Monthly Archive: August 2020

I really can’t speak for anyone else.  Grief, I’ve discovered, is a very personal thing and by that, I mean that everyone grieves differently and there are as many different versions of grief as there are people who are grieving the people they lost. There’s no right way to grieve; no correct or incorrect way to be or to feel.  There’s only your own way and so I feel I’m only qualified to write about my own experience.  It may turn out to be similar to yours.  It may be completely different.  But all of that doesn’t really matter because there is no right or wrong way to grieve. It’s almost unbelievable to me that we just had another anniversary of Nico’s...

Recently I was contacted by a mother who asked me a question.  I’ve been thinking about the answer for some time and I wanted to be truthful.  As I approach the anniversary of my son’s death, this has been on my mind more than ever.   The mother had asked me one simple question “Does it get better?” In a few days it will tip into it being another year since Nico died and with that in mind, I’d like to answer her question by looking back over the last few years. At the beginning there were no good days.  There were not even good hours or minutes.  Later there were sometimes good minutes, or minutes that you didn’t spend crying.  Crying seemed...

We laid him in a box decorated with blue skies and sunflowers in a church filled with huge stands of sunflowers.  After that day, friends of ours, and of Nico’s, gave us sunflower gifts to remember him by.  They still do.  Sunflowers have become a kind of shorthand reference not just for remembering my son Nico, but also for the lives of so many others.  Lives which blazed out, filling the world with colour, hope and love.  Lives that were then cut short, when they didn’t need to be.  Lives which are not forgotten. Sunflowers were never my favourite flower.  I can remember enjoying the sight of huge fields of sunflowers in the warm evening sun in Spain but I was not...

I’m so not a poet. Writing a poem for me is one of those occasional, when the feeling takes me, kind of things.  I first wrote of version of this one in 2014 but since then I’ve re-written it.  I realise poems are not my usual style of blog, but after all, poems are just words with a different rhythm.   I dedicate this poem to every parent who has ever sat in a meeting with Social Services, or with the Local Authority or an NHS Trust, a Supported Living, Care or Residential Home or any other official body who pretended to be listening to them, but in reality, simply wasn’t hearing them at all.  I’d also like to dedicate it to...

I’ve never been much of a “joiner”. I joined yoga for single class, ditto for Zumba.  I was a Guide for 2 weeks and liked the uniform which was paid for the day I left.  I’ve joined several gyms I’ve never been to and clubs I can barely remember and by now you’re getting the idea.  I’m rubbish at joining any kind of club. But there are some clubs that you join whether you want to or not.  Some of them are clubs that no-one wants to join, but you find you’ve joined them anyway. When Nico was diagnosed I joined a club I never knew existed.  I joined the club of “parents of disabled children” which is a large, well established...