Behavior: Therapeutic Friendship

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Softening Grief. A year later, the Society of Compassionate Friends was formed, and since then, 20 branches have been set up from Glasgow to Guernsey. The society aims not just at softening grief but at preventing its most damaging results. Explains Stephens: "Parents who cannot share their sorrow sometimes come to reject their remaining children. Or they have another child in the hope of re-creating the one they have lost."

If the later child's sex is different, however, he may be rejected; in any event, he is likely to suffer from not being wanted for himself. In other families, says Stephens, a father may try so hard to "keep a stiff upper lip, because it's the British thing to do," that he shows his wife little warmth, and the marriage itself breaks down. The grief over the loss of a child is universal and inevitable. But Stephens insists that the consequences are not.