Phil Bryant approached death in the same way that he had approached life: in a quiet but highly organised fashion. When a doctor told him he had a short time left to live, he put his affairs in order. He made sure the mortgage was settled, he gave his wife a folder detailing what she would be paid as a pension and a list of numbers to call after he had passed away. He told her she ought to find someone else. Mr Bryant ensured that his eldest knew the diagnosis, but spared his son the pain of seeing him in his final hours. There were no heart-rending goodbyes, no pre-recorded video messages from beyond the grave, no tear stained letters to his children. When the time came he left home for the hospice. He died on the last day of the tax year. He left a plan for his funeral service.

Yet there was one thing that he was powerless to affect, for all his careful preparation. He was unable to help his ten-year-old son come to terms with the grief of losing a father. Luke sits at home in Tamworth, Staffordshire, watching a Thomas the Tank Engine video with his brother Jake. Jake, 3, watches from behind a low table, upon which his own train set is laid out. He is carrying out routine maintenance work; he announces his progress in regular bulletins to the living room, shouting at the top of his voice.

"My best friend came to the funeral with me," says Luke. "Afterwards we got a football and kicked it around. There was a massive field out the back of the place where we had the funeral."

Jake interjects. "Broken!" he shouts, holding up part of a signal box. "Need new one!"

"Dad died at Easter," says Luke. "We were still on holiday for three days and then we went back to school. I wanted to carry on as normal."

In August, he met with six other children who had lost a parent, to begin a course of bereavement workshops run by St Giles Hospice, a member of the umbrella charity Help the Hospices which The Times is supporting this Christmas.

Crucial to bereavement counselling, according to Nikki Archer, manager of St Giles' bereavement service, is "the reassurance that grieving is a normal human reaction."

"You may do things that you would have thought creepy," she says. "Hearing the dead person talk to you is really normal. Smelling the person - or even wanting to hear them and wanting to smell them - that can cause a lot of anxiety." Sudden feelings of anger are also quite normal.

When the bereaved are children, they are less likely to have experienced grief - their own or that of others - to know that a reaction is normal and they may be unable to put their grief into words.

She recalls a boy of ten whose father died of cancer. He had acted quite normally afterwards. Five months later Mrs Archer received a call from his mother. The boy had always been well-behaved at school, but lately he had been arguing and fighting. What worried his mother most were the things he was writing on scraps of paper: "I want to be with my dad," he wrote. "When I die I will be with my dad," he wrote. "I want to die". His mother took them for suicide notes.

In a counselling session at the hospice, the boy explained that he had a strong belief in life after death. "He said he did want to be with his dad, but he was not thinking of killing himself," said Mrs Archer. "He wanted to be a professional footballer.

"At school, children were picking on him for not having a dad. We explained to him that we could understand his being angry, but that he needed to express his feelings differently. We bought him a punch bag."