Your Hope100

Challenge

Help us bring hope to more grieving children, young people and families

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The death of a loved one is one of the most devastating losses a child will ever face. We know that 100 children and young people lose a parent every day in the UK, as well many more who face the death of another important person like a sibling or grandparent.

Now, we’re asking you to join in and help us to raise funds through July and August so that we can connect with children and young people in urgent need of support. Help us to provide resources, peer support groups and counselling, and be there for them when they need it most.

Take a look at the ways to get involved around the number 100 and let us know you’re taking part by filling in our form.

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Get Involved

Donate £100

Show your solidarity with grieving children in need of support by donating £100. This could help us to run peer support groups for grieving children and young people to connect, or one to one counselling sessions tailored to meet their needs.

See how much you can raise in 24 hours

Set up an Instagram or Facebook fundraiser or share a post with a donation button, and see how much you can raise by sharing your fundraiser on your feed in a specific time-frame. You could try to raise to £100 in 24 hours, or see how much you can raise in 100 hours.

Raise £100 in 100 days

Set aside a little money each day or week and see if you can raise £100 in 100 days. You’ll be helping to further our work and making sure that we can reach more children and young people across the UK in need of support.

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Hear from our Youth Team

As well as an important statistic we hear about a lot and a fundraising target you can aim for, the number 100 can also be a vehicle for reflection. We asked our Youth Team to share their personal experiences of loss around the number 100.

Angharad

Angharad told us about the first 100 minutes after finding out that her dad had died.

Alina

Alina shared with us her experience of 100 days of grief after the death of her dad

Freya

Read Freya’s experience of 100 seconds and 100 months on after losing her dad.

Click to read

It’s been 3989 days since I lost my dad. My grief has affected me every single one of those days.

My grief began when my mum told me how my dad passed away. Those first 100 seconds changed my world forever… but I have absolutely no memory of those life changing seconds. I used to feel guilty that I didn’t remember such an important moment in my life. I felt especially bad when other grieving people remembered every word. Recently, I accepted that this was the start of my grief journey and – importantly – I realised it’s completely okay.

In fact, experiencing memory loss after somebody dies is pretty common. Memory loss is our body’s natural reaction to trauma therefore explaining why some people experience brain fog.  So, if you don’t remember the first 100 seconds of grief, just remember, your body was only trying to protect you.

Guilt is an emotion I’ve felt throughout my grief journey. During the first 100 months of my grief, I had many battles with regret and guilt.

For most of those 100 months, I regretted how little attention I paid to my dad on the day of his funeral. I spent the service looking at everyone’s outfits and searching for who I recognised in the crowd. I chose to stay at the wake with friends and wider family than go to the crematorium with my close family. To me, it wasn’t a day of sadness. It was a day of joy, curiosity and socialising.

I used to think I was selfish and didn’t grieve ‘properly’, however, now I see the beauty in my experience of his funeral. The church was brimming with people, dressed in beautiful vibrant colours, who all loved my dad dearly. Family and friends who lived thousands of miles away came to show their love. Instead of feeling guilty, I believe I did what my dad would’ve wanted. I didn’t spend the day crying. I spent the day celebrating and admiring the impact my dad had on all those people.

Throughout the first 100 months of my grief, I felt the pressure to grieve ‘properly’. Even to this day when I make a joke that’s a little too dark, I find myself questioning whether how I grieve is wrong. Whenever I have those doubts, I remind myself that nobody will ever have the same relationship I did with my dad.  My grief is just as unique as my relationship with my dad, so why should I grieve the same way as others?

During the first 100 months of grief, I had gone from being 8 years old to being 17. I was grieving and growing up at the same time. It’s hard to understand the world when you don’t understand why your own dad would leave it.

My dad took his own life, which was and still is one of my biggest challenges I face while processing my grief. Don’t get me wrong, I will always love my dad but during the first few years I began to hate him for what he did. For years, I hated Father’s Day. Hated July – especially the 11th of July. And hated all his favourite music.

None of my other friends, with the exception of one, have had to grow up while grieving a parent. I’d envy of them for growing up ‘normally’. I’d envy them for being able to enjoy Coldplay without tearing up. I’d envy them for being able to celebrate Father’s Day.

As the years went on, my resent mellowed and I’ve learnt to appreciate Father’s Day, July, and cherish my dad’s favourite music. Instead of envying my friends, I am grateful they can make beautiful memories with their own dads. Now, I see the beauty in grieving while growing up as it has allowed me to truly appreciate music, places, memories and people.

