It was a serendipitous moment at the beginning of 2020, just two months before the whole world shut down, that brought Serge Cowan and Lee Barnett together.

The two men, who vaguely knew each other, were hanging out at the Village Hotel in Elstree, discussing potential work, when Lee, 52, noticed a tattoo on Serge’s left arm. The tattoo, written in Hebrew, spelled the word “Maddie”.

Shivers ran down his spine. “I knew instantly what it meant,” recalls Lee. "Without saying anything, I lifted up my shirt to show him my tattoo, the name Madalyn, written in English but in Hebrew- style letters, on my left inner arm. And then we just looked at each other and hugged.”

Instinctively, wordlessly, each man understood the immense tragedy the other had suffered — the worst thing that can happen to any parent. For each of them had lost a daughter, both — by strange coincidence — named Madalyn (spelled Madelene in Serge’s case). Serge’s daughter was ten when she died; Lee’s was just four.

Three-and-a-half years after that meeting, Serge, 47, an international property expert and DJ, and Lee, 52, a videographer and actor — who used to star in the BBC’s Dick and Dom children’s show — have just completed the ninth episode of a series of podcasts, Men Do Talk, which examines their journeys of grief and provides a space for other men to talk about mental health, child loss, a child’s terminal illness or chronic diagnosis.

It’s an informative and entertaining listen (or watch, as it’s also on YouTube), frequently as funny as it is sad, with Serge and Lee’s warm banter ensuring it is never depressing.

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Serge Cowan and his daughter Madelene (Photo: Sege Cowan)

Now firm friends, the two men are very different, which is perhaps why the podcast works so well. They complement each other. Lee, who lives in Pinner, is more open than Serge, his emotions closer to the surface. He’s the one who often wells up and cries on air, his way of “releasing the pressure a bit”. He’s also more pragmatic, more cynical and more angry.

Serge, from Borehamwood, is softer spoken, less obviously emotional, but more spiritual. (He had his tattoo done in Tel Aviv after a meeting with a spiritualist in which “Maddie told me it was a good idea to do it”.) He bottled up his grief and didn’t talk about it for many years, instead pouring his feelings into a book, which he locked away. Ultimately, it led to a breakdown.

Madalyn was Lee and his wife Thamar’s first child. She was a healthy, active four-and-a-half-year old when she started to suffer from recurrent ear infections, which antibiotics didn’t cure. Within two months of her first symptoms, she would be dead.

“We knew something wasn’t right, but nobody would listen, and we were brushed off by the doctors,” says Lee. “Crucially, they didn’t do a blood test.” Just two days before she died, Lee and his wife Thamar had taken her to A&E.

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Beloved: Madalyn Barnett (Photo: Lee Barnett)

“Her oxygen saturation was 85 per cent, which is extremely low. She should have been kept in hospital. My wife said ‘Shouldn’t we be testing for leukaemia?’, but the nurse dismissed the idea. They sent Madalyn home with Calpol.”

When she woke up the next day with blue lips and a spot on her back, the GP failed to spot the signs of sepsis. Lee adds: “We were due to go on holiday to the Netherlands the next day to visit my mother-in-law.

"The GP said he’d do blood tests when we got back, and sent us on our merry way. So we went on our holiday. I don’t know how Madalyn even made it through the journey. I remember getting off the bus and she just fell out of her buggy. When we reached my mother-in-law’s, she went straight to bed.”

By now desperately worried, they took Madalyn to the nearby GP. He took one look at her and called an ambulance. By the time she arrived, she was dying. “I went into shock ,” recalls Lee, his voice breaking.

“They were working on her for ages. I remember looking at her and telling her I loved her, and then her eyes closed. And that was it. She died in front of me. And then I had to call everyone back home and tell them my child had died from undiagnosed leukaemia. It was all so surreal. We’d had no time to prepare for her loss.”

Serge’s story, while very different, is also characterised by a catalogue of medical errors. It is coming up to six years since he lost Maddie, his eldest daughter, in October 2017. She was born in 2008 with streptococcal meningitis, after his then wife, Sophie, contracted Strep B in pregnancy, which was missed by the obstetrician.

“Maddie came out blue and fitting and was rushed up to intensive care,” he says. “But the damage was already done.

Serge Cowan daughter Madelene Mae

Serge Cowan's daughter Madelene (Photo: Serge Cowan)

"She had been starved of oxygen, which meant she had brain damage and severe cerebral palsy. We were told she’d be confined to a wheelchair for life and she’d need 24-hour care. She couldn’t do anything on her own. It took up all my life. All our lives.

“Having a severely disabled child means you’re always grieving in a way. You love them for who they are, but you’re grieving for the child they should have been. It was hard, physically and emotionally. After Maddie was born, we had two other daughters, which helped us.”

In spite of her disabilities, nobody expected Maddie to die. Her death was sudden and shocking. “In October 2017 we were starting to think about her secondary education, where she’d go, how she’d cope,” Serge says. “And then one Sunday morning, we woke up and she’d gone.

