the Guardian

I’m not really sure where this should go but this forum seems as appropriate as any.

There is an interesting piece in the family section of the Guardian on the death (from cancer) of the mother of a three year old girl. A Big Hug for Ellie is here guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/07/grief-cancer-children-counselling-child

It details how resilient small children are in the face of the big issues.

Jenny
x

That was very moving…

*toddles off to get a tissue.*

What a moving and thought provoking article.

Jenny,
Thanks for posting this.
Sophie

Very very moving. Preschool children are indeed so often amazingly resilient - and accepting. Thank you for posting the link, Jenny.

Kay x

Hi Jenny, I read the article Saturday…really good article and I know, like you, from seeing late friend’s children’s reactions just how resiliant they are. I only wondered how the Mother would have felt to seeing the picture of herself with her daughter plus the other pictures of her daughter in the article? Seeing as she had been so very private with the family about her illness. Don’t know but I just felt a bit uncomfortable about it. She seemed such a private woman. I didn’t feel it needed pictures…just my thoughts after reading the paper Saturday…and perhaps the online link doesn’t have the pics…edited… to say I see visiting the online link it only contains 1 pic…think the newspaper had 3 or 4 pics.

Good…I’ve found this thread…I went off to read the Guardian article after you posted Jenny, read it, and then couldn’t find the thread.

Yes children are resilient and resilient and resilient (they are after all human.)

But I felt uncomfortable with this article. Over the years I have talked about this issue with quite a lot of friends and acquaintances whose own mother died when they were very young (invaraably of polio or cancer.) I’m talking 1940s, 1950s, 1960s here, when it was the norm that children didn’t attend funerals, were not encouraged to talk about their mum, often didn’t have a single momento…let alone a memory box. The way the author described Ellie’s experience and the ‘privacy’ around her mother’s illness which her mother and father had insisted on, made me wonder if we weren’t being catapulted back to the 1950s. Yes what a fetching picture of Ellie searching for flowers, but of course she’s not blissfully unaware. I think the author of the piece was wrong to suggest that 3 is a good age to lose your mother because in some way you are less conscious of what’s happened than if you were older. Its that very unconsciousness which can be so distressing as a child grows up, feeling loss, but having no words to explain it. If the adults around that loss are refusing to speak of it…how much harder is that?

I also don’t think that using the words: ‘Mummy is broken…and can’t be fixed’…is a good choice of words to explain death to a three year old…several days after her mother has actually died. Did she get a chance to say goodbye to mummy?

Atually I think this article was purely opportunistic…ie. let’s do a modest middle Eengland take on death as a contrast to nasty loud Jade Goody, and chattering classes John Diamond and Ruth Picardie

No I don’t have children…but I was once a child.

Jane

i know this isn’t cancer related, but i lost my twin brother 3 weeks before our 8th birthday, he fell out of an upstairs window, i wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral, this after all was the late 1960’s, my brother was never mentioned in front of me, if i asked i was just told that he had gone to heaven, this answer did not help me when other kids would bully me and accuse me of pushing him out of the window (yes kids can be that cruel at that age)so to cut a long story short, because my parents never spoke about my brother, i never felt i could speak about being bullied. luckily we moved from that area within 6 months and i was never bullied about it again. i don’t feel this experience was too detrimental to my up bringing in hopefully turning out to be a hard working honest caring person, who has a very honest relationship with all her children. but it does annoy me now when my older sisters talk about what a little angel my twin was and tell me that i was always the naughty one when i know that that wasn’t entirely true, and my younger sister who never met my twin says the same sort of thing!
i know i did grieve in my own little way about my twin, i hated the way my parents would shut up when i entered the room if they had been talking about him, and my older sisters were told never to mention him to me, i only found that out recently.
yes children are aware, its the parents that are not aware that young children see and hear a lot more than we give them credit for.
Alisonx

As a hospice chaplain and psychotherapist (which includes work with children) I can’t help feeling that the way the death in the Guardian article was ‘managed’ was about making the child’s pain bearable for the adults, rather than doing what was best for the child. The father might have chosen to avoid counselling now, but I am quite certain that the child will need it later.

Sass xx

Thank you, Jane. I was rather uncomfortable reading this article too. Yes, children are resilient. But they are also rather good at putting on the show that they think adults are looking for.

NOrmal life DOES go on after the death of a parent. But so too do normal fears and normal feelings of loss. I do think that it is important that children are allowed to grieve and that we try not to interpret everything they do with our adult heads. They need opportunities to show their grief, and to be comforted and not simply encouraged all the time to ignore the terrible thing that has happened in their life. My kids howled at the death of the hamster. And they howled at the memory of that loss for many days afterwards. Even now, my youngest talks with great sadness about it.

Seven years ago, I had to think hard how to tell my three year old that I had cancer (I didn’t have secondaries then). I decided to tell her it was a serious illness and that I needed some really strong medicine and that I would feel quite ill and need to be very careful about things like germs. I also decided to tell her that there were no guarantees that it would work. It was a tough call. But when she asked “Will you be all better after the medicine?” I felt I couldn’t lie to her. Now she is ten. She knows I have secondaries. She knows I may die while she is still young. She’s seen me being canulated, on drips, bald, tired and ill. She doesn’t like it. But she lives with it. And, when she wants to, we talk about it.

I wanted to take comfort from the article. But I didn’t. It seemed sanitised and blinkered and more about how the adults were feeling rather than a true understanding of how the child might be. Sorry.

Deirdre

Forgot to say…

Alison, I know something of how you felt. I lost my youngest sister when I was eight years old. She was four and had a violent epileptic fit and died. I don’t remember ever speaking about it with my parents. I certainly didn’t go to the funeral. She simply disappeared out of our lives and I think looking back it must have scared the hell out of me and left me with all sorts of unhealthy feelings - not to mention complete bewilderment at my parents’ grief.

Deirdre

I too lost a brother in the late '60s, when I was about 8 years old,in a tragic domestic accident. I remember seeing him lying dead, on the sofa while the house teemed with police and other officials. I remember my father gathering us on a bed upstairs and telling us Steven was dead. I remember importantly telling my teacher that I wouldn’t be at school on whatever day it was as I had to go to the funeral and I remember everyone gently telling me that I wouldn’t be going to the funeral. Amongst all of this, what I don’t remember much of, is my actual feelings of loss for my young brother.
The incident did have a huge impact on my childhood - my mother grieved for years and we had to move house but I don’t remember my own grief.

Interesting comments from everyone and I now feel prompted to wonder what the purpose of the article was.

Jennyx

…maybe the purpose was to demonstrate that there is more than one way to skin a rabbit (as my mother used to say)

Ian has had his instruction to turn heating off. I will order the the under garments.
In 1986 my then husband died at home he had just been on the camode(very thoughtful) hope I can mange not to make too much of a mess.
I did feel rather proud that I had been able to grant his wish of dying with just us with him. Heart breakingly sad but a very tender moving moment that our daughter can still remember. She was only four and said the angels were on their way he said no darling not tonight and within an hour he had gone. Sorry didn’t mean to go on.
Love Debsxxx

That last post was meant to be in the Hospices and Hospital thread not this one. I don’t know how to move it.

Hi Debs

You could cut and paste it into the appropriate thread and then I can delete it from here if that helps.

Lucy