When Angela and Richard Page lost their daughter, their two young grandchildren also lost their mother, explains Diane Parkes.

When Angela Page received a telephone call from a friend of her daughter eight years ago, she had no idea how her life – and the lives of her close family – were to be turned around.

The call was to tell her that her 22-year-old daughter Natalie had collapsed.

Rushing to the scene, Angela discovered her daughter about to be taken to to hospital, where she was given the news that Natalie had suffered a brain haemorrhage and was unlikely to recover.

That was in November 2000 and two days after she collapsed, Natalie died. It is a loss the family have been trying to cope with ever since.

She left two small children – four-year-old Lauren Page-Cassidy and her baby brother Tom, then aged just 22 months.

The two youngsters came to live with Angela at her Kings Norton home where she shares the care with her partner, Peter Bird, her former husband and Natalie’s father, Richard Page, and his wife, Debbie, and the children’s father ,John Cassidy.

Angela, a 60-year-old retired bank manager, still remembers the moment when she discovered something had happened to her daughter.

“It was November 3 in 2000,” she says. “Natalie was not ill, she was perfectly fine and was out with a friend. I was picking Lauren up from her reception class and I got a call from Natalie’s friend saying she had had some kind of fit and could I come.

“I got to her home and the ambulance was there. She was taken to Selly Oak Hospital but then they moved her to the neurological unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I think it was only really when I got to the hospital that I realised how serious it was.”

Doctors warned Angela and Richard that it was unlikely their daughter would survive. In the event she did not regain consciousness and died two days after she collapsed.

It left her family totally shell shocked.

“It was like living in a tunnel,” recalls 60-year-old Richard, a management consultant. “I just remember being in a daze. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.”

At this time Richard and Angela had been divorced a few years and had new partners - Richard with wife Debbie and Angela with partner Peter. And, along with the children’s father, they were all determined to do their best for Lauren and Tom.

“Tom was too young to know what was going on but we had told Lauren that her mummy was ill,” recalls Angela. “When we told her that her mum had died she cried a lot and then went to sleep, that was her way of coping with it.”

The family had been given a leaflet for Birmingham-based charity Edward’s Trust at the time of Natalie’s death. They were at a loss at how much of the grieving process to share with the children so called for some advice about including the youngsters at the funeral.

“We asked for advice and it was the opposite of what we would have expected,” says Richard. “They told us to involve the children as much as possible whereas our instinct would have been to protect them. But they said it was a way of letting the children have some control over a situation which was out of their control.”

The children came to live with Angela, while still keeping good contact with their father and grandfather. But the cracks began to show.

“I was finding it really hard to cope with my grief,” says Richard. “So I contacted Edward’s Trust and had four or five sessions of counselling. I had felt like I was the only person something like that had happened to and I just wasn’t coping with it. But it was really helpful just to talk to someone and realise that I wasn’t alone.”

By the time Lauren reached the age of eight she was having some difficulties dealing with her loss and opted to speak to a counsellor at Edward’s Trust.

“When I decided to come here I was writing letters to my mum and I just realised I was never going to get a letter back.”

One of the hardest things for Lauren, now aged 12 and a pupil at Kings Norton Girl’s School, was that she feared she was forgetting her mum. So as part of the process she created a memory jar with different colours representing various memories of her mum.

“I feel fine about it really,” she says. “When I tell people they say they are sorry but I say they don’t need to be sorry because I am no different from everyone else.

“In some ways it has made me the person I am now.”

Lauren’s brother, Tom, also benefited from the counselling service. A couple of years ago he started developing feelings of anger about what had happened. And for him one of the issues he was trying to deal with was the fact he could not remember his mum at all.

“When my nan mentioned it I thought I might as well give it a go as I knew it had helped my sister,” Tom says.

“When I came I did some art and they asked me to do a picture of something that showed how I felt. So I painted a red background and a kettle which was about to boil over.”

* Edward’s Trust this year celebrates its 20th birthday. Founded in 1989 by Peter and Hilary Dent after the death of their son Edward at the age of seven from cancer, the Edgbaston-based charity aims to provide counselling and support to families suffering child illness and bereavement of a child or parent.

The charity, which is funded by donations, also supports professionals working with bereaved families. For more information contact 0121 456 4838 or visit the website below.