Compassion, Autumn 2020

Autumn 2020 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 6 Dear Compassionate Friends, I hope this finds you all safe and well. It is hard to believe that another three months have passed. It is equally difficult to believe that we are already well into August, deep into summer and heading once again towards the end of the year. How fast has this year passed? And what a year 2020 has been, unprecedented for everyone, not what anyone could have anticipated. Equally, time has not felt as it does normally. You only have to listen to the radio or TV or look on social media to find many people are asking the same question… where have the days, weeks and months gone? I feel the same and I am sure so many of you do. I cannot but feel the similarities with what we have all gone through and continue to go through as bereaved parents and siblings. We may have completely lost any sense of time at the start of our loss. There is no gauge and no rule as to how long that can go on for. Time was one of my most difficult or at least different challenges that I faced in the first couple of years of bereavement. I often felt like I had ‘lost time’. I found this difficult to explain to other people and equally difficult to fathom myself. I might suddenly realise it was halfway through the day or even the end of the day, but I would have no proper memory of what I had done during the hours that passed. Looking back, I guess that following Fabian’s death, time lost its familiar meaning, because everything around seemed so very unfamiliar. To a lesser extent I think this is what is happening in 2020. We are all in unfamiliar territory and so time has taken a back seat. It is only when we stop and look back that we are aware that our concept of time has changed. There is also something else that has a ring of familiarity to it. “Put on your mask”. At TCF support groups many bereaved parents talk about the ‘mask’ they put on when at work, with family, or in a social setting with friends. We have all worn that mask and many of us continue to wear it no matter how many years have passed. Maybe we don’t want anyone else to see how we really feel or we are scared to show our true feelings. When you have lost a child or sibling you see and feel things differently to how you saw and felt them before. But you cannot always express how you feel. And as we all know, on occasions it is easier to behave as we did before. Sometimes we are fortunate in that we have friends or family or even strangers who allow us to take off that mask and just be ourselves. And when that happens it is Thoughts from the Chair Andrew Miller with his son Fabian