'We felt special'

PETER Ranson felt he had always been open with his ten-year-old daughter about his wife Lisa's illness. Having been diagnosed with ovarian cancer seven months previously, Lisa had drawn Lucy a picture to show her where the cancer was. Naughty cells, Lisa called them.

Meanwhile, the couple took care to keep their worried conversations to themselves. The time for tears, when they would dare to confront their worst fears, came when Lucy was in bed.

Then Lucy went to see Hazel Saunders, the child/adult bereavement counsellor at Butterwick Hospice in Stockton, and it was clear she had understood a great deal.

"I hadn't really thought how she was dealing with it as we'd kept everything quite light for her and always tried to stay positive," says Peter, 40, of Ingleby Barwick, Teesside. "But after chatting to Hazel it turned out she had quite a few questions and one of them was 'is my mum going to die?'. The sentence which got me was 'this needs answering now'.

"I've no idea how I did it. We just sat down in front of the Christmas tree and I said 'it's like this. She isn't going to get better and she is going to die'. She was very quiet and seemed to accept it in my eyes at the time. She was quite remarkable."

The questions Lucy posed were typical of the ones Hazel hears every day from her young clients.

"There is always the natural instinct as a parent to protect your child, but what people totally underestimate is the ability of the child to understand what is going on," says Hazel. "But the child that isn't prepared usually, six to seven months later, is the child that ends up kicking out in anger because they were pushed out.

"I remember seeing a two-and-a-half year old with her older siblings and she was saying 'mummy's so poorly,' and to me that speaks volumes, because if a two-and-a-half year old can work out mummy's sick then what does an eight, nine or ten year old think? Sometimes you can forget how absorbent children are."

She recalls the time a four year old had been displaying aggressive behaviour seven months after the death of his grandfather. Hazel went to see him and they were discussing the idea of creating a memorial when, suddenly, he stood up.

"I hadn't realised the door wasn't shut properly and he went over and shut it then said 'right, I'd like to tell you that I'm really angry that they didn't let me see my grandad before he died'.

"From the parents' point of view, they didn't want him to have nightmares of seeing his grandfather dying, but to the child he felt he'd been stopped from seeing him and he hadn't been to the funeral."

Hazel went on to create a memory garden with the child and they had a quiet ceremony. On spotting two neighbours, the four year old called out to them and said 'we're having a little funeral for grandad' and they came to pay their respects too.

The memorial boxes or gardens are just some of the ways people cope with their grief. One young mum who was dying found a profound sense of relief by making a video for the baby she would never see grow up.

Hazel also uses tools - a small, wooden coffin with a figure inside, pictures of hearses - which she says get children used to what they may see at a funeral. It is vital for the child to have control over the information they want to receive, she says, and for the parent to be supported in order to answer those difficult questions.

"With children, I talk about the changes that they're seeing, like the fact their brother might not be going to school any more or that mum's always busy," says Hazel. "We talk about different kids' illnesses and they move on to say that someone in their family has an illness. Then there are the questions they would like to ask and in 99 to 100 cases the main question is 'is my mum or dad, brother or sister going to die?' It's very difficult for children to express that kind of strong emotion, their fears and anxieties, so it's about finding a safe place for them to do that."

Hazel also counsels children who are terminally ill. Common fears include dying alone, dying in pain and leaving their friends and family.

"Often there are children who need help to tell their parents that they don't want any more treatment," says Hazel. "We do quite a bit of liaising like that and secure permission from the child to tell the parent what their concerns are."

Hazel recognises her work is difficult, but says that despite the distance she has to keep, the day she stops feeling anything will be the day she leaves the job. "If you don't feel anything then you don't have empathy with them," she says.

Peter Ranson found the counselling sessions he and Lucy had were hugely beneficial. Lisa died in Butterwick Hospice aged 36 on January 17, 2004.

"When she died the family walked in the house and they were all crying," recalls Peter, a teacher at Pennyman Primary School in Middlesbrough. "But then Hazel came in and was smiling, it was just her way. She had a knack of not saying very much and getting you to talk a lot.

"It was hard for Lucy because she didn't want to talk about it at first, but Hazel brought a book for her to write her thoughts in and she helped her write a poem. It was done at a very simple level and it was very reassuring."

Both father and daughter also knew that after the funeral they could speak to Hazel. "There were times when I'd walk in the room and there'd be a lot of tissues on the floor," he says. "But eventually the visits got fewer and fewer. For me, she got my mind thinking again, because I'd been numb for weeks and weeks."

The help Peter received banished the preconceived ideas he had had about the hospice. He thought it was simply a place people went to die.

"I want people to know what it offers and what a special place it is," he says. "I felt we were the only people they were dealing with, the only ones who mattered, the whole time. That was one of the best things about the hospice for me."

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