When I told my four year-old twin boys that Daddy had died, their response threw me. Nick, my husband, their father, had been ill with cancer for a year but despite his rapid and very visible physical deterioration in recent weeks, the boys had no inkling of what was to happen. As I imparted the life-shattering news, they stared at me for a few seconds before asking hopefully, "Can we go and watch telly now …?" Which is precisely what they did.
The moment still haunts me four years on, not least because it was the first of many that taught me how differently children grieve from the way that adults do. It wasn't that Joel and Benedict weren't devastated. It was simply that at such a tender age they couldn't comprehend how great the devastation was.
Grief in children, I now know, is like a murky pond: the true depths are out of sight and even when bubbles surface you need to know where to look, and what to look for. My boys have never cried about their dad, though I know his loss has overturned their lives and to this day they miss him badly. But Joel will cry over Spotty, a soft toy he has had since birth and which he lost two years ago, to his enormous distress. "Losing Spotty is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," he said once. The connection is obvious, but only if you want to see it.
Nor – and this is true for many bereaved children – will the boys talk much about how they felt at the time. Only once did Joel describe the morning he woke up to be told his dad had gone for ever. "It was like an electric shock went through me," he said, but when I pressed him he changed the subject. Some people refer to this as "jumping in and out of puddles" of grief – sad one moment and happy the next, a rapid switching of states that we as adults can find hard to comprehend, or even mistake for indifference.
Just because a child isn't visibly grief-stricken doesn't mean there isn't unbearable pain. In the first year after Nick died my boys showed all the signs that I now know are grief – one of them suffered crippling separation anxiety, screaming at me if I got out of the car ahead of him and he couldn't see me, just for an instant. He had months of tummy pains, a classic sign of childhood grief. My other son got angry, and occasionally lashed out at other children. "I want to be a baby again," he insisted, curling up on the floor. Both found it hard to concentrate at school, with the result that by the age of six neither could read more than a few words.
I tried to talk about what was happening, but my words unleashed tears; a sight the boys couldn't bear. I'm not sure I was much help to them in their confusion and bewilderment. I once caught one of them in the garden talking to the sky. "I wish you were still here Daddy, because Mummy's being really horrible …" They told me they talked to him at night and that they could feel him cuddling and watching them from above. When one spotted Nick's crutches (which he used after his leg was amputated in an attempt to save his life), he recoiled in panic. "Daddy left them behind," he gasped. I promised him Daddy would get another set in heaven.
It's easy to underestimate the impact on children of this most devastating of life events. Most of the time Joel and Benedict were, and still are, happy, boisterous and exhaustingly "normal". But children do need to process and understand their loss, for which they need help, something they can't always get at home if a surviving parent is drowning in their own grief – as I was.
An enlightened teacher at the boys' school, Sally Keck, took them aside once a week and gently probed. She recorded their words in a diary. "I hate cancer. I wish I could see it and hurt it," said Benedict. "It's the baddest illness in the world … You can only get better if loads and loads of doctors come, and Daddy only had 10 or 11. I think he needed 30 to be alive."
Remembering the fateful morning when he heard the news, Joel recalled: "I woke up one morning and called Daddy's name really loud but no voice came. I thought he'd gone shopping."
The probing allowed them to express their confusion. "I don't know why I'm so angry," Joel told Sally. "And I don't know why I can be happy sometimes when Daddy is dead. I feel happy about Daddy today. I heard Daddy in the night. He called me 'darling'. He said, 'Don't worry, darling,' just before I went to bed. I think he is also saying that he is OK in heaven."
I now know how important it is to help bereaved children this way, to allow them to talk, to listen and to answer their questions in an environment in which they feel safe. Some children will absorb loss into their lives and move forward. But there will always be those who find it harder, and without support, trouble may lie ahead. Research on young offenders shows that 41% had had a family bereavement as a child and that teenage girls are six times more likely to get pregnant if they suffered a childhood loss.
I learned this from Winston's Wish, the charity for bereaved children. At our first meeting with the Winston's Wish team, the boys were questioned sympathetically about their dad, then asked to recount their story of his illness and death. As they did so, they crawled behind the large sofa on which they were sitting and hid until they had finished. I was taken aback by their behaviour, but Kate Gardner, the family services worker, explained that it was probably the first time anyone had asked them to tell their tale in full. Piecing together the fragmented memories made them realise how powerful and painful their story was, and reminded them how they had felt then.
They wrote their dad a letter: "Dear Daddy, You are a very nice man. I hope you are having a nice time up there and that you've gone to lots of funfairs …" and together we drew a family tree with a place for every person in their lives. This helped them to see that despite their huge loss there were still people who cared about them, from our neighbour Liz to their godmother Cathy's sheepdog.
Last year, the boys were old enough to attend a residential weekend along with 10 other bereaved families. It was an extraordinary two days of tears (mainly the parents) and laughter (mainly the children). At one point, the children were guided through an exercise in which they drew a "film strip" of their stories, sticking together, in chronological order, hand-drawn pictures of their tragedy.
"Children need a coherent story," Kate Gardner explained. "Once they've got that, they can manage their story rather than feeling their story is managing them. Then they can choose which bits to tell people, or whether to tell them at all. Until their story is coherent, they worry they'll get bits wrong, or that the story might not come out the way they want it to."
I wish every bereaved child in the country could attend the Winston's Wish weekend. As we drove away, Benedict declared: "That was the best weekend of my life. Can we come again if someone else in our family dies?"
The boys are eight now and we talk about Nick almost every day with an ease we didn't have before. On his birthday every year they write Nick a card, which they burn in the barbecue in our garden, "So it can go up to him."
"I've got used to it being just the three of us," Benedict told me recently, but Joel's separation panic has never gone away and he is stalked by fear that I might die. Of course all children worry about losing their parents, but in Joel's case he's experienced it already.
The boys have been immensely brave and my heart weeps for what they have lost. Others may not see anything in the murky pond of their grief but I know its waters hide a loss that is felt every day and will long continue to be. When new horizons beckon, Nick will always be at the forefront of the boys' minds, whether at a new school when they have to explain that they don't have a dad or when they start competitive football and see other boys' dads on the touchline.
Joel and Benedict will grow up being "the kids who lost their dad when they were little", a label that will probably pursue them into adulthood. But I hope they won't always feel it's a tragedy. Bereaved kids sometimes do exceptionally well in life. Many American presidents grew up without fathers or lost them young. So, who knows what the boys might achieve. Whatever they do though, I know their dad would have been really proud of them.
Why Not Me? by Barbara Want is published by Phoenix, for £8.99. You can find out more about Winston's Wish at winstonswish.org.uk