Grieving while growing up is difficult because your parent isn’t there to support you and be there for your life milestones. Throughout the first 100 months, and even now, I still always feel a little empty after a big achievement, but I know my dad would be proud.

Somebody once told me you choose whether grief is your superpower or your enemy. I like to think the motivation that grief has given me to make him proud is my superpower. Instead of dwelling on my dad’s death, I’ve learnt to live my life as vibrantly and passionately as him.

I may have improved my relationship with grief in the first 100 months, but it’s been 131 months since his death and to some extent my grief still affects me every day. My most important lesson about grief has been learning how to healthily process it.

My friends knew about my dad’s death, but I avoided talking about it with them at all costs. I would happily talk to strangers about my grief, but I was terrified of upsetting my friends or my friends perceiving me differently. So, I prevented deep conversations with my friends by making awfully dark jokes or changing the conversation.

During the first 100 months, I had a long conversation with one friend about my dad and how it affected me. I didn’t have another conversation like that until May 2023. It took me 130 months to comfortably talk about my grief with close friends.

One day I hope for all my close friends to genuinely understand my grief. However, for now, I am grateful my two best friends know almost every detail. The healthiest way for me to discuss my grief is to never overstep my boundaries, remain feeling comfortable and share at my own pace.

The first 100 months of my grief has been a rollercoaster of emotions, but these months taught me that grief isn’t linear. Grief isn’t comparable. Grief is a journey you should only go on at your own pace.

Katie

Read Katie’s experience of 100 hours after losing her dad.

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When I was nine years old, my dad committed suicide. The first 100 hours after finding this out brought lots of tears. But it brought other perhaps less obvious feelings too.

I found myself jumping between many different emotions quite quickly, while an underlying feeling of confusion was always there. Physical comfort provided quite a significant safety blanket as I remember. For a week I didn’t want to get out of my pyjamas or leave the house; I just wanted to stay in an environment I was familiar with. After all, I had just been ripped from the normality of everything I knew, and now nothing was certain. At the same time, I was desperate to get back to normality and see my friends where, as a nine year old, I could play and enjoy myself in a familiar and secure environment.

It was the beginning of spring and so naturally, there had been an air of hope and positivity surrounding life in general. As a young child I obviously didn’t consciously recognise this but equally I was attune to a certain seasonal happiness, the presence of which was a complete paradox with what had suddenly hit my family. It was like the darkness and ice of winter had turned around and jumped back, attacking only us, while everyone else we knew carried on into the light of summer. This gap between my mum, siblings and me, and the rest of the world only seemed to get bigger as the months rolled on. But in these first 100 hours of shock, I was not capable of worrying about the coming weeks. If anything, the opposite happened, and as a part of a fight-or-flight response to hearing of the death of my dad only my primal functions continued to operate, and I was merely living in the moment. Particularly as a vulnerable and emotionally inexperienced young child, I don’t think my body would have survived even contemplating the full, life-long implications of what I’d just found out. This state of shock remained for these first 100 hours and beyond.

A feeling that wasn’t delayed in me was an extreme sense of isolation. Not only from everyone else in the world who this had not just happened to, like my friends who were all happily continuing with their care-free childhoods, but strangely from my family members too. Even though this was something that had happened to all of us, and was devastating to each of us equally, our very different reactions and coping mechanisms shone a light on the ultimately very lonely nature of grief. Our different ages, relationships with our dad and personal aspects too meant that inevitably we would all experience this period of bereavement very uniquely. I think this is the case for anyone in any scenario. Likewise, while my mum cradled my siblings and I and held us tighter than ever, I felt like I was a million miles away from her. Our similar states of shock and denial placed us each on totally unfamiliar territory, far from anyone or anything we knew. As is often said by people who lose a loved one, it felt (and still feels like), I lost a piece of each of them too. I’m sure they share this sense of loss.

As a result of all these overwhelming and raw emotions, I felt a strange detachment from reality. While this was quite subtle and not an intense experience, I remember it as a very surreal period of time. When I think about those first 100 or so hours, it’s more like remembering a dream than a real experience. It’s emotionally neutral and remote, like my mind has warped the memory of how it really felt at the time to protect me from the raw intensity of those feelings.

I believe that it was after about four or five days that I eagerly went back to school. All I wanted was to be with my friends again, playing games and laughing. I remember begging my mum to let me go back on a Saturday so I wouldn’t miss my weekly sports match. I was embraced by my lovely warm friends, who in hindsight, were impressively sympathetic and understanding of something so inexplainable even to adults, let alone children. I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed about being a part of a family drama and the last thing I wanted was attention from everyone who knew me, and yet I really was in desperate need of their comfort and the warmth and support of my teachers too. I felt like jumping straight back into normality and continuing to live in the space my friends were in was a way to mask what had happened. Temporarily this was a solution, especially for a nine-year-old so easily distracted by simple pleasures, fun and games.

