Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

Today is my son’s sixth birthday… he is thirty one years old.

I ought, perhaps, to clarify. It is the 4th July. What, to the US, is Independence Day, was long ago renamed in our household as Nick’s re-birthday. And in that simple prefix lies a story of hope.

Many readers are aware of my son’s story; stabbed through the brain and left for dead in a Bournemouth alley on July 4th 2009. The injuries were so severe that a murder investigation was underway before we had reached the hospital. He was not expected to survive, and needed immediate surgery to remove shards of bone from the brain, where the force of the blow had driven them. Nick had been in the deepest level of coma since the attack. It would be weeks before he woke, weeks when his vital signs were dangerous and the pressure inside his skull, from…