TODAY is the seventh anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Most of us can probably recall exactly where we were when we heard the news of her death. And we will all have our own memories of those eerie days that followed: the flowers, the silence, the crowds. The most enduring image for me is that of her two adolescent sons walking behind her coffin — a dreadful reminder of John F. Kennedy Junior saluting the coffin of his assassinated father.
The premature death of a parent is a sort of inversion of nature in which the child is left behind to fend for itself. When I was growing up, I used to read books about orphans (such as Anne of Green Gables) with wonderment, rejoicing in the security of my own uneventful family life. I didn’t know anyone who had lost a parent and death was very much “a foreign country”.
It has not remained so. Three years ago, my best friend from university died from cancer, leaving two young children bewildered and grief-stricken. In the past decade, the writings of John Diamond and Ruth Picardie have exposed the complex emotions that surround terminal illness when young children will be left behind. Meanwhile, two of the most successful children’s series of our time — Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books — are both about orphans.
Winston’s Wish, a children’s bereavement organisation, estimates that every year 20,000 children in Britain lose a parent — or to put it more poignantly, every hour of every day, two children under 18 are bereaved. The death of a parent is a seminal event at any age but if it occurs during childhood it can leave lifelong scars: depression, low self-esteem and an inability to trust.
So how do you help a child grieve? There are surprisingly few books offering practical advice. Earlier this year, two American psychologists, Dr Paddy Greenwall Lewis and Dr Jessica Lippman, published Helping Children Cope With the Death of a Parent, based on their work with motherless daughters in Chicago. “These young women revealed how their hurt was compounded by well-meaning but psychologically unaware fathers, teachers, friends and relatives,” says Lewis. “Over and over, we heard how their fathers were decent, good men but clueless about coping.”
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When a partner dies suddenly, the remaining parent is normally in a state of extraordinary shock. It’s easy to make decisions which you later regret. Few possess the sangfroid of Prince Charles who seemed relatively in control when he flew to Paris to bring Diana’s body home.
Felicity Peake’s husband, Stuart, died after falling from a ladder while doing DIY work at home in May 2000. Felicity’s two children, Delia and Harvey, were 4 and 6. Felicity decided that she did not want the children to visit Stuart in hospital where he was on a life-support machine. “He was fairly bruised and battered,” she says. “And I thought it would be too depressing for them to see him.”
Now she is not convinced that she made the right decision: “As a parent, your first wish is to protect your children. But the children have since repeatedly asked me, ‘Why couldn’t we see Daddy?’ At the time, they didn’t express a wish to see him.”
Lewis says: “Don’t be too hard on yourself. In these circumstances, every parent does the best they can. No parent wants to hurt their child further.”
The day after his accident, Stuart was declared brain-dead and Felicity faced the awful task of breaking the news to her children. “Everybody was asking me not to tell the children yet. But I couldn’t not tell them. So I sat on a bench in the garden and they were either side of me. And I told them that as a result of his accident, Daddy had died.”
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She remembers her children’s reaction clearly: “Delia, at 4, didn’t really appreciate what it meant. But Harvey said, ‘That means I’ve only known my Daddy for six years.’ His words will always haunt me.”
In their book, Lewis and Lippman deal with the topic of a child’s comprehension of death and identify three stages of childhood mourning. Children under the age of 6 do not understand death and its finality. Between 6 and 9, children personify death and believe that it can sometimes be avoided. Children between 9 and 12 understand that death is inevitable and affects everyone. They feel profound loss, but cannot yet master their emotions. Constantine Costa, the eldest boy of four children, was ten when his father died at home in Scotland in 1960 after a long battle with lung cancer. “None of us children were prepared for the fact that our father would die,” he says in a dull monotone. “There was a lack of understanding at what had transpired. For the first couple of years, I kept having dreams of my father returning. We’d dig up the hole and up he would come.”
Unlike Felicity, Constantine’s mother didn’t break the news of her husband’s death to her children: “We got up in the morning and my father was dead in his bed downstairs and people were crying. That’s how we knew he was dead.” The children, however, were taken in to see their dead father, who was laid out in his bedroom. Constantine dismisses this last encounter as “surreal” but the memory still preoccupies him. “I felt guilty. My father was very sick and I hadn’t seen him for about two days before he died. I was avoiding going in to his bedroom. So when I finally saw him, I felt very upset that I didn’t have the chance to speak to him again, let alone say goodbye.” Constantine recalls discussing this incident, some 40 years later, with his elder sister who confided that she hadn’t been into her father’s room for several weeks before he died. Dr Lewis explains: “When a death is not handled carefully or sensitively, issues remain for ever.”
It is even worse if the parent commits suicide, as Helen Mason’s mother did in 1968 when Helen was ten.
Helen was told that her mother, who suffered from depression, had “muddled up her pills” and only later pieced together the truth. “Euphemisms are usually not a good idea,” says Lewis. “They serve to muddle, not clarify, and children will inevitably find out what really happened and feel betrayed and angry.”
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Helen then suffered what Lewis refers to as a “conspiracy of silence”. “Nothing was said to me at school by the teachers,” she says. She also found it tricky with other children: “For a time,” she muses, “it was like the parting of the Red Sea in the playground. People sensed something dreadful had happened and they didn’t know what to say.”
Helen’s father remarried quickly and rarely talked about her real mother: “It was made clear to me that her name was not to be mentioned and I was told to call my step-mother ‘Mum’, which I found very hard.” Helen is now a volunteer for Winston’s Wish, which counsels bereaved children and their families.
Counselling can help a parent or a child weave their way through the minefield of premature bereavement. But the death of a parent during childhood is a gaping loss. And when the death is unexpected, the loss will initially be even harder to bear. Nevertheless, the untimely death of a parent can sometimes be the motivation for greatness: Madonna’s mother died when she was 5 and Bill Clinton’s father died in a car accident before his son was born. In his autobiography Clinton writes: “My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had.”
Will Prince William take on his mother’s legacy? Perhaps a more pertinent question is how his mother’s premature death will shape his own sense of purpose in his own life. Will it lead him to try harder and, as it were, leap higher? Or will he revert to type and just be a prisoner of his privileged upbringing?
Winston’s Wish: 0845 2030405
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The Child Bereavement Trust: 0845 357 1000