“How are you?” Such a natural question and so difficult to answer at times. I have my standard responses now. I’m ok. Surviving. Up and down. Taking it moment by moment. Getting through as best I can. Sometimes, all I can do in response to the question is just shrug. How am I?… Read More
Last night I dreamed about Jessica. She was wearing a hand-knitted green and white cardigan that she’d had as a toddler, although in my dream she was the age she was when she died. She’d been chewing on her cardigan next to a button and had made it fray slightly. As I often did in… Read More
If you’d asked me to describe our daily life with Jessica, I would have said it was pretty normal. All the things that came with having a child with a complex heart condition were just part of our everyday life. We did them without really thinking about them and never really noticed their impact. It… Read More
They say that time heals. Time doesn’t heal; it hurts. Time is a relentless tide. It takes me further away from life with Jessica. The turn of the calendar brings me pain. A new month is a month without her. A month with no memories to be made. As Friday moves into Saturday,… Read More
One of the challenges that we face as bereaved parents is helping our younger daughter through her own grief journey after losing her big sister. Sometimes Sophie will talk to us about Jessica and cry because she misses her big sister. Other times, her grief manifests as behavioural changes – pushing boundaries, being more clingy,… Read More
Once upon a time, I sat on the floor, exhausted and sleep-deprived, waiting for my girls to settle down to sleep and wrote a post about the loneliness of 3AM. I was tired and snappy as I held their hands, longing for them to go back to sleep so I could sleep too. By the… Read More
Organising a funeral is similar to organising a wedding – only without being fun. There are flowers to organise, halls to book, catering to organise, service sheets to put together. On the day, there are so many people to try and talk to, so much to focus on and it passed by quickly in a… Read More