So, my first 100 hours probably ended on a relatively positive note, as my young mind had put up a protective shield to defend me from shock and horror. Resultantly, my reaction and management of grief beyond these first 100 hours came as a massively delayed response. Sixteen years later I am so far away from where I was in those first 100 hours, but I am still processing my dad’s death and always will be.

This is the first piece of writing I’ve done for Winston’s Wish, a charity that is very close to my heart. The first support network that came to my family’s aid was Winston’s Wish, whose staff immediately provided warmth and care, as well as a space to share, express and connect with other families who had experienced recent similar trauma. It is difficult to explain how this gave a sense of hope at such a time of loss, as well as how it made me feel, as a very young and dependent child, that my mum was being looked after too. At such a devastating and confusing time in my life, Winston’s Wish provided humanity and positivity, and my hope is that I can now be a part of the effort to offer this to other families and children now going through similarly difficult times.

Henri

Read Henri’s experience of 100 hours and 100 days of grief.

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Losing my mum is the most impactful and significant event that has happened in my life. Despite this, I don’t have clear memory or reconciliation of the days or weeks following her death.

It all seems like a blur. A few events have stuck with me following her death, but on all the other days I don’t remember what I was doing or how I was feeling. It’s like my mind just wanted to block it all out and not acknowledge or accept what had just happened.

100 Hours 

The day after my mum died it was my 11th birthday. My granny (mum’s mum), my grandparents (dad’s parents), aunt and uncle (dad’s side) came to stay with us for a few days. I hardly remember anything from my birthday. I remember crying because my mum was missing my party… not crying because she had died, but crying because she was missing it. I wasn’t realising what had actually happened to her, and my mind could only understand she wasn’t at my party, not that she had died and that I will never see her again. My grandma (dad’s mum) started crying when I cried, and I felt guilty and worried that I had upset her. This is all I remember from this day. I don’t remember what presents I got or what we did. I have much clearer memories of my previous birthdays. After talking to my dad recently about this day and what we did, I realised how much my brain has blocked out.

100 Days 

Attending her funeral came with lots of different emotions. When my dad, brother and I arrived, everyone watched us get out of the car and walk in. I knew that all eyes were on me, and I felt pressure to look and act a certain way, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do to come across “the right way”. I spent most of the service looking around at everyone who was there trying to see who I knew or recognised and who I didn’t know. This was a distraction for me as I didn’t like seeing her coffin or seeing her grave. I remember feeling confused when guests were getting upset or crying, I thought, ‘Why are they crying? Why are they showing more emotions than me? It’s not their mum who has just died, they didn’t witness her death, so why are they crying and not me?’

As her coffin was lowered into the ground, I got the sudden realisation that she was actually gone and ‘leaving me’. I felt a rush of stress and panic. This was the first time I experienced what a death actually was. I had seen her body in hospital and at the funeral home but that didn’t hit me as much because she was right there in-front of me, and she hadn’t ‘fully gone yet’. Seeing her being buried terrified me as that’s when I realised I’d never see her again and she was ‘leaving me’ now.

For the weeks of my school summer holiday that I had left after she died, I spent them watching tv all day with my brother, watching our favourite childhood show on repeat. I remember sitting watching TV all day and focusing on that and not thinking about what had happened or how my life is going to change or what is going to happen to me.

I got invited to a girl from my school’s party at the end of the holidays, I remember feeling excited and happy I was invited. It wasn’t until I got there and felt left out and slightly unwanted that I realised I was probably only invited because my mum had just died. I remember feeling uncomfortable and thinking, ‘This is how my life is going to be, people feeling sorry and pity for me’. Everyone’s mums were at the party and my dad was the only dad there. This was the first time I experienced realising my mum wasn’t going to be here for things that happen in my life. Seeing my dad stood with all the mums made me feel like I was different to the children at the party. I felt like the odd one out. I knew that no one would understand that me seeing my dad be the only one there with everyone else’s mums would upset me. This shows that no one will ever understand what can trigger emotions relating to someone’s personal grief process unless they have experienced it themselves.

I decided to join the Winston’s Wish Youth Team to help others by sharing my personal experience. Being part of this team has helped me to further understand my grief by engaging in projects and talking to other young grieving people. It has also helped me reflect on what I’ve been through, and the projects are helping me look at my grief journey in a new way, which is really helpful for me.

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