What about your older son? Because I know you had concerns about him having been so kind of tied up with hospital in his early life and the sort of the fear of it all for him. How did you deal with it with him?
It was terrible. It was absolutely awful. The really strange thing is - and I mean I don't think many people will believe that this could happen - but on the Thursday before it happened I picked him up from his auntie's house and he got into the car and he was very upset. And it's the first time he's ever mentioned death, but he said to me that he didn't want his baby brother to die. And I, I sort of said, “Don't be silly.” I said, “He's not going to die. He's not even been born yet.” And he said, “But”, he, he just started talking about death and what, what happens when people die, and what about if everybody died in the world and there'd be no one left. And he was really, really upset. I mean, sobbing upset. And we went round and picked his dad up from my mother-in-law's because he was doing some decorating there. And he got in the car and I said, “Look [son] is really upset and I am just trying to explain to him that people do die but they go to heaven, and that people are being born every day" and he just kept saying to me, “But I don't want my baby brother to die.” And I said, well, I said to him, “He's not died, he hasn't even been born yet.” And he seemed to be okay. And then obviously two days later I had to tell him that he had died. And it was just absolutely awful, most awful thing I've ever had to do. And the surprising thing is that my son was actually, he had died at that time. We've since found out from the post mortem report that he had been dead for four days, so at that time he was already dead. But we, I mean we just, we said to him [sigh], we didn't know what to say him. We didn't want to tell him that he was, that his brother had been sick and had gone to heaven, because obviously with him being so unwell previously we didn't want him to associate being sick with dying and going to heaven, so we, we just said to him that he'd, he'd gone to sleep, into a deep sleep and hadn't woken up and God had taken him up to heaven.
He was devastated, absolutely devastated but [sigh] like all five year olds, he, he took in the information that he needed. Had a cry, cuddled my belly and then just said, “Right.” And off he went. He said, “I want to go round to Nana's now” and I think that was obviously his way of dealing with it. And he went back and stayed with the family for a few days.
Did anybody give you any help, any, you know, counselling about how to explain..?
Not at that time. I mean, after a couple of days we did see a counsellor in, a counsellor midwife who was attached to the hospital, but she was mainly a bereavement counsellor. That she was mainly to sort of help you make decisions about the funeral and the post mortem and all that sort of thing. And one thing she did say to me after was, was that maybe I shouldn't have said to my son that he'd gone to sleep and gone to heaven, because then he may think that going to sleep, he might become frightened to go to sleep in case he went to heaven. But I mean we, we hadn't been able to speak to anyone. We didn't know what the best thing to do, and at the time we just thought that we didn't want to say that he'd been sick, because obviously our, our son had been sick as well and we didn't want him to associate that with, with dying. |
