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Friday 10 February 2012

Tears, idle tears

There is no doubt in my mind that if I were to appear on television today, or indeed on any day, and I was asked about Imogen I would cry. I would not be able to help myself. Imogen was our second daughter, who was born very prematurely in 1984 and died in the special care baby unit five weeks later. Gordon Brown’s daughter was also born prematurely and died in special care. His son Fraser has cystic fibrosis, which is not necessarily fatal nowadays but can be and in any case is a draining and debilitating condition for the child and for the parents.
 
David Cameron’s severely handicapped child, his firstborn Ivan, also died recently.

There are times and places for discussion of these things. I wrote a book about our experience, not for money or sympathy but because I was asked to do it so that the many thousands of people who have similar experiences might be helped by reading that they were not alone, in all the physical and emotional senses. And so indeed it proved. I was dubious about publishing it but I was wrong. My file has hundreds of letters, some of them very long and all of them heartfelt, from people whose infants and young children died and who suffered from bewilderment, grief, distress, and many other emotions and experiences with which they struggled and who were relieved to find that someone else had felt similarly. ‘I was angry with the doctors who were only trying to help us.’ ‘I lay down on the grass above my baby’s grave because I wanted to cradle her. I have never been able to tell anyone until now.’

‘I thought I was going mad until I read that you had thought the same.’

After all the struggle, and when time was running out, we had a healthy  daughter, not a replacement for Imogen but our third child and I also have a wonderful file of letters from women who too gave birth successfully after earlier distress.

David Cameron spoke movingly about Ivan, the Browns have done so in several contexts about Jennifer and the entire House of Commons set aside differences to embrace them both in moving tributes and understanding.. That was all as it should be.

But - and it is a very big but – in interviews about politics and nothing but politics and in the run-up to a General Election, Brown and Cameron, and any others who may have suffered similarly, have a clear duty to make it crystal clear to every interviewer that the subject is politics and politics only and that  questions about personal grief and loss and the deaths of children are out of bounds and will be ignored, even when the NHS is being discussed.

Because neither man could help weeping and who would expect them to? Weeping when reminded of the death of one’s child is not something one can control.

The deaths of those we love help to shape and define us. They become as much a part of who we are, what we believe and think and feel, how we change and grow, as the lives of our living family and friends – more so, probably. I know that the deaths of those I have loved deeply are woven into the fabric of my being and can never be unravelled unless you unravel me. That is surely as it should be.

But these griefs are not for casual airing and they are emphatically not, not ever, to be used along with the subsequent tears, for party political purposes, not to make others feel sympathy or, heave forbid, that they are being emotionally blackmailed into giving their vote.

Of course, you will respond, this was not Brown’s intention when he shed tears for his dead child on television. No, I am sure it was not. But it happened and he might have known that it would and the only way he, and David Cameron, can be certain that he can never be accused of using that death for the wrong ends is to ensure that the subject is not aired in the course of public comments or interviews during the next few months.
 

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