and dad, myself, and my two younger sisters and brother all waiting for her arrival at the shopping center.

We all were so excited sitting there waiting for her to turn up.

I still remember hearing the call over the loud speaker. asking for family members and friends waiting for the arrival of the bus, to go into their centre management.

Us kids by this time thought we would walk around the corner and see her standing there, arms out ready for a big hug. But she wasnt there.

Instead we were greeted with people crying in foyer. Not understanding what happened, my mum walked up ad told them were wait for her mum. That’s when she was told there was an accident at Boondall, and were told to go home, and wait for a call. We went home and mum was ringing around and we all were watching every news coverage at the time trying to see her. Trying to get just a glimpse, just a little hope that was ok. But we couldn’t see her. My mum got the phone call that day asking her to go in and ID my grandma (her mum). Was one of the most heartbreaking things she ever had to do.

My sister never got to meet my grandma, and all we have now are articles from google to show her and pictures which isnt much. This is one article that i did find, and would like to share it with you all.

Widows’ Bus Trip Ends In Tragedy With 12 Dead, 39 Injured

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday October 24, 1994

By TONY GRANT-TAYLOR and AAP

Eleven women and a child were killed and 39 people injured in Queensland’s worst bus crash when a tour coach overturned and skidded on its side across a highway and down a steep embankment in the outer northern Brisbane suburb of Boondall yesterday.

The Wide Bay Tours coach was carrying 50 passengers, most of them members of a widows’ support group from Maryborough in central-southern Queensland. They were on a shopping trip to the Logan Hyperdrome on Brisbane’s southern outskirts.

Police said the child killed was a boy aged two.

Twenty-five ambulances and four medivac helicopters were used to ferry the injured to Brisbane’s four major hospitals and to hospitals at Redcliffe and Caboolture. Thirty-two people were still in hospital last night, including the 18-year-old driver, who suffered serious injuries.

The accident happened at 10.10 am, only 20 minutes from the bus’s destination, near Brisbane Airport.

A Queensland Police Service spokesman, Mr Brian Swift, said:

“The coach somehow left the southbound two-lane highway just after coming over a slight rise.

“It crossed a two-foot-deep ditch between the north- and southbound carriageways, came out of the ditch and slewed across the northbound lanes, demolishing a telephone booth and falling.

“It then ploughed, savagely, down a 15 foot embankment into a dry swamp.”

There was no official explanation for the crash last night. Witnesses, including the coach driver, said the coach shuddered before it ran off the road.

The coach driver apparently told police he “felt a shudder and did not know what happened after that”.

The first person on the scene was Ms Christine Carlile.

“The bus crashed across the road just metres in front of me,” she said. She had slowed down to answer her mobile phone just moments before. “If I hadn’t, the bus would have hit me and I’d be under that wreck.”

Another motorist quickly on the scene was Mr Barry Comer, 57, a sheet-metal worker of Carrara on the Gold Coast.

“There seemed to be bodies everywhere,” he said. “One woman we helped get out had her right arm torn off just below the elbow. Another man had his head jammed in an air vent in the roof of the bus.”

Mr Bill Blackwood, who was driving north to start a new job at Kingaroy, said: “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. There were people screaming and we were pulling people out from under dead bodies.”

Mrs Beth Ross, 79, who was not seriously injured, said after treatment at Redcliffe Hospital: “My friend sitting beside me had just put on some lipstick, and I said: ‘Gee, you look nice.’ “

“After the accident, she came and lay on the grass beside me and I said: ‘Gee, you look bloody awful.’ “

Another passenger, Mrs Jensen, 72, said: “It was terrible. There were bodies lying everywhere.”

Police set up a temporary morgue beside the wreckage as the bodies were removed from the bus nearly four hours after the crash.

Never take family for granted because you will be yearning for them when they are gone.

It never gets easier. They say time will heal, It never heals the would is always as fresh as the day it happened. You just learn to live with it in a way.

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Posted by zowieh, 15th August 2013