Category: grief

sihouette of a female child holding out hand towards a red heart balloon
blog, grief

Moving On

Eight years ago I bought a house with my husband. We moved in, had to clean a lot of it, (who moves out of a house and leaves it dirty?) ate pies for lunch and bought what the children call ‘the really good pizza’ for dinner. It’s almost to the day that we got the keys to the house I’d dreamed of. Good indoor / outdoor flow, great for parties. Six bedrooms, though one was really more an office. But still. Six! Count them! Two bathrooms. A rumpus room for the children to use when they’re teenagers. It cost a bit more than we wanted, but Oh! The space. The memories we’ll create. The children will grow up here. We will grow old here. We couldn’t believe our luck. We loved our home. And for a while, we were happy.     Today marks almost eight years to the day that we moved into that house. My husband even lifting me over the threshold of the door. Kind of. I took photographs of our twins, three years old at the time. So tiny. I vowed I would take pictures of them by the front door on the same date every […]

an endless body of water during daytime.
blog, grief, public speaker

Turmulent Times

It’s been a strange week. Full of ups and downs. The downs have been quite deep to be honest, but like all bad – terrible – news, in this case I have thought long and hard about what it means for me and my life. Last week I discovered a friend of mine had suddenly died. For this piece I’m going to call her Amy, (not her real name). The rush of grief was overwhelming. I’d not felt anything like that in such a long time. I was taken by surprise, side-swiped by the sheer shock of it all. I cried and cried and felt strangely numb. Later, I wondered if I had the ‘right’ to be so upset. Another friend, similarly saddened, felt the same way. How we deal with grief is strange. We still don’t really do it very well. Why is it that we feel that only the immediate family has the right to be affected by the sudden and untimely death of a person? We live with our spouses and children, and of course they are our number one concern. However, we also choose to spend time with others, we socialise, have friends, and spend more […]