Tag: Children's Grief

Hope is everything

Various pictures of the Charlesworth family to promote Children’s Grief Awareness Week

Two years ago, to mark Children’s Grief Awareness Week, I wrote a blog because the phrase “children are resilient” had been playing heavily on my mind. I felt it was clouding our view of how children who have been bereaved are treated. One of the points I raised that seemed to resonate the most with people was this: Needing help doesn’t mean she’s not resilient, that she’s mad, that she can’t cope or that she’s weird. It just means she’s human and vulnerable.

A lot has happened since I wrote that blog, but as I sit here today, on the first day of Children’s Grief Awareness Week 2024, there’s a new thought that is playing heavily on my mind. The fact that my daughter won’t ever really remember a life without grief in it. She won’t ever really remember her mum when she wasn’t grieving. Imagine that. Growing up with grief being part of your everyday life. I hesitate to use the word normal, because that is different for all of us, but ultimately grief, trauma and sadness are part of my daughter’s normal and have been since she was 10 years old. It breaks my heart beyond all belief that her innocence and childhood were snatched from her so cruelly.

Yet when I started thinking about this a bit more, I started thinking about the theme of this awareness week. #BuildingHope. Hope is probably the most pertinent word in my family. It’s the word I have tattooed on my wrist in my late husband’s handwriting. It’s part of my daughter’s name. And the fact that this grief awareness week begins on 18th November is also something that feels pertinent for me. 18th November 1993 is the date that I first really became aware of death and grief. These two things put together are why I knew I needed to write.

I’ve never really spoken about the fact that I too went through grief as a child. Mainly because in 1993, mental health or speaking about your emotions and feelings weren’t really considered. And certainly not for a child. But more than that. As the years have gone by, I have never really felt it was my story to tell. Yes, my family and friends at the time knew about it. It crops up in conversation with people to this day at times. But I haven’t publicly talked about it. I’ve had numerous different bouts of counselling over the years, but it’s never been a topic of discussion, there’s always been what I’ve felt are more pressing things to talk about. Yet recently I’ve stopped to think about how that day itself, the immediate aftermath and the bereavement I went through, haunts me and continues to affect me to this day. I suspect it always will. It’s a part of who I am. Because it is a part of my story. Whether I talk about it publicly or not.

It almost feels a bizarre coincidence in a way that both mine and my daughter’s first real memory and experience of death happened in what were fundamentally national tragedies. That we’ve both had to deal with death against a backdrop of news headlines and TV images. Such completely and utterly different circumstances, but the similarities are there, nonetheless. I was 12 years old. She was 10 years old. Having to adjust to a new reality without someone they loved in it. Becoming acutely aware from a young age that death can happen to anyone. It’s not just old people who die. Being aware of your own mortality before you’re even a teenager. It’s a lot to have to come to terms with.

I think this is what has led me to the realisation about my daughter having grief in her life forever. And I also think this is part of why I have so vehemently pushed her to talk about her grief. To have counselling. To try to help her process and make sense of the trauma she went through. The secondary losses she has faced. The future she faces growing up without her father. I want to do all I can to help her manage this unfathomable loss. To have it be a part of her story but not her whole story. To help her grow around it.

Whenever I talk about her and what she’s faced in my blogs, I always, always check she is comfortable with what I’m going to write. Because ultimately her experience is her story. There are some things which are just too personal to both of us to ever share. I won’t talk about them. I respect her views. Yet when I spoke about this blog, I could see the progress she’s made since that blog two years ago. The little bits of her life she is more comfortable for me to talk about now.

Shortly after I wrote my blog in 2022, my daughter and I joined Winston’s Wish Ambassador Molly for an Instagram Live together with Grace Lee, Director of Marketing and Communications for Winston’s Wish. The concept was for young people to talk directly and openly about their bereavements and grief. It was a classic case of Instagram vs. reality, in the 10 minutes before we went live, my daughter and I had some minor disagreements, she was stroppy with me, I was conscious of time so was blunt back and then the second we went live we switched on the consummate professional act! But as I sat there listening to Molly and then my own daughter, I was struck by just how astute they both were and how much they understood the impact that their bereavements had had on them. My daughter said things about grief that I’d never heard her say before. There were some real lump in the throat moments for me. I’d have never anticipated quite what was going to come our way just a few months later.

Because it was in February 2023 that I took my daughter to our doctor to get her referred for counselling. Her grief had manifested itself into anxiety. And it was becoming more and more difficult to manage. I’d had an inkling that this might happen the day of her great-grandmother’s funeral in January 2022, it was at the same crematorium as her dad’s funeral, she had to face all his family and by the time we got to the evening, she was shaking on the bathroom floor and vomiting. She couldn’t go back to school the next day. The anxiety and the stress that day caused for her was simply too much for her to deal with. It was another loss for her to have to process.

