Sometimes there's a single day that sticks with you for decades after it's happened, and you live through it already knowing that things will never be quite the same again. For me, that day was when my Dad died. I was in secondary school at the time, and I remember that when my Mum delivered the news, the first feeling was disbelief. The fact that he was gone didn’t sink in for days. And then the loneliness crept in, unexpectedly, even though my friends and family were doing all the right things to support me.
Ewa Jozefkowicz, The Dragon in the Bookshop
I distinctly remember close friends trying to include me in everything and teachers who went out of their way to check in on me, and yet there was something missing that I couldn’t put my finger on. The closest description that I could give was that I felt like I was frozen in time – that life was happening as normal to other people and I was watching it from afar.
I found myself trying to occupy every moment of every day to avoid thinking about what had happened. I lost myself in schoolwork and books, and later revising for exams, and somehow I coped. But the loneliness remained, and I didn’t know what to do to make it go away. I went through a long period of not wanting to speak to anyone because I thought that nobody could understand the way I felt. I was wrong, of course.
It was many years later, when I was working for a support service for school leaders, that a question came up from a headteacher about the best sources of support for bereaved children, and my colleague mentioned Grief Encounter. That was the lightbulb moment. I realised it was the exact support that I’d needed when I was back at school.
Grief Encounter is a charity that provides counselling, a Grieftalk helpline, workshops, retreats, and family days for children who have lost someone they love. Having spoken to members of the team, I was blown away by the impact of their work. One young boy, who hadn’t spoken since his mum’s death, had opened up when singing in the Grief Encounter choir. Perhaps most importantly, the charity brings together people who have been through similar experiences and can truly empathise with one another’s situation. There’s a real relief in that.
When I started to write The Dragon in the Bookshop, I immediately decided to raise awareness for Grief Encounter through my book. It’s a story about many things – a dragon, a dinosaur, a yellow-bellied lizard (and a girl who speaks to it in Portuguese), a peculiar old lady who lives at the top of a cathedral turret and has holes in her sleeves; it’s about the power of books and the beauty of songs. But at its heart, it’s about a boy who loses his dad and who misses him immensely.
Kon describes the moment in which his dad passed away, which was the 4th November, as the separation of two universes: ‘The universe from 3rd November backwards was the real one. And the universe from 5th November onwards was a strange mirror image in which everything was a little distorted, like a painting that had been left out in the rain. You could still see the outlines of people and things, but their edges had blurred and the sounds they made were muffled.'
Kon’s struggling to move on with his life and like me at the time, he’s stopped communicating with the people who care about him. But then he meets Maya on the beach that he loved to explore with his dad, and he opens up for the first time. Crucially, Maya has no expectations of him – she doesn’t know what he was like before. She accepts him in the here and now. I think that’s the beauty of the work of Grief Encounter – you come as you are, and you're surrounded by people who understand.
If a young person you know has recently lost someone special, please reach out to the brilliant counsellors at Grief Encounter, via their website: https://www.griefencounter.org.uk/
The Dragon In The Bookshop by Ewa Jozefkowicz (cover artwork by Katy Riddell) is out now from Zephyr The Dragon in the Bookshop : Jozefkowicz, Ewa: Amazon.co.uk: Books