“I still remember the sound of my wife screaming from Maddie’s downstairs bedroom. Because of her cerebral palsy, Maddie had always had a very stiff posture, but she was floppy, and even though the paramedics came and resuscitated her and took her to hospital, I knew she’d already passed. We decided to let her go peacefully at Great Ormond Street, the next day. The coroner said she’d had a heart attack.”

That night, Serge dreamt that Maddie was dancing, something she’d never been able to do in life. He awoke with a sense that she was finally at peace.

“I didn’t really absorb the impact of her death, I just sort of got on with it,” he says. But his grief was complicated by guilt because he no longer had the 24-hour burden of caring for Maddie.

“In some ways, life actually became a bit easier.” He channelled all his conflicted emotions into a 280,000-word book, detailing Maddie’s life and the family’s experience. It was never intended for publication, but he draws on it frequently in the podcast.

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Happy moment: Madalyn Barnett with one of her four siblings (Photo: Lee Barnett)

While Madalyn’s death brought Lee and Thamar closer, for Serge, losing his daughter spelled the end of his marriage. “Sophie and I realised we were probably together for the wrong reasons. Once Maddie had gone, we grew apart. I believe around 70 per cent of couples separate after the loss of a child.”

It also changed his relationship with Judaism — for the better. Previously a self-described three-times a year Jew, he was overwhelmed by the kindness and support he received from the United Synagogue at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).

“Rabbi Feldman from Bushey turned up at Great Ormond Street as soon as he heard we were going to let Maddie go, and recited the Shamar with me, Sophie and our other two girls at her bedside. We instantly bonded and he was amazing, there every step of the way. Rabbi Wilkinson, the GOSH chaplain, was also fantastic.

"We weren’t synagogue members, but we were granted three burial plots, providing we then set up a membership, and he brought me into the community. For about a year after, I went to synagogue every Friday night. It was meditative, comforting and uplifting.”

Lee grew up a United Synagogue Jew, who attended Carmel College, but turned away both from the “north-west London bubble” and from the religious side, which he felt was “just a load of hypocrisy”.

As an adult, he is secular but says “I love being Jewish, I’m proud of being Jewish and I’ve brought up my children to understand their history and culture”.

When Madalyn died, he came up against Jewish religious burial rules. Lee adds: “We wanted a heart-shaped gravestone for Madalyn, but were told we couldn’t have it.

"The cemetery said, ‘The rabbis need to have a meeting to discuss this,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care what the rabbis think, we’re having a heart-shaped stone.’ I was also angry that the rabbi wouldn’t shake Thamar’s hand, wouldn’t pay that respect to a grieving mother because she was a woman.”

But while aspects of the religion impinged on his grief, he also feels Judaism’s mourning rituals were helpful to him.

He adds: “It was definitely a rock to cling on to. The rituals, the shiva, having people at the house, the food and drink, they’re a good thing. But the atmosphere at a shiva for a child is very different from that for an 80-something. When a four-year-old dies, it’s not natural.”

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Madalyn Barnett (Photo: Lee Barnett)

There is no trace of self-pity. “There were Holocaust survivors at Madalyn’s funeral, one had seen all his female relatives shot in front of him and kicked into a ditch. And yet he still smiles and laughs.

"And so I stood there thinking, I’ll be all right. I mean, in the past, everybody lost their children. The problem is we shut it out and don’t want to think about it.”

Shutting out the pain and not thinking about it was what led to Serge’s nervous breakdown, in October 2022. “I call it a grief breakdown,” he says. “I wasn’t just grieving for Maddie, but also for my divorce, and the different type of loss of my other two daughters as a result of the divorce.

"I realised I had to change something. I left the business that my ex-wife and I owned together and decided to go my own route, and that included doing the podcast with Lee.”

Serge came up with the title for Men Do Talk: “When Maddie passed, what my male friends often said to me was, ‘There are no words.’

"Of course there are a lot of words, but they just couldn’t say them; I couldn’t say them. With the podcast, we’re trying to remove the stigma about men being unable to talk and share their feelings. Both Lee and I have now got to the point where we will share everything. We just don’t give a shit.”

Lee says that after the loss of a child, people prioritise women. “They forget that men do actually have feelings, that we also need to talk. And the only places we have to talk are pubs. But you know, once men start talking, it’s amazing how open they become.”

He and Thamar now have four living children. Serge has three, including a baby who was born last week with his new partner Lauren. “Life goes on,” he says. “But the grief never leaves you.

"It’s always there in the background and it can rear its ugly head at any point, often when you least expect. It can be triggered by a photo, or a song, or something that pops up on Google.”

Both men have been overwhelmed by the reaction to the podcast. “People message us privately,” says Lee.

“One man said he stopped work after listening and decided to spend the rest of the day with his daughters. I realised, wow, we’re making a real difference! But we’re also doing the podcast for us, for our daughters. It’s a way of keeping them ‘alive’.”

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‘The Men Do Talk’ podcast is available on Spotify, Apple and Youtube