The Empty Shoes Outside Parliament

Why Bereaved Parents Need More Than Time Off Work

Hundreds of pairs of children's shoes were laid outside Parliament this summer. Trainers that should have been running around playgrounds. School shoes that should have been kicked off at the front door. Sandals, boots and tiny pairs of shoes that should have continued to be outgrown and replaced as the children wearing them grew.

But the children who once filled those shoes were no longer there.

Each pair represented a child who had died and, beside them, photographs told just some of their stories. It was an extraordinarily simple but devastatingly powerful way of making visible something that no statistic ever really could: behind every child who dies is a family whose life has changed forever.

The display was organised as part of a campaign by It's Never You, the charity founded by Ceri Menai-Davis and his wife Frances following the death of their six-year-old son, Hugh, from cancer in 2021. The couple have since campaigned tirelessly for greater support for families of seriously and terminally ill children, including through Hugh's Law, which calls for paid leave for parents caring for a seriously ill child.

Their campaign asks us to look at something incredibly difficult: what actually happens to a family when a child becomes seriously ill, and what happens to those parents when the worst imaginable thing then happens?

Because grief does not exist separately from the practicalities of life. A parent can be experiencing something utterly devastating while the mortgage still needs paying, food still needs buying and an employer is still expecting them to come to work.

For many families, the crisis begins long before bereavement.

When a child becomes seriously ill, family life can change overnight. Hospital appointments replace ordinary routines. Treatment schedules become the family calendar. Nights might be spent sleeping beside a hospital bed. Parents may suddenly be travelling enormous distances for specialist treatment while simultaneously trying to care for other children at home.

Work, understandably, becomes secondary.

Parents reduce their hours. They use annual leave. They take unpaid leave. They rearrange shifts and ask family members for help. Some attempt to continue working from hospital corridors and waiting rooms because financially they simply cannot afford not to.

Others eventually leave work altogether.

Not because they no longer value their career, and not because they don't want to work, but because when your child is seriously ill there are choices that cease to feel like choices at all.

You go where your child needs you.

This is one of the most important points being made by the families campaigning for change. By the time a seriously ill child dies, a parent may already have significantly reduced their employment or left work completely in order to care for them. As Ceri Menai-Davis has highlighted, this can then leave some parents unable to meet the employment criteria required to access statutory bereavement pay.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about that.

A parent can give up their employment because their child is dying and then discover, after their child has died, that leaving work to care for them has also affected their entitlement to support.

It is why the campaign argues that the answer cannot simply be additional bereavement leave. Families need support throughout the entire journey, including financial protection while a child is seriously ill, appropriate support following their death and access to help that does not disappear simply because their employment status has changed.

Hugh's Law is part of that conversation. The Government has been consulting on employment rights for parents of seriously ill children, and the issue has attracted growing support for a statutory entitlement that would allow parents to step away from work without simultaneously fearing what will happen to their income or employment.

It feels difficult to imagine anyone having to make that calculation.

Can I afford to be beside my child?

Yet for some families, that is exactly the position they find themselves in.

And then, sometimes, the child dies.

There are moments when the language we use around work and wellbeing suddenly feels hopelessly inadequate. We talk about “bereavement”. We talk about “compassionate leave”. We talk about a “return to work”.

They are necessary terms, but they sound incredibly neat for something that is anything but.

A parent who loses a child hasn't simply experienced an event for which they require a certain number of days away from their desk. Their entire understanding of their life may have changed.

Their home is different. Their family is different. Their relationships may feel different. Their identity may feel different. The future they had imagined is different.

There is an empty bedroom. An empty seat at the table. A name that still belongs within the family even though the person carrying it is no longer physically there.

And eventually, somehow, there may be an expectation that this parent returns to work.

This is where the word return becomes complicated.

Because somebody can return to the same building, the same desk, the same colleagues and the same job without returning as the same person.

There are experiences in life that create a very clear before and after. Losing a child is surely one of the most profound.

The person walking back through the office door may look exactly as they did before. They may even desperately want the normality of work. They may laugh with colleagues. They may perform brilliantly. They may appreciate having somewhere to go where, for a few hours, they can think about something else.

