by Christopher Durkin
Senior Lecturer in Social work

August I always find to be difficult month. It is the anniversary of my brother’s death. Although it is twenty seven years since his death, it will always haunt me. I wonder whether I could have done something to prevent it, and I still ask the question, “Why him?” This year it was even more mournful because a friend’s son had been recently killed. Although I hadn’t seen her for a number of years, it brought the memories back. I sent her and her husband a card of condolence because I couldn’t think of anything to say other than he will have touched other people’s lives.

This period of melancholy made me think that loss is the one thing we all have in common, and yet it is the one area of our lives which we experience as an individual. How we experience loss is very personal. The loss of a pet to one person will be as traumatic as a loss of brother to another.

Loss is as personal as the way we mourn – it may be affected by our cultural background but how we interpret it is as individual as our own DNA. Although a person may not get over their loss, they hopefully will come to terms with it.

When my brother was killed I was in my early twenties and was able to talk to people and visit the mortuary to say good bye, something that was extremely important in my process of adjustment and mourning. To this day I still cannot make complete sense of it all, with events, sayings and pictures triggering off haunting images.

As a social worker I was involved in taking children into care and placing them in foster families or residential establishments. As a social worker I was also called upon to gather evidence for court proceedings. This forensic role sanitises the process and in part leads to us failing to recognise the full loss the child may be experiencing.

A child’s move into care is only one change that is being experienced. They have lost a carer, a pet, a brother, friends, neighbours. This confusion of loss may be made worse by then being moved through a succession of homes. Each home places another mask on the child, a mask which may allow the child to cope.

As a social worker I tried to help children understand what had happened to them. But as an adult how can I truly understand what a child is thinking? So often we expect miracles and expect children to ‘take off their masks’ and tell us what is going on. It is these masks that provide the door to a person’s emotional being, but why should they trust us when we spend at most an hour each week with them? In this context we need to work with foster carers and residential workers.

Children need to be given permission to talk, permission that needs to be open-ended at times when they want to talk and not at times when we can give them ‘quality time’. All of us need to make sense of events in our own time and in our own way.