guardian family article about bereaved child.....

[controlfreakythecontrolfreak]

did anyone else read this today? rebecca tyrell writing front page full length feature about her 3yo neice whose mother died from cancer a month ago.... with half page sized pic of the little girl....

very hard to see whose benefit this was for.... except rebecca tyrell's who got paid to write this insensitive twaddle. a lot of the article was about how her late sil was a v v private person who didnt want to talk about her illness.... sure she'd have been thrilled .

I agree. I read it, and kept thinking but why are you writing this then. There seemed to be no point to it. Gratuitous.
The family section seems to be getting worse.

I'm pleased other people felt the same way - I was reading it with an increasing sense of unease.

No real research. No real practical help to others going through the same thing. Just a bizarre sort of 'I didn't know my SIL very well and now I'm sad she's gone, but I'm such a good aunty' sort of thing. I'm sure the author is a nice person, but I couldn't see the point of the article. I feel bad for reading it, somehow.

...thanks for the link.

I read it, and the first thought that occurred to me on reading it was 'smug fucker'.

....I still hold that opinion.

I wasn't quite as horrified as lots of you are but was shocked when it emerged they'd not told the little girl that her mum had died. I just felt achingly sad for her. To be fair though, Rebecca Tyrrell did wonder what was really going on in her niece's head even though she apparently seemed 'fine'. I think it's awful that they don't seem to have tried to encourage her to talk about her feelings though - a three year-old would definitely be capable of expressing them.

I am no journalist but presumably she must have started writing this at least a couple of weeks ago - so about a fortnight after her SIL died.

Bag of crap IMO.

Apart from the question as to whether people should write about their children in the papers, I thought it was a description of a fairly normal (but perhaps old fashioned) way of handling a death in the family, keeping the child's life as normal as possible and avoiding exposure to things that are felt to be scary. When my cousin died (he was four and I was about eight) I can't remember very much being said about it, certainly my mother was adamant that none of us children were allowed to visit him in hospital as she thought that would be very scary (he had leukemia and some very aggressive treatments were tried). When my niece died a few years ago we also used the analogy of an earlier pets death to explain things to our children (they were I think four and five) because they seemed to understand and accept that, so it made sense to speak that way. Different people do approach things differently and I think it rather unfair to think that a grieving father is terribly wicked for trying to keep his daughter untouched. I am sure her joy in the small things of life makes his worth living.

I do agree the smugness about the cottage was irritating, but I did very much like the description of the dying mother. I hope if something similar happened to me I would be able to take such a stoic approach.

I got the impression that the author herself is rather stoic and it may be her who is incapable of with dealing with the emotions that arose. I imagine she is a very much head in the sand type of person.

One line made me irate - 'Ellie angling her head more and more melodramatically to one side as Penny became increasingly housebound.'. When she thinks the little girl is showing a reaction to what is going on she describes it as 'melodramatic'!

Children can be very good at presenting what they think adulkts want to see, and the article makes me worry that Ellie hasn;t really had the chance to deal with her feelings properly, and possibly because the family don't want to deal with a three year old grieving.

Comparing it to the loss of a couple of dogs is simply ludicrous.

i reckon it would have taken her less than a day to toss that off, wuglet. it's only about 3000 words.

very disturbing that she thinks it's a good age to lose her mother. dd1 was the same age when i was taken into hospital suddenly to have dd2, she most definitely remembers it and it most definitely upset her. the older she gets, the more she's able to tell me how she really did NOT like it when i disappeared.

and i don't understand, if the child was having a nice weekend and not thinking about her mother etc, why did they eventually tell her that she'd died only after her repeated 'mummy's tired' became too much for them?

terrible article, really, quite an outrageous invasion of privacy for one. but without wishing to be horribly judgey, it looks like a disastrous strategy to me, just never mentioning what happened. [judgey]

Aitch - I definitely didn't think it would take her 2 weeks to write that drivel.
I just thought it would take that long to write it then get it ?commissioned (is that the word) and have it printed up - am presuming all the supplements get made up days in advance.

Off topic though.

PS Accept I am probably wrong....but to do it 4 weeks after is still

lol. it was probably printed midweek, so could have been commissioned on the mon, written and back in less than a week.

Apart from it made me cry - I was upset that they hadn't even thought to get in touch with Winston's Wish or other organisation with experience in children's grief to see what might be the little girl's experience and how they might proactively try to help her.

Selfishly as the mother of a just 3 dd, I found it incredible that it would be a good time in her life for me to die. Or am I taking it too personally?

And, a minor detail, but this thatched second home in Dorset made me cringe - just how expensive is that going to be - how convenient that it was there. The reality for most people is treks across country and 'orrible 'otels when this sort of thing happens.

I think printing a photo of the girl was a step TOO FAR.

Dd2 was 3 when I had the twins, and was severely affected when I was in hospital. It is beyond me how the rest of her family were coerced into letting her be used like this.