One of a series of leaflets published by The Compassionate Friends The death of a child is an earth-shattering event. The unthinkable has happened. Our child has died, and we are still alive. How can such a thing even be real? Children are expected to outlive their parents, not the other way around. To be bereaved of a child is devastating, regardless of their age and whether they lived for days, months, years or decades. Bereaved fathers There are many different ways of being a father. We may or may not be living now with the mother of our child, or perhaps we never have. We may be part of a blended family. We may not be the biological father of our child, but we have been fathering them. We may be single, or one half of a same-sex couple who had our beloved child via surrogacy. Our child may or may not have been living under our roof. Just as there is no fixed type of fatherhood, there is no fixed way to grieve. We each need to find our own way through our grief. Although it may seem surprising when our bereavement is new and acute, we are not alone in this. Many of us are walking this difficult road. The early days of our bereavement “In those first days, I questioned what I was going to do next. How was I going to live my life now that my child had gone and my life was changed forever?” “As a single man I felt so alone after my son died. I tried to be strong. I thought this was expected of me as a father.” In the first few weeks after our child’s death, the future may look empty and bleak. When things go badly, we fathers often feel we should be able to fix them. We see ourselves as practical and logical, able to find solutions and take action. But this is A Father’s Grief
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