Simply Grieving

“I don’t know how you can cope.”

They stood by my daughter’s hospital cot and shook their heads. Parents/carers with their own children receiving attention, some for epilepsy, some for infections, some for bone breakages or burns.

She was massively handicapped, had a cocktail of problems that nothing, in the end, but death could cure, and our hearts were broken.

Down in the waiting room, the one place you could smoke then, I listened to a woman rant at her husband about the delay they were having, waiting for a medic to get back to them about her daughter’s broken arm.

A broken arm? Part of me thought. Jesus, what’s that?

And then it struck me. This was her child. There was no scale of bad-to-terrible for her, it just hurt, and hurt and hurt.

She wasn’t making an unnecessary fuss. She was simply grieving.