It is late November and I’ve come back to my grandfather’s house. Most of his belongings are already gone—distributed among family, taken to charity shops, consigned to the skip. The heating in the house has been switched off since he died, now just over a year ago, and the lack of furniture means that even my tentative footsteps echo. I pocket a few bow ties, the kind he wore even on ordinary days, and a set of cufflinks I imagine turning into a charm bracelet. A linen suit catches my eye; I hold it up, considering. Perhaps I could have it tailored, wear it on some future occasion—a wedding, maybe.
I default to his bookshelves, scanning their familiar ranks: The Great War at Sea, Betjeman’s Collected Poems, Shackleton’s Adventures, many of them with birthday inscriptions or newspaper cuttings slipped inside. In a biography of Van Gogh, I find tickets and brittle clippings from a 1986 holiday in Sicily. The edges curl inward like October leaves. The book feels warmer than the rest, as if it still holds the sun-washed memory of that trip. I wonder how much of it I can carry with me on the train back to London.
The house’s interior isn’t the most difficult to say goodbye to. It’s already dark, and I almost can’t bear to look out the window into the garden. What can you keep from a garden? In truth, it’s a small suburban plot, but through the transformative imagination of grief it appears edenically vast.
It is quiet and damp and winter-mulched, but in my mind I see it as in late July. The beds are bright with dahlias, tomatoes climbing their wire cages. There is a proud Victoria plum tree stood squatly in the middle, its branches bent under the weight of fat fruit. The plum tree was my mother’s gift to my grandfather, given shortly before she died. He outlived his daughter by 10 years and six months, exactly. She died when I was 12, after seven long years with motor neurone disease.
I can see them both now, walking together in this quasi-imagined garden, moving through the vines, past the laurel and silver birch. My grandfather is paused, tilting his head toward the air, listening for birdsong he could name by ear. He gestures towards the sky, reading the clouds to predict tomorrow morning’s weather and tides. Nearby, his easel is propped up, with studies of this spring’s wisteria. He is holding a small bunch of sweet peas that he’d snipped just for me, their thin stems still damp.
I can’t reanimate my mother in the same way. She was unable to speak and completely paralysed by the time I was six. We could only communicate through the movement of her eyes, spelling out words with a numerical board. The memories I have of her are spare and tentative, like drawings traced over too many times. Like negatives exposed too long to light. But she is certainly, albeit silently, there.
It was very rare that my grandfather and I spoke explicitly about our shared loss—the motherless daughter and the daughterless father. And yet, we were coppiced and grafted together. He understood my grief without slipping into the two responses so often given to bereaved children: suffocating pity or impenetrable silence.
My grandfather loved the little plum tree and referred to it, with quiet reverence, as “Sarah’s tree”. For me, it came to stand in for my mum: its cycles of flowering and fruiting mirror the looping, spiralling nature of my most fundamental sadness. Her death, rather than marking a clean ending, became the start of something unresolved. Childhood grief is strange like that. Without enough solid memories to hold on to, my idea of her began to blur into the texture of everything: the shape of the seasons, the feel of certain days, the rhythms by which children instinctively come to understand time. I didn’t remember her as a whole person—I learned to find her in fragments.
In the UK, a child loses a parent every 22 minutes—roughly one in 29 children, present in nearly every classroom. Bereaved children are five times more likely to develop serious psychiatric disorders in later childhood. We know they are disproportionately likely to be hospitalised for depression, more likely to die by suicide. And yet, there are no official statistics or national records tracking the number of bereaved children in the UK. As far as government support or educational policy is concerned, these children are invisible.
In December, two petitions on childhood bereavement were debated in Westminster Hall. I had lobbied my MP in preparation for this moment, which sought to formalise something many of us know instinctively: that death must be acknowledged if it is ever to be processed and transformed into something liveable.
One petition urged the inclusion of death, dying and bereavement in the national curriculum. The other—proposed by children’s author Mark Lemon, whose father was murdered when he was 12—called for the recording of dependent bereaved children when an adult’s death is registered.
During the debate Labour MP Kevin Bonavia acknowledged Lemon, who received no help in coping with his traumatic loss until well into his twenties. Bonavia pointed out that without knowing how many bereaved children there are, services will always be reactive rather than supportive. Caroline Voaden MP, a Liberal Democrat, described the long, relentless nature of her children’s grief after she lost her husband. The testimonies asked for something simple but radical: for children’s grief to be seen as real, and worth preparing for.
Despite the palpable strength of feeling in the room, no action has followed. These children remain structurally overlooked. But that debate marked something: a shift, however small, in public recognition. It placed these quiet losses on record. Recently, I’ve attended a few informal meetings, held in various pubs and parks across London, with other ABCs—adults bereaved as children, a term coined by psychotherapist Mandy Gosling. Patterns emerge: the way that early loss reverberates as an ongoing tremor. There’s an implicit understanding between us of that most frustrating, indissoluble tension: carrying the past forward and finding a way to leave it behind.
Losing someone when you are young means that grief entwines itself into your being. And yet, there’s something tender in the way it grows alongside you, not as an intruder—as adult loss might be—but as a part of your fabric, inseparable from who you are. I don’t know who I might have been if my childhood hadn’t been shaped by my mum’s illness and then her death. The things I fear or avoid, the anxieties I carry—I wonder which of them might not be mine if things had been different. I think I might move through the world more easily if my loss had been recognised at the time. It was treated as though it hadn’t happened. As though she hadn’t happened.
Sometimes, I google my mum. She died just before the rise of social media, so the only thing I can find about her online is her obituary. It’s a record of her, a proof that she lived, and proof that she died, too. I find immense comfort in reading it.
Records aren’t just bureaucratic exercises; they are monuments, however small, to the lives that shaped and then unmoored us. Most of my connection to my mum is the act of missing her. It’s her absence that defines her presence. To inscribe someone’s life and death into effective policy is the most practical kind of memento mori, a way of affirming that our grief matters, that their absence matters—that they mattered.
Grief resists linear time. It moves in cycles, like the seasons—receding, returning, reshaping itself. In spring, when everything else is beginning again, so too does my loss find a way to reassert itself. There’s strength in that persistence. Those of us who were dealt this card early carry our pain within us—woven into how we see the world, how we love, how we fear. It forms the lens through which the rest of life is lived. To count these children is to care for them, and to acknowledge their loss is to honour the people they’ve lost.
My mother died on Easter Sunday. The date shifts with the liturgical calendar, changing every year, but for me, for my entrenched childhood sensibilities, she dies each spring. The smell of that late March air—damp earth, budding leaves, daffodils on verges—seems to carry her death with it. I breathe it in, and she is gone again, as if the landscape conspires to keep her absence alive.
If you are affected by the issues mentioned in this article, resources can be found here and here.