None of that means their grief has finished.

This is something workplaces need to understand when we talk about supporting people through bereavement. A return date cannot be treated as an end point.

Grief does not work to an HR timetable.

It does not progress neatly through predictable stages before eventually disappearing. There will be birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases and ordinary Tuesdays when something completely unexpected brings everything rushing back. There may be days when work feels like a lifeline and others when concentrating on the simplest task feels almost impossible.

Support needs to be able to exist alongside that reality.

At MOCO, much of our work centres around transition: those periods when something significant happens in a person's life and they are trying to understand how to live, work and move forward within circumstances that have changed.

Bereavement is perhaps one of the clearest examples of why transitional support matters.

That does not mean coaching can, or should, replace specialist bereavement counselling, psychological support or clinical care. There are times when those services are absolutely essential. But there can also be a space alongside them where somebody needs help understanding what their changed life means practically and professionally.

How much can I manage now? What do I need from my employer? How do I explain what I need when I don't really understand it myself yet? Do I still want the same career? What matters to me now? How do I move forward when part of me doesn't want to move away from what I have lost?

Perhaps one of the hardest questions of all is how somebody begins building a future without feeling as though doing so somehow leaves the person they love behind.

There aren't tidy coaching answers to questions like these. There shouldn't be.

Sometimes what matters is simply having somewhere safe enough to ask them.

It is also important that we don't place the entire responsibility for this support onto line managers. Most managers desperately want to do the right thing when somebody they work with experiences a devastating loss, but many are frightened of getting it wrong.

What do you say to somebody whose child has died? Should you mention their child's name? Should you ask how they are? When is it appropriate to talk about work? What happens if they cry? What happens if they don't?

The fear of saying the wrong thing can become so great that people sometimes say nothing at all.

And silence can be incredibly lonely.

Managers don't need to become therapists or grief specialists. What they do need is the confidence to respond with humanity, the flexibility to recognise that everyone's experience will be different and somewhere appropriate to direct an employee when that person needs more support than a manager can reasonably provide.

Employers also need to recognise that support should not require the bereaved person to organise everything themselves. At the point when somebody has the least emotional capacity they may be expected to find policies, contact providers, explain their situation repeatedly and decide what support they require.

A compassionate organisation should make that journey easier, not add another burden to it.

This is why the image of those children's shoes outside Parliament matters so much.

Each pair represented a child whose absence is felt every single day by the people who loved them. But around each pair there is also an invisible circle of people whose lives changed when that child died: parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, friends, classmates and communities.

Many of those people will also be employees.

They will eventually walk back into offices, hospitals, schools, shops, building sites and businesses carrying something their colleagues cannot see.

We absolutely need legislation that protects families financially and gives parents the right to be beside a seriously ill child without risking their livelihood. We need appropriate bereavement rights and support that recognises the reality that some parents will already have been forced out of employment before their child dies.

But legislation can only take us so far.

A policy can give somebody time away from work. It cannot tell them how to rebuild a life they never expected to have to live.

That requires something much more human.

It requires employers willing to listen rather than assume. Managers confident enough to have difficult conversations. Flexibility that lasts longer than the first few weeks. Access to appropriate professional support and an understanding that returning to work and recovering from grief are two completely different things.

At MOCO, we believe people deserve meaningful support through life's biggest transitions. Not because they are broken and certainly not because anybody can make an experience like this okay, but because when someone's world changes, they should not have to work out how to navigate everything that follows entirely alone.

Those hundreds of little pairs of shoes outside Parliament represented children who should still be wearing them.

Nothing we write into an HR policy can change that.

But we can listen to the parents who placed those shoes there.

We can make it possible for a mother or father to sit beside their seriously ill child without simultaneously wondering whether doing so will cost them their job. We can make sure support doesn't suddenly disappear when that child dies. We can recognise that grief does not finish when compassionate leave does. And when somebody is eventually ready to return to work, we can meet them as the person they are now rather than expecting them to become the person they were before.

Support shouldn't begin at the funeral. And it shouldn't end when somebody walks back through the office door.

If those empty shoes ask anything of us, perhaps it is simply to do better for the families left behind.