When a friend dies.

Life is too short for regrets and I was reminded of this, this week when someone I used to call a very dear friend died unexpectedly from a heart attack on Wednesday aged 49. We were very close when our children was small, along with another couple, we celebrated birthdays, christmases, child care together. She was god mother to my youngest child. We were there for one another when things got tough, we laughed, we cried, we relied on one another. Then things happened in our lives and we grew apart. I remarried and moved away, the other friends also moved away within a year and something strange had happened with the woman who died, her contact with myself and the other friends stopped and the relationship dwindled into nothing. A few years ago she came back into the lives of the other couple, but by this time we were living abroad and I never got the chance to find out exactly what went wrong. My relationship with the other couple has become distant also, but we still keep in touch and there have been the occasional meet ups when I've been in the UK. I'm very grateful that they informed me of her death yesterday, very shocked also and I feel that a part of life has now closed for ever. Old people die, people who have led full lives, not people my age, not my friends.

I question my own mortality on occasions, I think about the older generation in the family, I assume that I will outlive my parents, my aunts and uncles. I remember when my nan passed away in 1994 and my mother saying, 'that's it, I'm the adult now' and I was puzzled by it. I now understand what she means, her generation is in charge now and it's made me realise it won't be many more years before I'm the oldest one left in the family.

For my friend that isn't going to happen, she had two grown up son's who all of a sudden have become the adults, the one's in charge, the one's left behind.

Although we weren't in contact these days, I grieve for a lost friendship that can never be put right now, I grieve for her adult children. I grieve for opportunities lost and for the future when I become the adult, the person in charge, assuming that life follows the pattern I grew up expecting. Receiving this news yesterday, just goes to show we never know what is going to happen in our lives and that we should make peace with ourselves and others before it's too late.

How do you deal with a child when they lose a loved one?

For most children their first experience of death is usually a family pet. I assume that the death of a pet is a life lesson for them; why else would we buy hamsters? They only live for 2-3 years so it’s inevitable that they will experience this by the time they are 5 years of age.

Children today are also exposed to the fictional deaths of soap characters and of famous people when their death is announced on the TV, radio and in newspapers. As parents though it is our responsibility to restrict and monitor what they are exposed to.

I don’t recall the effect of the death of any family pets, we always had cats, I do remember my Mother spending hours looking for them when they went missing but I was never exposed to the reality of it. My Mother used to tell me that the cattle and sheep in the Lorries on the motorways were on their way on holiday or off to market and I admit I told my children the same rather than deal with the truth.

My exposure to death until I was 24 was my friend’s parents dying, kids from my school in tragic car accidents and people that I had cared for when I worked for SCOPE. My Mothers Mum died aged 93, she had been ill for a long time, I did not have a close relationship with her, but I was very upset of the effect it had on my Mother. Over the following years until I was 34, I dealt with the deaths of many pets with the children. I was upset for the kids; I was also devastated by my lack of ability to console them over it. My youngest child was so upset when his hamster died; he stood by the grave under an umbrella in the rain for around 3 hours until he cried himself to sleep.

As with most things in life you cannot appreciate the effect of something until you experience it and in 2005 my Dad’s Mother, died. My Grandmother was admitted to hospital on the day of her 92^nd birthday with a minor heart attack and she died 4 weeks later of lung cancer.

I took the children to visit her in the hospital, she was still walking around, and looking after the other old dears for the first 2 weeks and the hospital staff advised I should bring the children in to visit while my Gran was still as she would want to be remembered.

I couldn’t deal with looking after my youngest then aged 6, so it was agreed he wouldn’t come to the funeral. Two weeks later though he was having nightmares and said Grandma was visiting him in his room at night and he wanted to say goodbye so she could go to heaven with his hamster.

We took him to the Crematorium and walked him through the funeral service and into the garden of remembrance, so he could see for himself where Grandma had gone. The following year the children’s grandfather, on their dad’s side, died. It took place at a crematorium also and the youngest child was able to grieve and say a proper good bye.