For bereaved families

Grieving means feeling and expressing all the emotions you have.

It also means slowly accepting the reality of what has happened and learning to live with the change that has taken place in your life. Grieving isn't about forgetting the person who has died. It is about finding a permanent place for that person in your life, where it does not cause you so much pain.

The death of a child is a particularly difficult kind of grief. No one expects their child to die before them. It is out of the natural order of things. It feels even more like something that should never have happened.

Some people think that you can only grieve for a child who has been born alive and one that you have got to know, if only for a short while. But parents begin their relationship with their baby long before the birth and may experience grief for babies who die before they are born or where a pregnancy is terminated because problems have been diagnosed.

Equally, people who are unable to conceive naturally and parents whose baby is born with a physical or mental disability may also experience grief. For some parents, the devastating news that their child has a disability may begin years of grieving for the child that could have been. There is also a special kind of grief associated with the death of a child who has been very ill. Parents who have cared for the child, being so close to the child and so badly needed, often feel that when their child dies their own reason for being has been taken away.

It is neither helpful nor appropriate to compare or judge the intensity of feelings involved in grief. Everyone is different, and one parent's grief may be as painful as another's, regardless of the circumstances. So often, it is our previous experiences of loss and grief which affect the way we feel about our current loss.

Grieving is different for everyone. There is no right way to do it. We do as we must, in our own way, at our own pace. This is no less true for children and young people when someone important in their life dies.

Time alone does not heal - it is only through grieving that we begin to work through the pain. For some parents, the loss of a baby years ago was not seen as a significant loss and for these parents, their grief may only be acknowledged years later.