Our ways of consolation

When Sharon Dempsey spends time with other bereaved parents, she finds some have disconcerting ways of seeking comfort

I am going on a bereavement weekend trip to Glasgow. Liam, my husband, is at a conference with work so Kate is coming with me. We will meet up with families of children who have died from cancer.

Some of them we know from the hospital, others we have not met but know of them and their children. It is a small community of those who have gone through the experience of caring for children with cancer in Northern Ireland.

The pregnancy sickness is easing but sleep remains a problem. I have stopped taking the sedative diazepam and struggle to fall asleep most nights. I hope the change of environment will lessen my anxiety at night.

The trip has been organised by a small local charity, Shine a Light. The charity's main man and our chaperone, Billy, spends his time organising special treats for children going through chemotherapy. He visited Owen dressed as Santa on a fire engine; he organised for Liam, Kate and Owen to have a flight in an RAF helicopter over their school; and took us on a tank day where we drove around in a variety of tanks, crushing scrapped cars. Billy is big-hearted and enjoys a bit of banter.

He doesn't use the word "bereaved" and he doesn't assume to schedule therapy time into the weekend. He wants to simply let us relax.

Over dinner in Glasgow, we bereaved parents catch up. Some of us have spent years watching our children going through treatment and share news of others not on the trip.

We compare the number of times a week we visit the graves and the ways in which we try to keep our dead children present in our lives.

I have no problem telling these people I am pregnant. No one would think for a minute that this new child will comfort my pain.

They know there are no consolation prizes, no solutions, or remedies for the desperate grief that a bereaved parent feels. There is no sense that somehow I have moved on. No one here tells me I am brave or that it is a positive step in the right direction.

I meet the mother of another child who died from a brain tumour. Her son died peacefully in hospital. She wants to know the details of Owen's death.

I feel a sense of needing to protect Owen's dignity by not telling too much of his final weeks but I won't pretend to anyone that he just slipped away.

The morphine couldn't control the pain; the steroids he needed to reduce the swelling on the brain had caused him to swell to such a size that his skin was rent with stretch marks, and a deep split in his flesh occurred, causing him a lot of pain. In the last few weeks he had lost nearly all movement in his hands and legs.

The other mother had her son cremated because she was sure she would have tried to dig him up at a later stage. I am aware that Kate is listening to this and move the conversation back to hospital life. There was no protection for Kate from the treatment or Owen's death, but I don't want to add macabre thoughts to her head.

The next morning the same mother tells me how she had phoned her husband to tell him she was glad to have met me. I smile, pleased to have been able to relate Owen's story to her. Then realise as she goes on that her pleasure in meeting me is because she has proof of how "good" God was to her son in letting him die without pain, while Owen suffered. I am astounded that her take on religion is so naive that she thinks her prayers were more powerful than mine, and to believe God would choose to give her son a peaceful death while Owen had one of torment. She tells me how many prayer groups prayed for her son's tumour to disappear. She finds it miraculous that it did but doesn't see the irony in that it reappeared on another part of the brain.

I find her sense of comfort in thinking Owen died in worse pain than her son disconcerting. The difficulty of faith and bereavement lies in interpretation. My God doesn't reward one family's prayers while ignoring another's.

Third of a monthly column