Anne L Raper

The Anne L Raper biography begins in Scarborough, where she worked full-time shifts at a local hospital from the time her son was six months old. Her marriage ended when Jason was six, and for most of his life it was the two of them at home, with early starts and split shifts juggled around nursery runs and grandparents.

Jason was born on 8 July 1992, eight weeks early, weighing five pounds and two ounces. Anne fractured her collarbone in a fall days later and was given a side room on the special care unit so she could stay near him. She sums the whole episode up in one line that anyone who knew him will recognise: like later in life, Jason wanted to get on with things.

As a bereaved mother memoir writer, Anne is candid about what came afterwards. She could not return to work following his death. Fourteen years on she makes no claim to have healed, only to have adjusted, and that refusal to tidy things up is precisely what readers trust.

The Anne L Raper writing journey grew directly out of that honesty. She gathered school reports, his own paddling journal, condolence entries and tributes from paddlers around the world, then set about turning them into a record that would outlast memory.

From a Scarborough childhood to the white water of Europe

The Jason Raper life story is not a story of tragedy. It is a story of appetite. He swam from six months old and was covering 600 metres by the age of eight. He cycled constantly, and at nine he entered the National Cycling Hill Climb Championships at Oliver’s Mount as the only competitor from Scarborough, finishing eighth in the under tens after practising the route and setting himself a time to beat.

At secondary school he was sports personality of the year three years running and runner-up in the fourth. He was captain of nothing. Anne had taught him early that the best sportsman is not the one who wins, but the one who comes second and turns round to congratulate the winner.

The Jason Raper kayaking story began at thirteen, on a family trip to Abernethy in Scotland. Twenty minutes into his first session the instructor came over and asked how long he had been kayaking. Twenty minutes, said Jason. No, said the instructor, before today. Twenty minutes, said Jason.

He came home and asked to join the canoe club. Anne said yes, assuming that next week it would be something else. It never was.

Jason left school with ten GCSEs and no interest in sixth form. He enrolled at York College for a joinery diploma, was interviewed on his sixteenth birthday, and wrote on the application that he wanted to become a joiner and eventually own his own business. He commuted from Scarborough by train every day, and worked out he would take his kayak on the train too. People take bikes, he reasoned, so why not a boat.

By nineteen he was a qualified instructor and a committee member at his club, coaching beginners and providing safety cover for long-distance swimmers. He completed his Duke of Edinburgh Bronze and Silver and died before he could finish his Gold. In 2008 the BBC filmed him surfing his kayak off Scarborough, and he barely mentioned it until it aired. At the 2009 National Surf Competition he took first prize for best newcomer and second place overall.

This is an inspirational kayaking story precisely because the achievements are not the point. When he spotted a paddler in trouble at Holme Pierrepont after she broke her paddle in a rapid, he went to help. That was Sal Montgomery, who became a close friend and is now a world-class paddler. After the accident she wrote that he had changed her life for the better.

The condolence book from his funeral says the same thing over and over in different handwriting. The European champion Bren Orton wrote that every GB paddler in the finals in Austria that year wore a black armband out of respect for him.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Jason was on the river when his friend Kate capsized and was trapped underwater. She was airlifted to hospital and died two days later. He took it very hard. He was stunned that Kate had been an organ donor and that a stranger had received her heart, and he signed up as a donor himself at the first opportunity.

Within a couple of weeks he had decided to paddle the River Ure from source to sea in her memory: 160 miles from Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales to Spurn Point on the Humber, raising money for the Great North Air Ambulance and awareness of organ donation. He recruited his friend James Barnes, who was on holiday at the time and was not really consulted.

They trained through a Yorkshire winter, set off on 9 March 2012, and landed at Spurn Point with an hour to spare before the tide turned, having raised more than three thousand pounds.

Anne, waiting on spinal surgery and barely able to travel, was driven to York to see them at a pit stop. It was one of the last times she saw her son. Of everything in this mother and son memoir, that weekend says the most about who he was.

Nineteen chapters covering a whole life, and everything that followed

At the centre of Anne’s work is To The Last Eddy & Beyond, a memoir about losing a son that spends most of its energy on living. It follows Jason from a premature birth in July 1992, through a Scarborough childhood of bikes and water, an apprenticeship, a rise through the kayaking world, and on to the accident in Norway in June 2012 and everything that came afterwards.

As the To The Last Eddy & Beyond author, Anne is explicit about why she wrote it. She wanted a written account she could return to as she heads into her senior years, she wanted to share Jason with people who never met him, and she wanted readers to chase and fulfil their own dreams the way he did.

