How do children deal with the death of a parent?
Ben was eight when his father, a single parent, died of cancer. He remembers his dad’s eyes were the same colour blue as one of the marbles he keeps in a box upstairs where he now lives with his foster parents. William, also eight, wanted a saw to cut open the coffin to release his dad at the funeral. He drew pictures of kites, big ones for his brother and sister and himself, and a very small one for his dad because “Dad’s dead”. In her prayers, six-year-old Jessica instructed God to “let me speak to mummy now”, then waited while God passed the phone to her dead mother. By the time we reach adulthood, most of us are aware of the rituals of grief. Experiencing bereavement for the first time, we know how we are supposed to feel and act – even if it doesn’t work out that way. But for children, there is no code of conduct; no handy guideline to indicate what they should be thinking or feeling. In an attempt to explore a child’s experience of loss, Jeremy Howe interviewed children aged betw
