Son of pregnant Trafalgar Square model Alison Lapper found dead at 19
Written by News on 27/08/2019
The child that disabled artist Alison Lapper was carrying when she posed for a famous Trafalgar Square sculpture has died.
The sculpture by Marc Quinn, called Alison Lapper Pregnant, was displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square between 2005 and 2007.
Lapper’s son Parys was just 19 and “mischievous, generous, kind, loving, frustrating, cheeky and forgiving”, her partner Si Clift said.
Mr Clift urged people “not to hold things in” and said that “actions have consequences that may alter our lives irrevocably for the future”.
Quinn said he was drawn to Lapper as someone who had overcome their personal circumstances through what he called “a different kind of heroism”.
Lapper has a condition called phocomelia and was born without arms and with shortened legs, grew up in institutions and reportedly faced opposition when she decided to bring Parys up on her own.
When he was born in 2000 she said she “just cried and cried”, adding: “I had never imagined I was going to be a mother – never thought it could be possible.”
Following Parys’s death she posted a photo montage of them on Facebook.
He took part in the BBC TV series Child Of Our Time, which tracks millennial babies from infancy into young adulthood.
Si Clift thanked people for their messages – for their “eloquence and kind sentiments” – and urged them to learn from Parys’s death that “you are not alone, that you can talk and not to hold things within”, adding: “Whatever it is, there is help.”
The couple had received “beautiful and supportive words spoken from unlikely sources”, he said, but had also “been witness to one who has tried to compare a tragic death with a petty hurt”.
Mr Clift asked his readers to “Keep Parys in the forefront of your minds and hearts for a long while”.
He added: “He was his own man. He was a good son.”
A motorcycle escort is being organised for Parys’s funeral on Thursday.
He will “love it wherever he is watching from”, Mr Clift said.
(c) Sky News 2019: Son of pregnant Trafalgar Square model Alison Lapper found dead at 19
