WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO ...

SEVEN years ago my husband Martin and three-year-old Alex had gone on a boys’ trip to a static caravan in the Lake District. I spoke to Martin on the phone and he seemed fine. Two hours later I got a call from the caravan park, saying, “Your husband has been taken seriously ill.” I asked to speak to Alex, who was really excited saying they wanted to go swimming but the pool was shut. Eventually somebody phoned to tell me Martin had died of a heart attack.

As I drove down, I spent the four hours thinking about what I was going to say to Alex. He didn’t seem worried when I saw him. “What are you doing here?” he said. “There’s no girls allowed.” I knelt down and put his head to my chest and said, “Can you hear the sound?” He said, “Yeah, a funny bump, bump, bump.” I said, “That’s a heart and when it stops beating your body can’t move any more and you can’t speak any more and you can’t feel pain any more and you can never come back – and Daddy’s heart stopped beating and he can never come back.”

In the days and months to come I got a million questions. I thought I would get a book and read it to him and that would explain everything. But there wasn’t a book. I remember sitting in my mum’s kitchen and saying I’m going to write my own.

When he was still only three years old, Alex asked, “How many more sleeps until Christmas?” I worked it out: “One hundred and sixtyseven.” Then he said, “How many more sleeps until I have to die?” I didn’t know what to say. I just sat and talked to him and said, “Nobody knows, but normally you would have a lot of sleeps.”

He also kept asking if they had chopped his daddy’s arms and legs off and I realised that was because I’d said the body was in the coffin. When young children hear us saying “body” they just think of the torso. There are all these little things that children take so literally.

It was difficult to get my book published and at first I self-published it. When I went round independent book shops to see if they would sell it they would say, “It’s very nice but we can’t put it on the shelf because we don’t want to scare people.”

I got breast cancer in 2012. Again I talked to my children honestly. It wasn’t going to be an easy conversation especially because my friend’s sister had just died from

breast cancer. I said: “I’ve got breast cancer and, yes, I might die, but the doctor has told me I’m not going to. I need special medicine and it’s going to make all my hair fall out, I’m probably going to be sick and grumpy and sleeping lots.” So when it happened they were pretty cool about it. Luckily I did beat cancer, fingers crossed.

I tell my children that bad things happen all the time, and they’ve happened to us. There isn’t a reason. Alex says things like, “It’s not fair. I wanted to do so many more things with Daddy.” I give him a big hug and say, “You’re right. It’s not fair and I’m really sorry it happened but we need to do the best with what we’ve got and be kind to people and value people.” Is Daddy Coming Back in a Minute? and What Happened to Daddy’s Body? by Elke Barber are published by Jessica Kingsley.