Compassion Autumn 2022

Autumn 2022 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 8 I’m writing this in the middle of a heat wave with the threat of the highest UK temperature ever a couple of days away and it’s fair to say I’m a bit hot and bothered. It’s taken my memory back to 2003, the year before my daughter Claire died, when the temperature just down the road in Gravesend reached a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. I was fairly hot and bothered then too and that was compounded by having to constantly remind a very happy 17 year old, set on getting a suntan, to slap on the sunscreen, wear a hat, and stay in the shade during the middle of the day. I expect I got a bit exasperated at the time but, do you know, I would give everything I have to be able to go back and relive that summer. That was nineteen years ago, and it’s been more than eighteen years since I was last able to scold Claire for taking risks in the sun, but my thoughts slip back so easily to when she was physically here and that’s because she’s still a huge part of my life and always will be. This brings me to something I seem to have been talking about a lot lately and that’s the ‘Theory of Continuing Bonds’ You’d think it would be obvious that our children, and other people we love who have died, are always going to be an important and lasting part of our lives. Any cemetery, especially at Christmas time or on special days like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or a birthday, is surely evidence of that! And yet until the mid-1990s the general perception, for people like psychologists and grief counsellors as well as the general public, was that grief is time limited. After someone we love dies, be it a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a grandchild, a dear friend or our child, we grieve deeply for one to two years, gradually start to feel better and then, after five years at the latest, we cut ties with them and move on. We all know that’s nonsense but it wasn’t until the 1980s that experts began to question it too. A psychologist called Dennis Klass worked with a TCF group, or chapter as they call it, in St Louis in the USA. He talked with them, interviewed them and, with their permission, attended their meetings. What he discovered was quite revolutionary for its time because it became obvious to him that, far from cutting ties and moving on, those parents continued their relationship with their children until the end of their lives, albeit in a different way. Their lives did move on but WITH their News from the Catharine Pointer Memorial Library