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Stuart - Interview 22

Stuart - Interview 22

Age at Interview: 40
Sex: Male
Background: Stuart is a project manager. He was widowed and has 1 child. Ethnic background/nationality: White British.

Brief outline:Stuart had been separated from his partner, Anne, for 13 months, but saw her and their son regularly. He was deeply saddened when she took her own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in 2005. He feels isolated but has found help for his grief in many ways.

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Stuart had a young son when he lost his ex-partner. Suddenly he had full responsibility for his child. He makes many suggestions about caring for children after bereavement.
Print It’s also about trying to keep things going as well, even though it’s really difficult. Other sort of practical things I would say to people are trying to; if there’s my top five things let’s say of things that people needed to do, it’s probably, I imagine it would be one would be care for yourself, and make sure that you’ve got support in caring for yourself so let your work know, and let work know that although you come back you may need to ease yourself back into things and there may be a time when you have to go back away from work. Mmm. I think the other thing is making sure that you’ve got some sort of care, for your child so you can care for them and you try and get some routines in place for them… Mmm. …and they, and talk to them about what’s happened sort of well and don’t, don’t ignore the death of the person or anything about the person… Mmm. …and you could make the memory box would be helpful for that. The other thing which I would say as well is making sure you get some good childcare as well, I was very lucky for that because [my son] was attending, well my son was attending an out of school club, and they were excellent, and there’s, there’s a young lad from there who looks after my son… Oh that’s good. …and I think that’s particularly good to have a boy looking after a boy and he’s been very good and they have a good relationship, and you also know that if that person comes from the out of school club that they’ve been checked as well… Mmm. …and that they’ll have some experience of dealing with children so that’s really useful. And then it was trying to make sure that I kept something going for myself… Mmm. …and that the more, only for myself and it may be different for other people, but the more that I found that I kept myself busy the better it is so I didn’t dwell too much on things, but then the other tips would be as well would be making sure that you’ve got, some sort of support network in place for yourself, and you’ve got some way to channel the sort of, bereavement that you deal with… Mmm. …as well I think that’s sort of quite important. Those are really useful messages for other people.

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