The Power of Memory

The following blog was written by Kevin Gosden, father of Andrew Gosden, who has been missing from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, since 2007. Kevin has written this blog to mark Andrew’s 32nd birthday.

I wake up with a sense of panic almost every day. Sometimes I am able to rationalise things and calm myself, but the sensation often persists until I go to bed again. It is a common symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Along with the flashbacks and nightmares. After nearly 18 years since Andrew went missing, it demonstrates how deeply rooted in the subconscious a traumatic time can be. These moments can affect your entire life and this is particularly the case when you cannot reach a conclusion about the fate of your missing loved one.

I wrote a year ago about our house refurbishment and how difficult it has felt to change Andrew’s old room in particular. I am still working on the house, but a great deal has been completed now and we have endeavoured to do things in a way that reminds us of Andrew. His room now looks something like this:

When we were looking at paint colours, we ended up saying it had to be blue, the colour Andrew chose when he was young: anything else just felt wrong to us. On the chimney breast, we hung these pictures:

The one in the centre was a work by an artist who contributed his work to Missing People’s “Unmissable” exhibition in 2019 and was framed by my father. On the left is a portrait of Andrew taken from a photo. I was contacted by an artist on Facebook, Ben Bastiani, who offered to do this for us free of charge. We liked his work so much, we later commissioned him to do the portrait of Andrew’s sister, Charlotte, which hangs on the right. They were best friends as well as siblings.

These are the positive memories, the ones that remind us of Andrew, and how much we love him. I was recently asked for a podcast if I have any difficult memories of Andrew and the straight-up answer is no; we always enjoyed his company and conversation and my wife and I were always aware of how easy our children were at every age. It reminded me of a colleague one lunchtime who commented that I was the only member of the team who never grumbled about his children. I never had to.

The kindness of people like Ben Bastiani is always such an encouragement to us; that people still think about Andrew and care about what may have become of him. There are many examples.

The picture below is from our cellar rooms (where Andrew was often found playing on his Xbox). I re-used old wardrobes to build open shelving and used a section of it to display some of his collection of rocks and minerals. I think he would like it, especially the UV lights under which some of the rocks fluoresce. He would know that the shelves in the centre at the back were ones he and I made together. He was around 10 I think and not at all bad with a chisel to cut slots for the small glass shelves and dovetail joints on the corners.

It is an irony, I think, that we have nothing but good memories of Andrew, but still wake each day feeling the panic of his disappearance.

He will be 32 on 10th July. Perhaps you would feel able to remember Andrew by sharing a current appeal for a missing young person, or by making a donation, however small, to Missing People, the charity that is always there for us and so many other families. Thank you.