The dedication sets the tone for everything that follows: in loving memory of my son Jason, who will never get to read this book, but has inspired every page written. Beneath it sit four words that could serve as the book’s thesis. A life well lived.

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The meaning behind the title, and why it holds the whole book

To kayakers the title needs no explanation. To everyone else, Anne provides one herself in the opening pages. When a river flows past an obstruction, the water backfills the space behind it and turns calm. That pocket of quiet water is an eddy. White water paddlers use eddies for scouting, regrouping and resting as they work their way down a set of rapids.

Once you know that, the title stops being a phrase and becomes a structure. To The Last Eddy covers Jason’s life up to 23 June 2012, including the moment he sat in the final eddy on the river before the accident. And Beyond is everything that came after it.

It is a title that does real work, which is rarer than it sounds. A river does not end at the last eddy. It carries on, changed, and so does a family.

That structural honesty runs through the whole of this kayaking memoir. Anne does not treat the accident as a climax to build towards. She treats it as one day in a life that had nineteen years of other days in it.

On 14 June 2012 the car was packed, checked and double-checked. Anne treated Jason and a friend to a carvery tea before they left. He drove away happy, with his mother’s blessing. She told him to enjoy his holiday, stay safe, and that she loved him. It was the last time she saw him.

He drove to the French Alps for a week, paddling three sections a day and working through the classics. At the end of that week he filmed a short clip on his GoPro, saying the classics were all ticked off and it was time to take in the scenery, then turning the camera in a full circle across the mountains. Anne carries those words with her, because she knows he was having the time of his life.

The Voss Norway kayaking accident happened on his first day of paddling there, on 23 June 2012. The water was high and the river unknown to the group, and they spent most of the day scouting and portaging. Half a kilometre from the get-out they saw a large stopper with a clear line to the right of it. They left the last eddy.

Anne does not look away from what followed, and the chapter is written with the help of the friends who were there. But this is not a sensational account. The leader of the local kayak club told the Norwegian press that the group had not been paddling beyond their capabilities, and Anne includes that too, because it is true and it matters.

Grief is often described as a corridor with a door at the end. Most bereaved parents will tell you it is nothing of the sort. It is closer to learning to paddle a river that has permanently changed its course. You do not get the old river back. You learn the new one.

As a grief memoir author, Anne offers no cure and promises none. What writing gave her was something to do with her hands and her mind when there was nothing to be done. Every detail recalled and set down was a detail saved. That is what healing through writing actually looks like: not recovery, but a way of turning helplessness into something that holds its shape.

It would be dishonest to call this a therapeutic exercise that made everything better. Writing about the accident meant returning to it deliberately, sentence by sentence, for as long as it took to get right. That takes a courage which has nothing to do with rivers.

Her sister, Dr Linda Myers, read early drafts and contributed two chapters. The book also includes a chapter on spiritualism, which Anne came to wanting to know whether Jason was all right. Readers will bring their own views to it. She is not asking anyone to agree, only telling the truth about how she survived.

This is a memoir about losing a son, so it will find bereaved parents first. The loneliest part of that experience is how few people speak the language. Anne does. There is a moment in the book where a stranger, whose daughter had died in a kayaking accident two years earlier, heard about Jason in the news and made contact to offer support. The book does the same thing on a much larger scale.

It will also find readers of true story memoir and life after loss memoir, who are drawn to books that are honest about ordinary lives. There is no invented drama here, which is exactly why it lands.

For paddlers this is a book about one of your own. Anne learned the sport through her son and eventually took it up herself. Climbers, skiers, surfers and anyone who has loved a risk sport, or loved someone who does, will recognise every question it raises.

And it will find readers who have lost nobody at all. The question at the centre of this book, which is what happens to love when the person is gone, belongs to everybody eventually.

Anne did not want a graveyard. She did not feel Jason belonged in one, so she built other things instead. There is a memorial garden at her house built around a waterfall, with a boat and paddle set on the rocks and stones collected from rivers he paddled. There is a tree in Norway on the riverbank, with a plaque that reads: keep on kayaking, life is good. Paddlers still visit it. His name is on the hull of the Whitby lifeboat. Everyone who came to his funeral went home with forget-me-not seeds.

The Jason Raper legacy lives in those places, and it lives in the paddlers he encouraged, several of whom now compete at the highest level and still speak of him.

British Publishers is proud to welcome Anne L Raper into the British Publishers Author Circle, and to honour the patience and courage that went into this book. She set out to hold on to her son’s life, to share it with people who never met him, and to send her readers back to their own lives with more appetite than they had before. She has achieved all three, while carrying a loss that has not lessened in fourteen years.

If you take one thing from this page, let it be this. Read the book, meet Jason, and then go and do the thing you have been putting off.