Managing grief

When I was 12, one of my schoolfriends died. In the immediate aftermath, our teachers (no doubt grieving themselves) were unfailingly kind to us, giving my class the space we needed in lessons to cry, reminisce and process what had happened. The school also held various memorials, including the planting of a tree in the school grounds.

About four years later, the tree was moved to another site. The first my class knew about this was when we walked past the old location and saw a large clump of roots abandoned by the hole. Over the next few days, the tree looked increasingly sickly in its new position – we worried it was slowly dying. We tried to ask our headteacher what was going on, but she refused to see us. So one afternoon, we held a sit-down protest at the tree.