Like most parents, Carol and Neil Wilkinson cannot imagine any greater anguish than the death of a child. More than three years after the death of their adopted daughter, Lucy, ripples of pain still lie just below the surface.
After the bleak days of grief, guilt, and severe marital strain, Carol and Neil might now be expected to try to put the past behind them. Instead, having survived every parent's worst nightmare, they have chosen to plunge themselves into it again - by fostering a one-year-old boy who stands only a slim chance of surviving to adulthood.
"A lot of people probably think we're mad, and I can understand that," says Carol. "But there are terminally-ill children spending the whole of their lives in institutions because their families can't cope with the strain. After all we learned with Lucy, it would seem a waste not to help make another short life a happier one." The Wilkinsons, both 49, show no sign of masochism, missionary zeal, or obsession with glory - they seem quite simply besotted with children. They have four of their own, an adopted daughter, and have fostered more than 100 others since 1976.
The motivation to foster initially came from Neil. Now a principal engineer at Jaguar, he was put into care twice as a child - less-than-happy experiences which left him determined to provide a better environment for children in similar situations.
The couple had no experience of dealing with so-called "life-limited children" until 13 years ago, when Coventry social services asked them to foster a baby called Lucy, then only 12 weeks old, who was expected to die within three months. In the end, Lucy defeated this prognosis and many more. She survived for a decade, becoming emotionally and legally - through adoption - a central part of the Wilkinson family.
She had been healthy at birth, but a day later "died" a cot death. She was revived, but left with severe cerebral palsy, epilepsy, asthma and, says Carol, "virtually everything else in the book".
"We had no real experience of dealing with serious sickness, and at the start we were only told that she had difficulty feeding," says Carol. "If we'd known then how long she would live, and how badly disabled she was, we probably wouldn't have accepted her."
The memories of caring for such a deeply damaged child are still vivid. "At first, Lucy was in constant pain and screamed 24 hours a day. It wasn't the cry of a normal baby, but this kind of high-pitched whine, which was awful to listen to. She would fit so violently that she would go into a banana shape with her head touching her toes, so you couldn't even cuddle her to comfort her. She couldn't suck, so it was almost impossible to feed her. She ended up being fed through a tube in her nose, and later by a tube directly into her stomach."
Lucy's pain and epilepsy management improved after the first year - by which time she was being given 26 tablets and several medicines each day - but she never had any kind of normal mental development, and all her movements were involuntary. In the last year of her life, she was on constant morphine and oxygen, and was suffering from degeneration of the heart. She died in Carol's arms while Neil was away on holiday with the other children.
Can Carol really justify the couple's emotional investment in Lucy, or believe that such a sick child had any true quality of life? "I would be devastated if I thought Lucy's life had been unhappy and that we had kept her alive for no reason. That little girl had an incredibly strong personality - I'm sure that's why she refused to die for so long. She would respond to music and to all the members of our family, and for the first few years she could smile - she had an amazing ability to make everyone around her smile too.
"She also adored her visits to the Acorns Children's Hospice in Birmingham, which were great for us as well. Those times were the only respite we had, and as her condition deteriorated we literally lived from one visit there to the next. It had a wonderful warm atmosphere, and we knew she was in safe hands.
"Our other kids had a wonderful relationship with Lucy - they used to love helping with her physiotherapy massage, and she taught them a lot about tolerance, and how to relate to people with disabilities."
Carol doesn't believe they resented the almost constant attention she devoted to their sick sister, or that living with a terminally ill child placed them under unnecessary emotional strain. "She was so helpless, and her needs were so different from theirs, that jealousy didn't come into it," she says. "Of course, her death was traumatic for them. Even now they are still deeply affected by it. But in some ways I think it has made them more mature. Children today might hear about a grandparent or neighbour dying, but they don't experience it first hand - whereas 100 years ago nearly every family would have had a child that died, and it was just a fact of life."
It was Carol and Neil who suffered most, however. "As a parent it was almost impossible to accept that she really was going to die, no matter how much love and care we gave her. "For at least a year afterwards I had terrible black days, and could tell you the exact number of months, weeks and hours since she died. Neil and I went through a very rocky patch, because his response to her death was denial. He bottled everything up and wouldn't talk about her - I thought it was because he didn't care."
After more than two decades of non-stop childcare, three of the Wilkinson's own children have now flown the nest, leaving "only" four youngsters at home. The smell of baking still fills the couple's five-bedroom house, and regimented lines of shoes and coats still line the hall, but until the recent arrival, Carol says it "felt a bit empty".
Although taking on another terminally ill child had been discussed before Lucy died, Neil clearly feels a certain amount of trepidation. "I'll probably go off the deep end again," he jokes - and sometimes still seems lost for words when he talks about Lucy. "My problem was that I never really believed she was going to die, because there had been so many times when family life came to a virtual standstill while we waited for her to die - and she never did.
"In the end we decided that life had to go on around her, because marking time like this was having a negative effect on us all. That's why I wasn't there when she died - I'd taken the other children on holiday while she was having one of her bad turns. I felt terrible guilt, and it took me a long time to come to terms with it."
Neil isn't alone in having some misgivings about the new baby. Carol says: "Two of our children still aren't at all happy about us taking him on, and our eldest son was initially against it too, because he felt we would be forgetting about Lucy. But the younger ones are really excited, probably because they dealt with Lucy's death in a different way - they just think she's happy in heaven now."
On the brink of stepping back into the maelstrom, Neil makes a last effort to explain a decision which, he admits, almost defies explanation. "It's not the losing or the dying that's important - it's the life that comes before. Living with Lucy was sometimes very difficult, but it was also an incredibly enriching experience. If we can give another child the stability, love and happiness of a home environment, then it balances everything else out."
