As a newly bereaved parent I read an item the other day written about the need to talk freely about death and dying.

Something of a taboo subject in the society that we live in. After death and dying come grieving. If we as a society have trouble coping with death and dying, it follows that the people who grieve will often find it difficult, sometimes even impossible to find the responses from society that they so desperately require. Family and friends will rise magnificently in the days after the death and then the funeral - but what then ...? The newly bereaved face the days, months and years ahead - a lifetime of living without this significant other. I personally, have found the second year to be a lot harder than the first.

Our only daughter died aged 24 in June 1997 of Non Hodgkin's lymphoma and in early July of that year my husband wrote in his diary, "Mark and I went into city. Got Tiff's Birth Certificate" [scratched out] ... "Death Certificate - she had died from internal bleeding ... " You see, we'd been there, we had seen her die, but the brain still had trouble writing "Death" after our daughter's name.

There is remarkable familiarity in the heavy images of Emily Dickinson's poem:

"This is the Hour of Lead -

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons recollect the Snow -

First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go - ".

We who grieve want a lot. Nothing will bring our loved one back; but if we can't get that, we want your full attention. I have found much comfort in the person who is fully present to my grieving; who is nonjudgemental enough to take my gift of my deepest self and who can then give me her empathy and understanding. There is a new vulnerability about us and like the tender new shoots of a plant we are easily bruised.