Category: Nico

When I was 17 I met the man I thought I’d spend my life with.  When I was 17 that man died.  For many years I pushed my grief into a box and shut the lid.  I’ve had close friends who never knew about it and I’d been with my current partner for over 10 years when I told him some, but not all, about it.  It happened decades ago, but this will be the first time I’ve written about it. It was only when I began to write about grief and to talk with other bereaved people, I found myself thinking about that part of my life again. At the time it wasn’t treated as a bereavement, so I struggled to...

There was a time in my life when New Year’s Eve was a very big deal.  Choosing your outfit and getting ready for what was potentially the biggest night of the year.  I have had some great ones.  Also had some that were not so great.  Sometimes I think the most memorable ones were the not-so-great ones, like the New Year’s Eve party which the host had massively catered and decorated for, but I was the only guest who turned up (or as she said to me “I’ve spent days and days preparing for this and you’re the only one who shows up!  I don’t even like you!”) This New Year’s Eve was probably the most non-event of a NYE I’ve been...

For most people complex grief is an unknown or misunderstood form of grieving.  Although it’s generally referred so as “Complex Grief” or “Persistent Complex Grief”, I like to describe it as “Complicated Grief” as I feel this explains better what’s it is.  Yes, it is grief, but it is grief with additional complications. Grief on its own is bad enough, but when the grief is for the loss of a vulnerable loved one who depended on you to ensure they were loved, safe, healthy and happy in this world, then it’s almost inevitable that this will lead to complicated grief.  If you’re dealing with someone deliberately taking your loved one’s life, or they were unequivocally instrumental in their death, that too may...

“We called him Mr Christmas because he loved it so” was the opening line to a blog I tried to write in December 2014.  After I’d written this, I could write no more and the blog was never finished.  I tried to finish it in 2015 and again in 2016 but failed both years.  It was too hard to write, especially at that time of year, before Christmas, when it felt as if I was walking along a tiny path, with black grief just waiting for me if I faltered or fell to either side.  But this year, I’m going to honour Mr Christmas and I’m going to finish the blog.  This Christmas will be our 8th without Nico and this year...

At work I’ve been writing for an A-Z for families.  When I got to “I is for Inquest” I found it difficult to create a few simple sentences, mainly because I believe the inquest and the coronial system is outdated and unfit for purpose.  The Coroners Society says that although the office has been in place for eight hundred years, it’s survived for that long because it is constantly evolving.  I think it’s time for another evolution. Currently an inquest is presided over by the coroner for the county the person died in.  The coroner is presiding over an inquest which has only one purpose – to decide where, when, why and how the person died. The role of the inquest is...

I’ve having some vivid dreams at the moment. Last Sunday I dreamt I was pushing open the heavy door to a train station, when coming through the door the other way was someone I used to know.  As we passed each other, I said to her “it’s really all about resilience you know.  That’s the key to it all”.  Then I woke up. Since then I’ve been thinking about resilience a lot. Events of the last few days have caused me to think about resilience even more.   I know the word resilience is getting bandied about more at the moment because of the pandemic but for many of us, it’s something we’ve been living with for years. In the last few days...

A woman approached me at a local event 3 years after Nico died.  She was someone who had pointedly avoided me immediately after Nico died, crossing the road and concentrating on the contents of her bag with such intensity I thought she’d spotted a winning lottery ticket in there.  She may have been planning to give me some kind of explanation and apology but I’ll never know as she actually said was: “I didn’t speak to you when Nico died because I didn’t know what to say”.  Having delivered this line, she looked so smug and pleased with herself, so “well, that box is ticked” and all very like “I’ve just donated to Children in Need”, that I just wasn’t able to...

When I was a child my mother told me the mark of maturity is understanding when, how and why you need to say sorry.   She said it was important to know when you were wrong and that you should never be afraid to be wrong, so long as you also weren’t afraid to admit it.   She said sorry was important. She believed a true apology took three steps.  Step one was to admit to the person involved that you were wrong.  Step two was to actually apologise – but she said the apology only worked if you really understood why you were apologising and what you were apologising for.  The third step was to offer to make amends in a real and...

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...