I say died “with” and not “of” because it wasn’t the disease that killed him – it was the side effects from the carpet-bombing chemotherapy followed closely by a bone marrow transplant. He was too young, and the treatment was just too brutal.

Toby died the day after I started a new job in the City. I recall my final interview with the chair of Lloyd’s of London happened as my infant son lay in a critical condition at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

Writing these words feels completely mad. The desperately sad truth is that our lives went on, even as Toby’s was cut short.

I’ll never forget the pained look on my colleague’s face as he peered through the glass to extract me from my induction session with HR. He passed me my mobile phone. My wife was on the other end at Toby’s bedside and had been told by the doctors that we needed to consider turning off our son’s life support.

Our world collapsed.

After two weeks of bereavement leave, I was back at my desk at the top of the iconic Lloyd’s building in EC3. This was before hybrid working was a thing, which meant five days a week spent 60 miles away from my wife who (just like me) was locked in a day-to-day battle with unimaginable grief.

And yet I count myself lucky. I worked with empathetic colleagues and a compassionate employer. I had people around me who understood how I felt and some of them, I was saddened to hear, even had their own experiences of childhood cancer.

That doesn’t mean that my colleagues and friends always knew what to say (or how to say it). Confronted with someone newly bereaved we can feel frightened, angry, and helpless and sometimes, in our emotional confusion, feeling we need to do something, or say something, we do or say the wrong thing.

I don’t know if there is a right thing to do or say to someone in mourning. I do know that compassion in the workplace is important and it carried me through.

The best managers recognise that we all have things going on in our lives outside work that affect how we feel. As a leader compassion is one of the best ways to inspire and motivate the people around you.

Sometimes we forget this. Especially in a busy workplace where the stakes are high, your clients or other stakeholders are often demanding, and everyone on the team is expected to perform at the highest level at all times. Feelings can get in the way and they can be mistaken for weakness.

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Having a routine and focusing on work helped me move through the grieving process. It might not be the same for everyone. There were times that I struggled with moments of overwhelming sadness. I still do. I think as a parent who loses a child, you fear that if you ever stop grieving then you risk losing them all over again.

There are also day-to-day challenges that no one is prepared for. Do I talk about it at work and risk making people feel awkward? Or do I sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened?

That has never been my approach. I just love talking about Toby. Sometimes I fear this makes other people uncomfortable. But his life and death define who I am more than any other single event.

In opening up more about Toby, I’ve been inspired by Rob Delaney’s book A Heart that Works, in which he writes bravely about his son Henry. It has helped me understand grief better.

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Much of what he writes strikes a shrill chord with me. The painful parallels with Toby’s experience, and ours, weren’t just because we were neighbours at GOSH – where Rob and I once momentarily bonded over how our infant sons had both beaten multiple bouts of sepsis before growing out of nappies.

It’s the way he articulates so beautifully the whole vicious experience, especially those particular parts that are permanently seared into my mind. These are the memories – both happy and sad – that stick.

It was the way Rob’s wife Leah always seemed instinctively to know what the best thing was to do. The way Henry – just like Toby – used to hold his head at a funny angle, indicating pain (although the doctors never told us this, presumably out of compassion). How, at the very end, they (like us) carried their son outside so he could see the sky once more before he died. It was the precious hours that you can spend with your child after they pass away, how beautiful he was in death. How, when your child gets sick or is dying, you are animated by the belief that you can help them get better. How that’s not always the case. And how, afterwards, you think it might be easier to be dead yourself, just so you can be with your child.

Toby should have celebrated his eighth birthday this year. His death has left a massive hole in our hearts that will never fully heal.

We have so much to be grateful for, and our lives today are so full of love – thanks to our three other lovely children (who were all born after Toby died) – that it’s easy to be distracted by the everyday madness.

I believe in talking about grief and loss. I hope our story reminds people that we’re all just human and sometimes we all need a bit of compassion and empathy.