Compassion, Winter 2020

Winter 2020 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 10 and which has been requested by a lot of people. I managed to get hold of another copy, the last one on Amazon, but there is a waiting list. Please be assured that I haven’t forgotten anybody and I’m working my way through the list so it will arrive on your doorstep eventually. One other set of books I’d like to talk about are those for parents whose child died from alcohol and/or substance use. I know from my nursing days just how traumatic it is to see your child suffering from an addiction and I know how desperately my patients wanted to stop being addicted. I think, like most things, the best help comes from other people who have had a similar experience to your own and the library can help with that. One of our best books is ‘See You Soon’ by Philippa Skinner, whose son died from an overdose. We also have this book in an audio version, read by Philippa herself. ‘Blue Skies my Son’ by Ann Loy, whose son also died from a drug overdose, is another excellent book and reading them makes you realise you’re not alone. The TCF group for parents whose children have died from substance or alcohol use support each other and meet for a weekend every year, apart from this one obviously, and they’ve produced a beautiful book called ‘They Are So Much More’, which has photos of their children as well as tributes and memoirs, in both prose and poetry. It’s a lovely book to browse through. Thanks largely to the generosity of Christine Evans, who finds and reads books which address this subject and then passes them onto the library, we’re building up quite a stock of books to help parents whose children have died in this way. Just to mention two, there’s ‘Lukelove, My Boy, My Grief, My Journal: losing a child to opioids by Sheila Scott and ‘Junkie Buddha: A journey of Discovery in Peru’ by Diane Esguerra. Christine’s books are dedicated to her son, Jake Burkin, who died when he was 22. She now campaigns for Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT), which may well have saved Jake’s life, to be freely available in the UK. HAT has been trialled successfully in Middlesbrough and that trial has been extended for another year. For more information you can look at anyoneschild.org which has a wealth of information including Jake’s story. Also Chris is happy for other parents to contact her and, if you email the library I can put you in touch. To finish, I just want to share a lovely little quote I found in a booklet called ‘Helping Each Other through the Seasons of Grief’ and it goes like this: “Sympathy is feeling sorry, Compassion is doing something about it” Doesn’t that encapsulate the whole ethos of TCF? With love from Mary Keep going That’s all you have to do, ever. You really don’t have to be amazing or fierce or beautiful or successful or good. Just keep going, please. Slowly is fine. Crawling is fine. No feeling is final. Except hope. Glennon Doyle

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