Has anything helped you over the years?
We’ve had, fairly recently, in the last year or so, we’ve had some support from our Compassionate Friends group, that we go to once every six weeks or so. That’s a group of people who’ve lost children.
And they offer a befriending service. And really that’s what they’ve done for us, they’ve become our friends.
Would you like to say a little bit about that?
Yes, the SOBS meetings tended to be very heart rending. Very, for me, very difficult because you sit in a circle and people round the circle would say how their, the person who’d, they’d know had killed themselves. How they’d done it. And people were so raw and, descriptions of the deaths, was so emotional that I found it difficult to go to these group meetings.
Didn’t find it helpful. There are lots, when you’re bereaved, there’s lots of anger about and lots of the people at the meeting were angry.
Admittedly, when we went to the meeting, we were fairly newly bereaved so perhaps we weren’t coping at the time. It’s difficult to see yourself objectively in, in social settings. And a thing we struggle with now, I certainly struggle in, in social settings, to feel accepted in a social setting. And some of that is, is because of the suicide. That, I think the suicide causes more trouble than the, the death of the child in social circumstances because people, some people have trouble dealing with that, with the suicide thing, with the mental health thing.
Do you, can you say why you think people find it hard to talk to you about it?
Well, all I can say is, really, I know people find it hard to talk to me about it.
And I know people find it hard to, to listen when I’m talking about it, because they change the subject [laughs].
Do you like to talk about Ben? Would you like to be able to talk about him?
Yes. Not at any great length, but it would nice, at times, to just acknowledge that he existed.
Yes.
And it happened.
So that must be painful in social situations. And how is Compassionate Friends different [from SOBS]?
Well, they all know. They all know what it is to lose a child so, it’s, it’s easy to be silent in a room with people who know.
That you don’t have to explain.
But it’s difficult to explain…
So, do you still go to those meetings?
Yes. Yeah.
And what happens at a typical meeting? People just talk about what they want to talk about?
It starts, the meeting, the group we go to, I, I assume every group is different, but the group we go to, the people that run it have run it for twenty something years since their son died. And they know lots of the people; they’ve known lots of the people for a long time. But there are newly bereaved people there, and when we first went, you sit round and there’s perhaps, the meetings vary from ten to twenty people. You sit round in a circle, a sort of a circle, and you can go round the room and each person can say a few things about their bereavement if they want to. They don’t have to, but they can if they want to.
And that often happens. People usually say something. Some people get upset, and you can clearly see the diff., the length of time people have been bereaved by how they’re, how they’re functioning within the group, I think.
So I’ve found the groups very helpful, the people very friendly. No, no pressure, no questions. You’ve got, you’re at ease immediately because people have experienced similar things.
And when Ben first died we thought the, the suicide was the worst thing, but we now think that it’s the, the death of the child is the worst thing.
Yes.
And the suicide might be a bit of extra horribleness on top, but it’s, it doesn’t make it any worse than people who’ve just lost a child.
That’s the, the unexplainable thing, and it’s impossible to describe it to someone who hasn’t experienced it.
