In our sad club, the ache of grief is always present

AFTER brief tributes to Ivan Cameron, the ritual abuse of Prime Minister's Questions was suspended today - rightly, properly and with dignity.

Everyone's hearts will go out to the Cameron family - that goes without saying, though it won't take long for the pieties to be replaced by political business as usual. In the meantime, the nation will try to understand how David and Samantha Cameron feel. Most people, luckily for them, will never succeed.

For the Camerons have joined a club, the worst club in the world. And non-members cannot imagine the subscription that must be unceasingly paid. Grief is a universal feature of the human condition. It is natural to experience the death of one's parents. In a lifetime partnership, one partner will normally endure the loss of the other. But the death of a child is neither natural nor normal.

Every parent spends their lives to some extent imagining it. (Don't run across the road! Put those scissors down! Are you sure he'll be OK, doctor?) But maybe one in a billion parental worries turns out to be fatal.

For nearly 12 years of our son Laurie's life, my wife, Hilary, and I were those kinds of parents. In fact, we tended towards the old fashioned relaxed school (He'll be fine). He was as good as you get: happy, healthy, sporty, smart, funny and nice. Then suddenly Laurie wasn't fine. A small pain became a major problem, became a diagnosis of cancer, became a gloomy prognosis, became grim certainty. He died, aged 13, in September 2005. It seems like yesterday and, then again, it seems like an aeon ago.

He is with us every moment. The nature of the grief changes - it becomes less raw, a dull ache rather than a sharp pain, so much second nature that it is impossible to recall when it wasn't there. But it doesn't take much to bring it back: a packet of Skittles, Laurie's favourite, is usually my trigger. And parents have to grieve together which is hard, bordering on impossible. The divorce rate in bereaved families is high.

The Camerons' problems will be redoubled because they have to cope with the intrusive and ignorant public. They will perhaps be better prepared than some because, with Ivan, they were always aware of the likelihood.

Gordon and Sarah Brown belong to our sad club too: they lost their baby daughter. Say what you like about Brown and Cameron as politicians, but I believe their understanding of what the worst coming to the worst really means can only make them better able to understand everything else.

Matthew and Hilary Engel founded the Teenage Cancer Trust Laurie Engel Fund, which is helping build a new unit for cancer patients at Birmingham Children's Hospital. www.laurieengelfund.org