https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-46964179Child bereavement: A brother's promise to help 'forgotten grievers'
By Orla Moore BBC News
27 April 2019
When Callum Fairhurst hugged his 14-year-old brother Liam for the last time, he made him two promises: to live a great life and to help others. As the 10th anniversary of Liam's death approaches, Callum has founded a new website that aims to answer the very questions he couldn't ask as a grieving 12-year-old. Callum Fairhurst still remembers every detail of 30 June 2009, the day his big brother Liam died. "I was 12. I remember what I was watching on TV, what I did before, what I did after, how I was told," he says. "I didn't quite realise what was going on, when the community nurses came down I just knew. We were eating dinner at the table. I just knew that was the last time I'd see him. That is so vivid in my memory. The days and weeks after were more of a blur."
Liam had been diagnosed with synovial sarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer, in July 2005, aged 10. In the four years that followed, he refused to accept his condition was terminal, and embarked on a remarkable campaign, raising £340,000 during his lifetime, and a further £7m after his death. Callum, from Soham, Cambridgeshire, says that in life and death his brother continues to inspire him. "I remember kissing him and I just felt something. Although he wasn't conscious, he couldn't respond, there was something there," he said. Afterwards I was scared, emotional, hiding it. Looking back, I think I was protecting myself. People were supportive in that they'd come up and hug me. But there was no formal support. I received counselling sessions but in a way I felt forced into it, months after I needed to."
Some friends would innocently say the wrong thing, people knew him only as "Liam's brother", and the extent of direct support was a "sympathetic pat on the shoulder", he says. "I wanted to know if it was OK to be happy. I wasn't suicidal, I wasn't depressed, but I was struggling. I had awful nightmares, but other times I was absolutely fine. Liam was dead, but I felt bad for getting on with it."
Callum plunged his energy into fundraising, like his brother, cycling more than 17,000 miles (27,350km) round the world in 2015-16, and completing a tuk-tuk trip around 27 European countries last year. He is now in the final year of an International Development and Politics degree at the University of East Anglia. He spoke to other bereaved children to gather a cache of particular questions they had when they lost a sibling, from younger ones asking what death actually means, or 'Why are mummy and daddy being different?', to teenagers' dilemmas with drinking or drugs. The result is a bright new online forum called Sibling Support, created by Callum with a pool of professionals and teenagers with first-hand experience. It includes details of how to create memory boxes, and the plan is to install an instant message function which children can use anonymously.
