First Year Worst Year

Coping with the unexpected death of our grown-up daughter

Any reader would need a heart of stone not to be moved to tears by this account of a family’s bereavement. Sarah was thirty-six when she died in a white-water rafting accident in Peru. Her body has not been found.

First Year Worst Year begins with the dreadful telephone call, and we are taken by the parents through the following year. They have a two-fold task: first to share with the reader the anguish of the loss of their child, and secondly to describe the reflection and resolution that come with the passing of time. They are candid, completely open and do not conceal their grief from us.

But there is change as time goes on: Barbara tries to return to work (Barbara Wilson, O.B.E is a world-renowned clinical psychologist) but she finds she spends most of the morning in her room crying. Colleagues do not come in and talk to her, fearing they might intrude. Barbara sends out the message in her book that letting bereaved people talk and cry is one of the best things other people can do. She urges people not to say ‘I don’t know what to say’, or worse, ‘I couldn’t live with it’. This family had no choice when they lost their beloved daughter, aunt and sister.

Reading First Year Worst Year is a salutary lesson for everyone about how to help any bereaved person. The authors describe the different stages they passed through: they gained strength from planing a memorial service to celebrate Sarah’s life and, in time, from visiting Peru and the river where Sarah died. They describe their contact and support from ‘The Compassionate Friends’, an organisation offering support to bereaved parents. As a parent, and grandparent, I was very moved by the number of parents who shared their stories of children who died either from an accident or from an illness.

To lose a child is not in the order of things, and must be the most bitter cut of all. The Wilson family show their grief and anger in its full strength. They include poems they have written, e-mails from loving friends and family, and photos of Sarah which proclaim her vitality and love of life and adventure.

Three years on Barbara says that they still cry and yearn for Sarah, ‘but we can now put our feelings into a compartment labelled "Sarah". Life goes on, and has to go on. There is nothing else’.

The authors hope that this book will provide bereaved people with hope, and that it will take all readers to a deeper level of understanding. I believe they have achieved their aim.

published by Wiley
£9.99   $16.95   ISBN 0470093595

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