But by 2023, her anxiety had got to the point where she couldn’t leave the house in the morning for school without eight different alarms. Each of which to tell her it was time to do something else, be that go in the bathroom, get dressed or have breakfast. It felt unsustainable. Any change to that routine, a few minutes lost here and there was enough to cause a meltdown. There were days she didn’t even make it into school. She simply couldn’t process change. Everything had to be regimented. I watched as she withdrew into herself more. We argued more because I couldn’t really understand what she was going through. Because I didn’t understand just how crippling her anxiety had become. Just how hard her life was. Until she started her counselling, all I could do was love her and watch her suffer as she tried to make sense in her mind of why she was like this. As she tried to answer the question she posed herself “why am I like this?” It was, quite simply, heartbreaking to watch.

She was nervous about the counselling. She didn’t really know what she’d say. But as I sat on the stairs and listened to her first session, I could hear her talking. I was astonished quite how much the counsellor got her to say. After that I didn’t listen to her sessions, they were personal to her and I knew if there was a major concern, the counsellor would contact me. But for someone who was such a sceptic, these sessions helped her. Even she would admit this. Just last week, she commented on how she only has one alarm now and it goes off 35 minutes later than it did last year. This might sound small to someone who has never experienced anxiety, but to her it’s massive.

And while a lot of her anxiety has dissipated, it is still there. I don’t doubt it always will be to an extent. It’s part of her grief. We have found ways to help her manage it, but if things come at her left field, they do still cause her to feel anxious or to panic. She will openly admit she has trust issues. She struggles to let people in. She has abandonment issues. I don’t doubt that as she gets older, she will need therapy again. Because at different points in her life, she is going to need help to process her emotions. It’s a fact of her life.

And she’s also had to live with my grief being a fact of her life for the last four years. The fact I find myself crying anywhere, a supermarket, the theatre, in the car, the cinema… the list is endless. We recently went to see Paddington in Peru (I cried!) and on the drive home, we saw an ambulance with its blue lights on. No siren, just lights on. My daughter started making the sound of a siren, I laughed and said, “why are you being an ambulance?” To which she simply said “I know you don’t like seeing the blue lights without the sirens. It’s hard for you so I thought I’d add them.” Deep breath moment for me. The realisation that things like that are on her mind. How acutely aware she is of how I feel and my triggers. Three years ago, she was interviewed as part of a study on childhood bereavement, they asked her how her mum was coping. “She keeps herself busy and doesn’t sit still, because if she stops, she’ll have to think about what’s happened to us and she doesn’t want to do that.” Another deep breath moment. Because there are times her emotional intelligence is off the scale. But this also breaks my heart. She shouldn’t have had to become this astute. She shouldn’t have had to live with grief becoming a part of her world at such a young age that she’s been able to gain this understanding.

Her understanding, vulnerability and honesty are just some of her qualities that I am most proud of. I do believe she’s growing up with an empathy that she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t experienced the loss of her father and watched her mother grieving. She knows this herself. Towards the end of last year, she and I had a conversation in what is known as the “Jac McDonald’s” (mainly because this is where we ate before going to see Jac Yarrow on more than one occasion.) And while I’d rather not be having a deep and meaningful over a Big Mac, sometimes you just have to go with the flow of the conversation. She told me that she wouldn’t necessarily change what has happened to her. I was quizzical over this but the way she responded again just made me so proud. Her rationale was that she likes the person she is now, and she doesn’t know if she would be this person if she hadn’t gone through everything she has. Another deep breath moment for me. There is no real response to that. Without question, she will never cease to amaze me with how she has approached everything and the way she now reflects on her life.

Recently she and a friend went to their first gig without a parent. No way would she have been able to do this last year. And while I was a tad neurotic, when I got the text message from her to tell me they’d found their seats, had bought some merchandise and what time they’d worked out they’d need to go to the toilet before the main act, I breathed a sigh of relief. She’s got this was my overarching feeling. And as her friend’s mum and I waited in the venue for the gig to finish, I listened to the lyrics of one of the songs. The words that Henry Moodie sang felt like the perfect way to sum up my daughter’s response to grief and anxiety:

  • I’ve learned to live with my anxieties
  • ‘Cause I’ve got some bad emotions
  • It’s just a part of life, it doesn’t mean I’m broken
  • At the worst of times, I tell myself to breathe
  • Count to three, wait and see that I’ll be okay
  • ‘Cause I’ve got some bad emotions
  • Took a minute, but I’m finding ways of coping.

