I WAS very sad to see the article about Sister Frances last week.

Like Oxfam, the children's hospice movement was founded in our city and it is something of which we should be immensely proud. Unlike Oxfam, its founder is alive and well and still living here.

I first met Sister Frances in the 1980s when she visited my school to talk about Helen and her family and her vision of how to help others like them.

I remember our being inspired to dedicate all our charitable funds that year to the new hospice.

In 2002 I met her again - this time because I found myself the stricken mother of another Helen.

For 13 years, Frances and her team guided me through the agonies of Immie's condition.

My other children all felt loved alongside their sick sister - embraced as a family, even at our most hopeless and most bleak.

When we admitted her to Helen House for the last time in December, Sister Frances' absence was palpable.

Gone was the feeling of safety and warmth that had built up around us through all those years.

Instead of it feeling like our home, the hospice has become another version of hospital; another institution.

The staff did a very expert job, and Immie died peacefully there just before Christmas, but it was not as it should have been.

I was denied the real comfort and strength that the hospice's founder could have given me.

The death and suffering of a child is (in our society) an exceptional thing and requires an exceptional person to truly understand and face it.

For more than 30 years Sister Frances did this, supporting families like mine with her simple love and profound understanding.

Your article only serves to emphasise to me what a great cruelty it is that the trustees should deprive us of her.

JULIA HOLLANDER

Charles Street, Oxford