Creative therapy and shared support can help with grief after losing a child

A retreat for grieving parents provides therapeutic benefits, writes a mother whose daughter was stillborn 22 years ago

After my daughter Grace died when I was eight months pregnant, my first impulse was to write it all down: the birth, surrounded by candles; the coffin and funeral where there should have been a christening; how her death had been accompanied by snowdrops fighting their way through the frozen ground in the first stirring of spring. I felt I was the only one really to have known her and I wanted her acknowledged. I wrote a diary as a way of making my daughter real, and published it in a magazine. It helped.

I've since learned that this is a common impulse in the bereaved - especially among bereaved parents, who feel an urgent and deep-seated need to remember and honour their children.