'I lost both parents to Covid within an hour'

Before Christmas, Graeme Carling didn't know anyone who had caught Covid.

As a businessman, he'd had to adapt to the pandemic like everyone else.

But within the space of less than an hour one evening in January, the virus changed his and his family's lives forever.

His mother Margaret died having contracted coronavirus three weeks earlier. As he left the hospice where she'd slipped away, he got a phone call about his father Graeme senior.

He had been taken into hospital on 8 January with a headache and tested positive for Covid-19.

Graeme, from Dundee, told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: "Just as I was coming out the hospice, 20 minutes after my mother had just passed, I got a phone call from the hospital while I was walking up the corridor. They wanted to talk about my dad.

"They said he was doing okay, the oxygen was working, he did need it but they would have liked to have seen more progress."

By the time Graeme was driving home with his wife Leanne, he got another call.

"I had just phoned my uncle to let him know what had happened with my mother, and while I was on the phone to him Ninewells Hospital phoned me back again," Graeme said.

"The doctor was in a distressed state because I had just spoken to her 15 minutes before and by the time she had gone back to the ward, my dad had passed also.

"It was so surreal. I was in complete shock. I got my wife to stop the car and I got out and felt the blood draining from me. It was right in the middle of lockdown and late at night and pitch black.

"I remember looking up the street and there was no-one around I was there on my own. It was like something out of a movie, I was in complete and utter shock and disbelief that this had happened."

Margaret had been living with the lung condition COPD and had been coping with that for a long time.

She was admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties in December but was released on Christmas Eve and got to spend Christmas with her husband.

On 29 December she was readmitted with breathing issues - and this time she tested positive for Covid.

She was transferred to a high-dependency unit at Ninewells Hospital and on 5 January the family was told she had 24 hours to live. But she managed to hang on for another fortnight.

Graeme, the CEO of United Capital which owns building firm McGills in Dundee, said: "The focus was my mum and praying that she would get through that. Then my dad was taken to the Covid ward and diagnosed with Covid as well.

"We didn't expect anything to happen to him. My dad was fit and healthy."

Margaret was 65 and her husband was 66. They were married for 47 years.

Graeme said it was a reminder that despite success with the vaccine rollout and bigger sections of the country now opening up, the virus is still dangerous.

"Before that I never knew anyone who had Covid, nothing close to us. To get a double whammy like that..."

Graeme said he was glad that neither of his parents had to hear that the other had died. He said their joint funeral was extremely difficult.

Graeme said: "It was a double funeral but we were still only allowed 20 people.

"But it was their funeral. They died together, they went together. They were married 47 years. I do take comfort from that as much as I can."

He now just wants people to know that the pandemic is still not over and it can still have devastating consequences.

"It's easy to think this won't happen to you. But it can," he said. "We are devastated that this happened."

But although it has been heartbreaking, he has tried to be strong.

He said: "It has been tough.

"But myself and my wife and kids, we have a lot of responsibilities and we need to keep going on. My parents would expect nothing less of me."