Anyone who is parenting a child who is bereaved wants to make it better for them. Anyone who has experienced childhood bereavement wants to feel better. Wonders when the grief and the pain might go away. Yet, as I’ve come to realise it doesn’t ever go away. But by talking about it and hopefully breaking some taboos, we can become more understanding of the impact, find techniques for coping and learn ways to support.

#BuildingHope is this year’s theme, and I cannot think of anything that is more fitting. It sounds clichéd. It sounds trite. But speaking as a mother who has watched her child ride the grief rollercoaster these last four years, I do truly believe that building and offering hope to those also experiencing this is one of the most powerful things we can do. 

Quite simply. Hope is everything.

Children are resilient

Family photos of The Charlesworth Family

I want to start this by saying I’m no expert on grief. I’m no expert on bereavement. I’m no expert on childhood bereavement. But what I am an expert on is my child. My child who, at the age of 10, watched as her beloved father grew steadily weaker and more ill because of COVID-19. Who watched as her father walked out of our house to an ambulance accompanied by three paramedics. Who then never physically saw him again. Just think about that for a moment. It’s not fiction. It’s real. This is what happened to my beautiful, clever, amazing 10-year-old.

One of the very first things that was said to me in amongst all this carnage was “children are resilient.” It was said in a way to make me feel better, to make me feel that she would be ok despite our world crumbling around us. It wasn’t meant with any malice at all, because fundamentally children are resilient in a way that is different to adults. They are far more black and white, they are far more pragmatic, they see the world in a different way to us. But over the last two and a half years, this phrase has come back to haunt me time and time again. Because I can’t help but wonder if we are actually doing children a disservice by using this phrase and immediately telling them and their families how resilient they are. Yes, they might be, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer, that they don’t feel pain, that their lives aren’t ridiculously changed forever, that they aren’t ridiculously changed forever. And quite simply, this is what has happened to my daughter.

She was a relatively carefree 10-year-old when the pandemic came into our lives. She was never meant to have been an only child, but after Mr C’s cancer we didn’t even know if we’d be able to have a child, and then after my miscarriage, we decided to just be thankful for the child we did have and that was that. I’ve wondered on more than one occasion how different her experience of bereavement and grief would have been had she had a sibling to share the pain and the loss with. It’s one of those “what if” questions that should never be asked and will never be answered.

And while I say carefree, she hadn’t always had it easy. She’d had to watch me hit rock bottom at the age of eight. She’d had to watch my nan’s health decline due to Alzheimer’s from the age of six (just six weeks before the diagnosis, she’d still been having sleepovers with my nan and baking cakes). She’d seen the usual marital arguments that happen. But, overall, she didn’t really have that much to worry about in her life. We tried to make as many memories with her as possible, we knew that she would only be a child for so long and that we needed to make the most of our time with her. I will be beyond grateful for the rest of my life that we took this approach and have a wealth of memories and photos to look back on.

But as the pandemic seemed to grow in its severity, the biggest worry and challenge I thought she was going to face was that of isolation, of not being at school, of not being able to go to dance lessons, of not seeing her friends and just being stuck with two adults in the house. But I didn’t worry too much, because children are resilient… Little did I know what she was actually going to face. I will never, ever forget the early hours of 30 March 2020 when she woke up to hear her father struggling for breath, me making a 999 call and seeing the utter panic and desperation I felt. Yes, I tried to say calm for her but in that moment I’m sure she saw it. She knew. And then, in a reality that will forever pain me, I had to leave her on her own when the paramedics arrived because they needed me. My 10-year-old had to sit on her own in our lounge, whilst knowing that upstairs people were trying to save her father and the only comfort she could get was via my mum on the phone because no-one could come in our house. But that’s ok right? Because children are resilient.

The next three weeks sort of passed in a blur. There were days we didn’t make it out of our PJs. There were days we’d have cake for breakfast and brownies for lunch. There was the day a week before he died when I had to sit her down and tell her that he was very poorly (understatement of the year) and might never come home. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” I remember saying to her. “Yes, you’re saying daddy might die” was her response. Pragmatic. Real. She was bloody amazing. And then the Skype calls came. I didn’t do the first one with her because I wasn’t sure what he’d look like but having done that one, I knew she’d be ok seeing him. Each day I would ask if she wanted to talk to daddy and her response was always “well, I’ll talk to him today because he’s here today isn’t he and might not be tomorrow.” I told this story when I was on a panel at the UK Commission on Bereavement “Bereavement is everyone’s business” report launch and you could hear a pin drop. I saw members of the audience crying. It hit me then. Just how much I’ve come to accept what we went through because we were living it. How I’ve probably downplayed our experience because it was ours. And yet when other people hear it, they consider it heart-breaking.

