2022 into 2023 Artwork by domtsoi.com (Ben’s friend) I struggle every time someone wishes me ‘happy new year’ and can’t quite bring myself to say it back. Happy isn’t what it used to be - and how can we possibly assume a new year will be happy? 2018...
September 2022 - almost 4 years without Ben I often wonder why I keep writing - why after almost four years I haven’t managed to get to grips with grief. Why it’s such a complex and multifaceted enigma! But of course it’s not that easy -...
August 2022 “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Bible tells us to be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger (James 1:19). Good advice of course!! I grew up trying to live by those principles...
July 2022 ‘Parental grief is forever boundless, an ever-present, deep-seated wound that has no name. There’s a reason no label has been ascribed to those who have lost a child — it is too foreign a concept, a much too chaotic form of brain freeze, an...
April 2022 Inverted:‘Changed from the normal position by being turned upside down or arranged in the opposite order’https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/inverted Absence is the opposite of presence. When a precious child dies everything is inverted. Our lives feel like they’ve been turned upside down and rearranged in the opposite order....
March 2022 Life grinds to a halt when you lose a loved one. It feels like you’re suspended in a time warp - stuck between the life you knew and the life you don’t want to know. You can’t go back and dread going forward. But...
February 2022 It’s now over three years since our world fell apart. 39 months since our darling boy happily walked out through the front door and never came home. 1213 days of barely functioning under the weight of the worst pain I have ever known -...
December 2021 ‘From the outside looking in you can never understand and from the inside looking out you can never explain…’ Three years ago I remember staring at this image and reading the words over and over again. I found it hard to believe that in one...
October 2021 I borrowed the heading from the title of an old 1944 Humphrey Bogart film. ‘To have and have not’… that’s just how it is. What appears to be a contradiction is actually reality for those of us trying to live with and without a...