COMPASSION 212 Summer 2022

Summer 2022 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 6 As I’m writing this, Easter is just over, the sun is shining and normality, whatever that is, seems to have returned. People are out and about again and very few of them are wearing masks, or maybe they are but we can’t see them. Nobody meeting me, for example, would realise I’m a bereaved mum who still has to force herself out of bed to face the day sometimes. Nobody seeing my daughter running around after her own children would think to themselves, “goodness there’s a girl who misses her sister every day”. That’s because our invisible masks are firmly in place and how many other people are wearing theirs too? There’s so much grief, illness, poverty and fear in the world and so many people must be struggling for one reason or another, although you wouldn’t know it if you met them. That makes me think about the blurred edges between fact and fiction in the world, and leads in turn to the thought of how reading a work of fiction can often make it easier to live with a hard and painful truth in your life. If all this sounds a bit deep, or maybe a bit rambling, I am thinking about the part fiction plays in our library. We have a few works of fiction but I really want to write about two new books I’ve read recently. The first came from my local library and took me completely by surprise. I enjoy reading crime and detective novels, as long as they’re not too graphic, and an author I really like is Clare Mackintosh. So when I saw a book of hers I hadn’t read, sitting in the crime section of my library, I was very pleased and brought it home to read. It’s called ‘After the End’ and isn’t a crime story at all. Rather it’s a beautifully told story of the hopes and fears, and eventual grief and devastation, of a young couple whose son Dylan has a brain tumour which leads to a situation where nothing more can be done for him and the parents need to make a decision about turning off his life support. The parents disagree and end up in court with a judge deciding for them. As I read the book I was very impressed with the way the author captured things like the camaraderie between parents in the children’s Intensive Therapy Unit, the terror and the hope against hope you feel when your child is desperately ill and the reality of the grief that follows. For example, the News from the Catharine Pointer Memorial Library