National Bereaved Parents Day 2023
The Compassionate Friends are supporting National Bereaved Parents Day on Monday 3 July 2023.
Please join us to help spread the message, keep that conversation going, raise awareness and show the bereaved parent community that they are not alone.
Please follow our Facebook page to see how you can show your support and share our posts.
Elizabeth and her daughter
"What has helped me in the last 14 months since my beautiful daughter died is The Compassionate Friends support group that I belong to, and the walks that the lovely Terry organises in London.
The support group, along with my bereavement counsellor, have been a lifeline for me and, without them, I don’t know how I would have coped".
Caroline and Matthew
"They (The Compassionate Friends) have an active online presence where you could always find someone to chat to. They have walks, craft sessions & weekends away with people who get it! Most importantly they got me talking, which was a huge turning point in getting back to being “me”. Today, I am still a bereaved parent. I am still Matthew’s mum". - Caroline
"I am a bereaved parent - my oldest son Matthew died age 2 in 2005 from complications arising from heart surgery.
Looking back, I truly feel like my body put me into a state of shock for about 2 years to cope with the scale of loss – and while I appeared to the outside world to function quite normally – I was basically sleepwalking through life. Even now, I have periods of that time which are still a complete blank! I felt so alone. I didn’t know anyone else who had lost a child and genuinely felt I must be grieving “wrongly” when time continued to pass, and the feelings of loss and pain weren’t getting better….
Denise and Abbey
"What helped me was connecting with other grieving parents, joining groups such as this one and hearing their stories. It gave me strength to keep on going. It may sound selfish, but the knowledge she was not alone in leaving early made me think she was not targeted, nor was I as her Mum." Denise, Abbey's mum
What has helped me since I lost my beautiful daughter Abigail, aged 22 to an aggressive medulloblastoma brain tumour – 4 months from diagnosis in 2019.
In those early days I realise I was in complete and utter shock. I can remember mixed emotions from crying hysterically, to being able to chat about shallow meaningless things, even laughing and entertaining people. All the time knowing it was a big act, or a way of staying connected to my other life – my life before my loss. But then it became more and more exhausting and around that time covid struck. Even though that was a bad thing, it made me realise that I needed space to grieve.
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Each year thousands of parents suffer the loss of a son or a daughter. Please help TCF to support families in their time of greatest need.
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Whatever your contact with TCF we encourage you to give us feedback so that we can continue to improve our support.
