1 : A grief so deep that it is hard to breathe

We share the pain of the bereaved, but there is so little comfort we can give

No death is more sad. Parents don't expect their children to die. Imprinted in every mother and father is the confident hope that we will go first.

Even to think about death in relation to children seems wrong. If the cause is 'natural', a child's death breaks the soul. But when children are murdered, so too is part of the world. To kill a child is to poison the reason for living.

Today Leslie and Sharon Chapman and Nicola and Kevin Wells face feelings with which we can only try to identify. They are in a type of hell. Not only have they been told that their daughters Jessica and Holly are now dead, but their grief has been toyed with by events. Not for them the instant certainty of a crash or drowning. Since 8.30pm two weeks ago today they have had to maintain a sense of hope within an eggshell of fear.

The police, supported by psychological profilers, have offered a range of optimisms with one conclusion. The children are frightened but alive; they have been kidnapped, not killed. The parents have had their hope cracked by the discovery of shallow graves, then put back together by the admission that these were just badger setts.

The police then appealed to the kidnappers: Stand tall. Look at yourself in the mirror. Give yourselves up. This message contained for the parents just one sub-text: 'We still have hope.'

Mrs Chapman also addressed the supposed abductors herself: 'Just give the girls back. It doesn't matter what has happened. I don't care. Just give them back.'

And now she knows there is no hope. These two bright girls in their red shirts will never grow up to become women.

Of necessity, all this has been played out before cameras in a display of 'reality TV' which compounds the bereavement. In many ways, the public support will have been a comfort. Only a deranged soul could not have felt some sympathy for these family victims.

There will almost certainly be a further emotional delay as the court system proceeds on its painstaking path to a trial which may not take place this year. And the reliving of events line by line in court is not always cathartic. For many families it can feel like a second slaughter.

For the Chapmans and Wells, some time next year, there will come a moment of silence for which they may feel wholly unprepared. They will find themselves alone with their own thoughts in homes which seem obscenely empty.

Grief is a lengthy process because we have to 'number our losses' over more than one cycle of seasons to realise what has actually been taken away. You may be able to manage at Christmas - but what about the summer holiday without those buckets and spades? Human feelings change far more slowly than facts. We need rituals to help us cope. And in grief we are also marked forever. Life changes from innocence to knowing more than we could ever wish.

Most of us in Britain share some of these feelings today. But for Leslie and Sharon, Nicola and Kevin this loss practically prevents breathing.

You fear to sleep. You can't taste food. You think you are going mad. Does it get any better? Yes, but it will need a lot of patience and support. Time alone doesn't really heal. Eventually we must talk.

I don't know what the deaths of Holly and Jessica mean. But I do know these parents have all my spare love, and I hope yours, for they tread the hardest path.

Phillip Hodson, Sunday August 18, 2002, The Observer
Phillip Hodson is a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
http://observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,776487,00.html
 

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2 : Amid the fear, parents need to be realistic when warning children

THE teams of counsellors, who are standing by ready to help in Soham will come to listen rather than to talk. Although the grief felt in the small fenland town may be greater than that experienced in a larger centre, where the victims might be less well known, the tight-knit nature of the community will provide the mutual support that will help them to recover, even if they never forget.

The Fens is one of the parts of the country where the sense of community is still reinforced by devoutly held religious views. This will give added support.

Children, and increasingly the adults around them, are unaccustomed to dealing with the emotions engendered by a child’s death. In the generations before immunisation, antibiotics, chemotherapy and less advanced surgery, childhood death was comparatively common, but even then sudden or violent death was always hard to come to terms with. As death in childhood from disease becomes less common, violent death is becoming paradoxically more frequent. Sudden death, particularly in children, is heart-rending to the toughest of police officers or doctors. It is infinitely worse for those to whom death is a stranger, and the victim, a loved child and friend.

Children facing up to the murder of Holly and Jessica have to have their questions answered with truthfulness and honesty, and they must be kept informed. They must not be allowed to obtain their information from forbidden programmes, or whispered parental discussion.

Parents should be around at TV news times so that they can explain the bulletins, and they must be prepared to discuss even the most lurid and preposterous rumours and counter them with unemotionally delivered facts.

The children will need reassurance. Their trust in the adult world will have been dented, but they must be told that paedophilia and murder are still rare occurrences. They must be taught that some people have unnatural and at times dangerous sexual interests in children so that certain rules must be obeyed to avoid those dangers.

It should be expected that all who have known Holly and Jessica will go through the process of grieving, from disbelief to anger, depression and finally acceptance. If the grieving process becomes arrested at any stage, or at any time becomes unbearable, help in the form of additional counselling or medication may be needed. There is however an increasing weight of evidence that shows that too much counselling can be counter-productive and can reinforce fears, and reawaken memories that were beginning to fade.

Parents will need to look out for such symptoms as nightmares, insomnia, food refusal, headaches, abdominal pain, disobedience and timidity, any of which could have been caused by the fears induced by the murders.

The advice parents give to children in the future will be difficult in Soham. It is important to emphasise that children should be taught never to promise someone else, particularly an adult, to keep secrets from their parents, and they must never accept either gifts or lifts from strangers. It is a narrow line between frightening a child and teaching them the facts of life.

Children from an early age need to be exposed to reality, especially as changing mores have undermined the concept of childhood innocence.

The careful parent should now aim to make certain that their children are brought up with an understanding and kindly realism, even a dash of cynicism about the world, based on sound knowledge.
 

Medical Briefing by Dr Thomas Stuttaford, The Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-388222,00.html