There is a park bench on Hampstead Heath where I walk the family dog. However often I stop to read its simple inscription, I am always moved. ‘Riley Arthur Paterson Croft, 25 March 2005, lived 35 minutes – loved forever’. If my children are walking with me, I clutch their hands tighter and try not to think. Life, most of us come to learn, has few patterns, but most parents still proceed on the assumption that our children will outlive us. For some, though, even that is taking too much for granted. In The Death of a Child, a book of essays I have edited, 12 writers relive that experience in the hope of helping others. Part of the proceeds is going to the Child Bereavement Charity.
The contributors - Carol Drinkwater, Catherine Dunne, Sarah Brown, Joanna Moorhead, Mary Craig, Louise Patten, Robin Baird-Smith, Kim Meade, Barry Mizen, Richard Davenport-Hines, Augusto Odone and Wendy Perriam - are joined by psychologist, Dorothy Rowe who adds an afterword. The book offers no easy answers, but Dorothy writes: ‘When we love someone, our image of that person makes a home inside us, and in its own way comforts and guides us until the day we die’. The essays try to share that comfort. The Death of a Child is published by Continuum.
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