Tag Archives: Emotion

Guest post: Thoughts of loss and hope at Christmas

(Jo Powell kindly shared this moving reflection some years ago. Sadly, Jo died in April 2023. I still miss her joyful face and caring nature very much. She was a very special human.) I was pacing the landing with my teething baby at 3am last night and all I could think of was you. As...

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Halloween just got scary

[I didn’t post this blog about Halloween at the time, I suppose to avoid offending anyone or to put a damper on the fun, but reading back on it, it’s certainly worth sharing. It’s not a major worry for me now, and who knows how I’ll feel about it in the years to come, but...

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There is always tomorrow…

Some days I feel like grief has slapped me in the face so hard. This was one of them, about four months (in July) after Abi died. I wrote about this particular day as it was a full 24 hours of challenging thoughts and emotions… Continue reading → Share this:Tweet Email a link to a...

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Family comforts … but who’s comforting who?

The death of a child, quite naturally, has a huge impact on an entire family and the aftershocks can be widespread and ongoing. In my case, my immediate family (husband and other two children) were emotionally torn, yet we had to find a way to continue to live our lives together, finding new routines and...

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Balancing the kindness of strangers…

[Taken from notes written around July 2013] After Abi died, we kept people informed via Facebook, which was a great help to us as it saved having to contact lots of people at an impossibly difficult time and also prevented any misunderstanding about what had happened to her – many people who knew Abi were...

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Water Bugs and Dragonflies

We came upon this story when preparing Abi’s funeral and the vicar read it out. We knew many people of all ages would be there and wanted a reading that everyone could understand and, hopefully, find comfort from. Continue reading → Share this:Tweet Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email

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How many children does a bereaved mother have?

The note about what to write in a card to a grieving person in my last post seemed to strike a cord with some readers. Some recognised the uncertainty of what to do for the best, others realised they’d never considered how this simple gesture could be interpreted by the recipient, others recalled past occasions...

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A grief observed… approaching the first anniversary

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!...

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The whirlpool of grief

A note before you read: I wrote this a few weeks after Abi died, when my grief was still very fresh and raw. It’s become one of the most-read posts on this blog, because the ‘whirlpool’ image – closely linked to the well-known Kübler-Ross stages of grief – seems to resonate with so many people...

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