This chapter explores writing produced by William Hayley in response to the illness and, in 1800, the death of his only son Thomas Alphonso: unpublished sonnets, the Essay on Sculpture and the Memoirs of Thomas Alphonso. These are viewed as examples of the father’s memoir, alongside Benjamin Heath Malkin’s 1806 A Father’s Memoirs of His Child. Although Hayley prided himself on his ability to display sympathy and to comfort the bereaved by composing epitaphs, the loss of his son challenged his assumptions about writing and bereavement. Like Malkin, Hayley attempted to complete the work of fatherhood by bridging the passage of the child from the family to wider society or from the domestic to the public through writing.