In this crazy first year as a grieving mother, I’ve learned an awful lot about bereavement. Far more than I expected to know at my age, having lost a child so suddenly. Just like many people, I was living in blissful ignorance of this feeling before my daughter died – oh, how I miss that! Now, I’m part of a different club; a club I never intended to join and can never leave. One thing I know for certain is that I still cannot believe she’s gone for good; I still pray she’ll just ‘come home’ and give me a hug, like she used to.

Grief is so many things and is different for everyone, but, for me, I find it is mostly quiet, unheard, unspoken. I’ve had amazing support from some truly wonderful and inspiring individuals, but equally I’ve experienced the side of grief that people (specialists) warned me about. It seems it is generally left to the bereaved to ‘put away’ their grief somewhere, and, indeed, the bereaved do try to find a place for it, to fit it around their ‘normal’ lives, we would surely go insane if we didn’t. But, almost a year on, on the surface I’m doing well but I live that rawness of loss as though it were yesterday every day, those early weeks before the true mourning kicked in…

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