It has been a year of firsts for Stephane Sarrade; the first Christmas without his son Hugo, the first birthday, the first holiday, and tomorrow the first anniversary of his death.
Mr Sarrade has been dreading the day for a couple of months, as he fields requests for his attendance at various memorial events.
“It’s very hard for me to attend these events,” Mr Sarrade said.
“In fact, I decided to do nothing.”
His son, 23-year-old Hugo Sarrade, was one of 89 people killed when three Islamist terrorists stormed the Bataclan theatre on Friday, November 13 last year during an Eagles of Death Metal concert.
Mr Sarrade said his priority now was to “prepare to live another year”.
On the anniversary he will either stay home with his second wife and young son avoiding news broadcasts, or he will get out of town entirely.
As of a few days ago he was still undecided.
He is in touch with other victims’ families and says many of them feel the same.
They are all, he said, “looking for a place to be emotionally safe”.
Mr Sarrade said he prefers, “being in the action … rather than attending some event”.
“My son Hugo was really a part of me and is still a part of me and every day, every hour I feel that I miss him, but I think also that he wants me to go further,” he said.
A father’s search for answers
“Going further” for Mr Sarrade means trying to understand how it came to be that a “French guy, the same age as Hugo” came to murder him.
As part of that process Mr Sarrade has reached out to French parents whose children have become radicalised and gone to fight for Islamic State, including Laurent Amar, whose son Raphael was killed in Syria in 2014.
The two grieving fathers have become friends and have appeared at events together to speak of their loss and try to foster discussion about what went wrong.
“We have to understand,” Mr Sarrade said, “why in France it was possible to manipulate those kids in such a direction.”
Mr Sarrade has also set up a study grant in Hugo’s name. Both he and Hugo were huge fans of Japan, and recipients of the scholarship must undertake some study in Japan.
Ten candidates applied for the inaugural award, all of them he said of high calibre.
In the end he awarded it to a young woman who loved manga comics, just as Hugo did.
“It was a choice of the heart,” he said.
Hugo was happy and laughing before Bataclan attack
There is a photo that did the rounds in the weeks following the terrorist attacks of the happy crowd in the Bataclan just before the concert began that night.
A young woman in Australia sent it to Mr Sarrade when it first surfaced.
She was one of a number of Australians to reach out to him on hearing his story on the ABC.
With his ex-wife, Hugo’s mother, he scoured that photo and they are pretty confident they have identified Hugo there.
“He was happy,” Mr Sarrade said. The family has also received information from the authorities — 4,000 files in total — from which they have been able to establish that a bullet wound to a major artery most likely killed him.
“He had a huge haemorrhage and perhaps he didn’t have time to suffer and he was one of the first to die,” Mr Sarrade said.
“So we try to stick to that scenario, because if he was able to die very quickly it’s very important to us.”
After the terrorist attack in the French city of Nice in July people from Australia got in touch again with Mr Sarrade to say they were thinking of him.
“Nice is a tragedy that takes me back to the darkest days of November,” he said.
The Orlando shootings affected him deeply too.
‘He was exceptional because he was my son’
I met Mr Sarrade five days after the terrorist attacks that killed his son.
Cameraman Ale Pavone and I were blown away by his dignity, passion and just how measured he was.
So often we glorify people in death, as if their passing is somehow more tragic because they were the best son, the best father, best brother in the world.
Mr Sarrade did not do any of that. What he did say was just as heartbreaking.
Hugo, he said just days after his death, “was not exceptional, but he was exceptional because he was my son”.
I ached when he showed me photos of his son, whom he described as a “guy from his generation”.
He looked open and fun, the kind of young man you would love to drink a beer with.
Hugo did love beer.
His friends in Montpellier, where he was studying at the time of his death, make sure there are always a couple of beers on his gravestone.
His father intends to continue to honour his son by trying to understand how the terrorist attacks came about, by promoting tolerance and by not succumbing to hate.”I’m not Mother Theresa,” Mr Sarrade said, “I’m not Gandhi.” “I’m just an ordinary guy, but I know that if I feel hate it will not help me.”