Therapeutic Friendship

Suffering from a cancer that had left a gaping wound in her leg, 13-year-old Karen was sent home from an English hospital for a last visit with her family a few days before her expected death. Karen's mother, changing the girl's dressing, vomited over her child in horror when she saw what lay beneath the bandages. A week later, Karen died. But her mother lived on with her crushing sense of guilt that Karen's last thoughts had been of rejection. To ease her grief, the mother turned to the Society of Compassionate Friends, a rapidly growing organization that brings together parents of dead and dying children for what Founder Simon Stephens calls a therapeutic friendship.

Breached Defenses. From others in the group, Karen's mother gained what she most needed: a chance, as Stephens puts it, "to talk through her dreadful experience with a parent who had experienced something similar, so that she could begin to absolve herself of blame"--and eventually accept the loss of her child. Without the society, she probably would not have found anyone able to share her sorrow, because, he believes, society quarantines the bereaved exactly as it does people with contagious diseases.

"The death of a child was commonplace in Victorian days," explains Stephens, a curate trained in psychiatry and psychology. "Now it is so rare that we try to pretend it never happens. When it does, society turns away from those who are suffering, because their tears can breach our defenses."

Betty Edwards, a member of the Compassionate Friends, encountered those defenses. "A few weeks after my 22-year-old son was killed racing," she recalls, "a friend talked to me about everything under the sun; and I wanted to scream because she didn't mention John. She thought she was doing me a kindness, but I didn't want my son forgotten. The trouble is, most people have this little bit of fear that what has happened to your child could happen to theirs, and they don't want to face it."

This fear affects others besides friends, Stephens has discovered. He points out that doctors, unable to face the tragedy, will sometimes stop visiting an incurably ill child, and that nurses may try not to become emotionally involved. Clergymen frequently abandon bereaved mothers and fathers as soon as the funeral is over. Even close relatives, trying to be helpful, often remove every trace of the dead child--his books, clothes and toys and games--and encourage parents to forget at a time when their real need is "to work through their grief by talking incessantly and by remembering."

Stephens' attempt to evoke that memory began two years ago when as chaplain of Coventry's biggest hospital he encountered two dying boys: Billy Henderson, 12, who had cancer in his legs, chest and bloodstream; and Kenneth Lawley, 11, with head injuries resulting from a fall from his bike. "Billy died first," said Stephens, "and I felt a need to tell his parents they were not alone in their grief. I told them about Kenneth, and after Kenneth died I introduced the two sets of parents." Adds Joan Henderson: "We found we could cry together about our boys without embarrassment."

Softening Grief. A year later, the Society of Compassionate Friends was formed, and since then, 20 branches have been set up from Glasgow to Guernsey. The society aims not just at softening grief but at preventing its most damaging results. Explains Stephens: "Parents who cannot share their sorrow sometimes come to reject their remaining children. Or they have another child in the hope of re-creating the one they have lost."

If the later child's sex is different, however, he may be rejected; in any event, he is likely to suffer from not being wanted for himself. In other families, says Stephens, a father may try so hard to "keep a stiff upper lip, because it's the British thing to do," that he shows his wife little warmth, and the marriage itself breaks down. The grief over the loss of a child is universal and inevitable. But Stephens insists that the consequences are not.

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