What could have been

After the accidental deaths of police officer Jim Sara and his wife, the next worst tragedy was that they left two infant daughters behind. The police family pitched in to help, as usual, but what did the girls miss out on in a life without their parents?

Orphaned at the ages of just three and one, sisters Amy and Karma Sara have no real memories of their parents. They cannot remember their mother’s loving embrace or kisses goodnight. Nor can they picture sitting atop the shoulders of their dad the policeman, dressed in his blue uniform.

Amy has only the vague memory of her father, Jim, lifting her over a fence to hand her to someone. Karma, so young when her parents died, remembers nothing of them.

Through their 20-odd years of life, the sisters have had only photographs to make up for the precious images that never formed in their minds. And, as keepsakes, they have only their mother’s wedding ring, cutlery sets, and other jewellery.

Jim and Christine Sara died of injuries they sustained in a horrific car crash at Port Broughton on January 27, 1986. They had driven into the town to pick up the girls, after a day in Adelaide at the cricket. But, at a main-street intersection, their car and another collided at around 8pm.

Christine, 26, died soon after the collision. Jim, 27, spent the next two days clinging to life in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, but finally succumbed to head injuries on the morning of January 29. And so began little Amy and Karma’s lives without their parents.

But quickly to the rescue came Christine’s sister, Judy Grivell, and her husband, Harold. The pair opted to become the girls’ guardians, and began to raise them in their Verdun home.

Meanwhile, Jim’s colleagues, not only from his last post, Port Pirie, but right across the police force, established a trust fund for Amy and Karma. By the end of 1986, then-police commissioner, David Hunt, presented the Grivells with a cheque for almost $19,000.

The money covered part of the cost of extending the Grivell home by two bedrooms, to accommodate the children.

Childhood for the girls – who attended Oakbank Area School and, later, Seymour College – would be mercifully normal. And, from the beginning, the Grivells never tried to keep from them the story of their parents.

Pictures of Jim and Christine always hung in the family home. Karma, now 19, remembers asking, as a four-year-old: “Who are they?” “They’re your parents,” the Grivells told her.

Says Amy: “They were discussed, but not too often. If we had any questions, we could always ask. Something would remind Mum (Judy) and she’d talk about how we were like our parents; how I looked like Mum; and how cheeky like Dad (I was).”

Issues of soul-searching and finding oneself never arose for either girl, until she reached her mid-teens. “We started getting confused in trying to find out who we were, without our biological parents,” says Amy, now 21. “It was kind of hard.

“From the time I was 16 until I was about 18, I just had to work through it. I had to grieve (over my parents) like everyone else did, 15 years before.”

And, as the girls’ fellow college students knew of their parents’ deaths, school life proved tough as well. To Amy, on her first day at Seymour, one inquisitive girl said: “Oh, your parents died?”

Sometimes overwhelming, too, was the urge in others at college to help. “They wanted to talk to you, know if you were okay, and help you with your subjects,” says Amy. “All you wanted to do was get on with it.”

For a time, Amy wrongly blamed herself and Karma for their parents’ deaths. She figured the crash only occurred because Jim and Christine had to travel the main street of Port Broughton to pick them up that evening.

Karma came to direct anger at her parents for “leaving us”. “Why did they have to go to the cricket?” she would ask herself.

Neither Amy nor Karma found counsellors any help, but both managed to emerge from that time of short-lived confusion. Karma, however, questions whether she ever “really found myself”.

In the few years since their college days, both young women have moved on from any emotional issues, found steady work, and bought their own homes. Amy works part-time in a video store and as a volunteer at the Holdfast Community Centre. Karma works two jobs as a dental nurse, and studies international business.

Today, neither sister, while free of bitterness, can say she is totally at peace with the deaths of her parents. Each continues to live with an intense sadness for her loss.

At the sight of a police car, Karma always thinks of her dad. But both sisters still think of their parents just about every day, anyway; and to talk about them sometimes brings tears to their eyes.

“I think what could have been,” says Amy. “Everyone else got to be with their parents and go to sport, movies or whatever, and we didn’t.”

Ahead for Amy might yet be a career that invokes new images of her father, and his working life. She has decided to follow his footsteps into the police force and, in late February, applied to join SAPOL.

To help her chances of selection, she has already secured her diploma in justice administration. In 1999, she scored a week’s work experience with SAPOL, spending time at Fort Largs, Norwood police station, and in Forensic Services Branch.

But was the memory of her father her only inspiration to join the police force? “I don’t know where else the thought would have come from,” she says. “But that’s not the only reason I’m doing it now.

“I did do the work experience, and I found it really interesting. I like helping people, and I’m doing volunteer work at the Holdfast Community Centre. I just want to do what I can, and the police force is the way I hope to do that.”

Aside from her foray into law enforcement, Amy also wants to discover more about her father as a police officer. She recently met one of his former course-mates, Senior Constable Paul Noble, who told her something of their academy days together.

“I know Dad in the sense of how the family knew him, but I don’t know how he was with his (police) friends,” she says. “I would like to get to know that side of him.”