Childless Parents Newsletter, Spring 2022

Newsletter for Childless Parents | www.tcf.org.uk 2 Hello everyone. The grass is getting greener and the first of the flowers are blooming. Perhaps you too find some pleasure in the brightening days as spring unfolds around us. It’s lovely to see life returning. As much as I enjoy spring, it also has a nasty sting in its tail. My lovely daughter Catherine died in the beautiful sunny spring of April 2011. My dear little son Pax died on 27th May 1982. That is forty years ago. I miss him still, and I always will. It was Catherine’s death that left me childless. The death of one child is painful enough, but to lose two is devastating. From my own experience, becoming childless adds so many other dimensions to grief. I don’t have any grandchildren or close relatives that could even begin to fill the gaps that my missing children have left. When Catherine first died and I began this ‘childless’ chapter, life felt utterly empty and devoid of meaning or purpose. I couldn’t see a way forward or even believe that I could survive the agony of my grief. Looking back at my journal entries of those first couple of years, I was in a very dark place. It’s a bit of a wonder to me that I survived, but I did. So have you. You’re reading this newsletter because you have no living children, whether you were sadly bereaved of one or more child. You’re reading this with a broken heart. You’ve been through sleepless nights and you’ve endured agonising days. You have felt the loneliness of your grief, a grief that so few people can even begin to comprehend. Perhaps you have felt the sting of hearing other parents complain about something or other that their child has done, the mess they left in their bedroom or their lack of motivation in their job. What you would give to have something like this to talk about! Perhaps you feel apprehension about the future. But I hope you have also been able to celebrate your child’s memory. They lived. However long or short their life, they lived. Life always has meaning. Thoughts from our editor