But. The attitude and philosophy that my daughter adopted during that final week kept me going, because if she could do it, then so could I. And then the fateful day came. The call came. Hope had gone. He was going to die. She was actually about to become a child whose father had died. My biggest fear had been realised. Again, we did a Skype call and this was our chance to say goodbye. I can still remember her saying to him “I’ve not really got anything else to say to you now, I haven’t done much, I’ll go talk to nana and come back in a bit” (my mum was sat on our driveway at the time). Because let’s face it. Children are resilient. This was just something else she was dealing with.

And let’s be honest. She didn’t really have a choice but to deal with it. We were living in the middle of a global pandemic. Her father had died. I couldn’t make this any better for her. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t real. Both of us had to deal with it. But unlike me, she didn’t cry. For weeks, if not months, she didn’t cry. She queried this with me because she didn’t understand why not. “Everyone grieves differently, please don’t worry about it” was my reply. It was all I had. The day of the funeral, she didn’t cry. She stood in the crematorium, did a reading with me, and didn’t cry. Shock. That’s what she was experiencing. Shock. I didn’t really realise it at the time, but like I say I’m an expert on my child and now I can say she was in shock. She was in shock for such a very long time. My amazingly brilliant, resilient child had experienced pain that no child should ever experience. She not only experienced loss, but went on to experience isolation, a lack of physical contact, her mother falling apart and secondary losses. Yet all the while people kept telling me that she’d be ok. Because children are resilient.

What I hadn’t really realised at the time and didn’t really realise until this year is how she aged overnight. Not just mentally, but physically. Her eyes took on a sudden weariness. She looked older. Yes, partly because she was growing up, but also partly because of the trauma she went through. And I realised this in the simplest of ways this year. We went to Florida for three weeks; it was our treat to ourselves after the heartache we’d gone through. We did a day trip out of the parks one day and she asked me for a cuddly toy as a memory, before then I couldn’t tell you the last time she asked for one. On the coach back to the hotel, she cuddled that toy. I snapped a photo and sent it to my sister. “She looks so young” was her response. And that was it. That was the moment I saw it. Our three weeks in Florida enabled my daughter to be a child again, to not have a care in the world and ultimately, to regress. She got back a little bit of her childhood on that holiday. I cried on the plane on the way home, partly because I felt I was leaving Mr C there but also because I felt I’d got my little girl back. She had been given the space and ability to be a child again. It was a momentous feeling. I wanted to keep her like this forever.

But back to reality we came. She said something to me a couple of weeks later after a difficult few days and it just winded me. “People don’t ask me how I am anymore, it’s been over two years, I’m supposed to be ok with it now aren’t I?” Because time is meant to be a healer, isn’t it? But sadly, the misconception that exists because we’re “trained” to believe that children are resilient is that they don’t suffer for any length of time. That they just bounce back from whatever comes their way. That they don’t experience pain in the same way. That grief doesn’t affect them. Without question it does. And it’s something that will be a part of them forever. I wonder how we can change that, because in my opinion it needs to be changed. Unless you’ve witnessed it first-hand, you have no real idea of what grief, trauma and pain can do to a child.

I won’t talk about all the ways I can see that she’s been affected and what it’s like for her because that’s her story to tell and I don’t want to divulge it. Maybe one day, but not now. Not while she’s living it. But what I can tell you as her mother is that she is 100% affected by her loss. That she is 100% struggling to work through and process what has happened to her. Losing her hero. Losing her protector. Losing one half of her history. And quite simply, why wouldn’t she be? It doesn’t mean she’s not resilient, it just means she’s human. It just means that she’s experienced one of the most awful things that she possibly could, and she needs to be allowed time and space to work through it. She needs love and care. She needs people to ask her how she is. She needs to talk about her dad. She needs to know that all of how she is feeling is ok.

And interestingly enough, from my perspective, it is this that I believe will build her resilience and help her as she goes through the teenage years and adulthood. Needing help doesn’t mean she’s not resilient, that she’s mad, that she can’t cope or that she’s weird. It just means she’s human and vulnerable. And I will be there with her on every step of this journey. I am so grateful for the child bereavement charities that I’ve spoken to who have given me guidance, who have supported her and will continue to support her.

But most of all, as her mother, I couldn’t be prouder of her for the way she has responded over the last couple of years. It’s not been easy; I’d be lying if I said it had. But I hope that she’ll retain the human and vulnerable elements to her as she gets older, because they’ll be two of the most valuable qualities she’ll ever possess. I hope that her experience doesn’t define her but instead helps shape her. To help her go into adulthood retaining that realistic and pragmatic view on the world. To truly understand that being resilient doesn’t mean that you don’t find things hard. That you don’t suffer. That it’s ok to need help now and then. And without question, I know that if she takes this into adulthood, it’s something that her dad would be very proud of her for doing too.