March 2019 - 20 weeks without Ben! “This is the big scary truth about trauma: there is no such thing as ‘getting over it’. The five stages of grief model marks universal stages in learning to accept loss, but the reality is in fact much bigger:...
Have you ever felt like a car that seems to be running on the bare minimum of fuel? That you’re functioning - but only just? That your wings can’t carry your weight (quote above). That you’re treading water and going through the motions of living...
‘You don’t know how much one life can alter your entire existence until you’ve had to bury your child.’ - Ruqayya Gibson February 2019 - 18 weeks without Ben. This journal is long and disjointed. It’s an overview of the past eighteen weeks since Ben died. Rambled dark...
They say that in French there is no literal translation for ‘I miss you’ - instead they say ‘tu me manqués’ which means more along the lines ‘you are missing from me’. And is that not the most apt description of losing somebody? Because if...
‘Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the place of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish.‘-Henri Nouwen The death of my gorgeous son twenty months ago has opened my eyes to a world full of pain. I’ve always been sensitive...
(10th April 2019 - 7 months without Ben!) ‘On days like this, when the ache is visceral, and I fall into the hole you left behind, I try to remind myself that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever take the MEMORIES we made, the JOY we shared,...
I wrote this post about eleven months after Ben died. It’s now nineteen months (scarily edging towards two years) and I’m staggered by how little has actually changed! I will probably spend the rest of my life learning how to dodge around a plethora of love,...
Sixteen months without Ben (written 7th Feb 2020) There really is no easy way to live with grief. Some describe it as carrying a heavy boulder on your shoulder; a raw open wound; an amputation; a stone in your shoe - things that really hurt -...
Saying goodbye - 25th October 2018 The other evening my husband Paul and I were watching ‘The Sounds of the Seventies’ on TV and Bill Withers came on singing his famous song ‘Lean on Me’. It’s a song we probably all know well but as I...
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed This is going to be a complicated post as I try to get to grips with living with grief at the same time as living in the middle of a Coronavirus...