Health, Beauty and Lifestyle with Denise McNamara

Breda Fallon was reeling from the death of husband Pat five years ago in the Galway Hospice. It was a terrible shock for their three children, but it hit her 14-year-old son particularly hard.   The retired teacher who spent 40 years at Mervue Primary School searched around for support he could access to help him process his grief.

“The hospice provided me with really top-class support, but they don’t have a child-centred service. My son attended what they offered a few times, but he ended up saying to me, ‘you have to get me help’. His emotions were running high. Thankfully he’s a talker.”

She went to her GP to see what was out there. There was a Rainbows group course for bereaved children that was not available at that time. A course run by the youth support service Jigsaw was only open to teenagers aged 15 and up.

“I felt very isolated. I remember that feeling of being in a fabulous, vibrant, festival city and there was no support for a grieving child.”

She linked in with the Children’s Grief Centre in Limerick, the only one in the country. A counsellor she met there told her it was dream to set up a similar service in Galway. After she transferred to a job in Dublin, Breda decided to take on the challenge of making that dream a reality.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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