Compassion, Spring 2021

Spring 2021 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 9 but, to be honest, that didn’t matter. I remember reading Sue Grant’s ‘Standing on his own Two Feet’ which told us about her son’s illness and death, from cancer, and I felt such a connection with her as I read. That’s a book which is still very popular with readers as is another of my early reads, ‘A Quiet Courage’ by Jim McCullum whose daughter died from lymphoma. Another book which really resonated with me was ‘Living Still and Loving Always’ which was written by Nita G Aasen after her two sons died in a road accident. Nita based this book on the essays she wrote for TCF in the USA and it really is very good. In 2004 most of our books seemed to have been written by Americans and two others that come to mind are ‘In the Absence of Angels’ by Elizabeth Glaser, whose daughter died from AIDS, and ‘His Bright Light’ by Danielle Steel after her son died by suicide. I read both of those and again felt that connection. Finally I have to mention a book which I’ve read and reread so many times over the years, especially when I’ve been feeling low and needed comfort. It’s C S Lewis’s ‘A Grief Observed’, which he wrote after his wife died, and it’s just his thoughts and feelings written as they happened in the first few days of being bereaved. He writes, “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear….. the same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness….. I want others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” That last sentence always makes me smile because I remember my house being full of people all the time, friends and neighbours and family, and the only single one of them I really wanted to talk to was the mum of one of Claire’s school friends whose elder daughter had died a couple of years previously. Later on Lewis says, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything”, and isn’t that so true! It’s a very small book but, in its few pages, it captures the experience and the pain of grief so evocatively and it re-assured me that I was normal, not mad. Well that’s it for this time; a rather self- indulgent trip down memory lane. It will soon be the seventeenth anniversary of the day my daughter died so I’d just like to share something which always makes me think of her with a smile. She was a teenager enjoying life after all. “Her Candle burned at both ends; it could not last the night, But ah my foes and oh my friends, it gave a lovely light“. With love from Mary