A wonderful comment came from Rae to the post Happy Halloween about a feeling which I have had on a couple of occasions.  The feeling is that suddenly you forget that they have passed away, that you feel their presence, that you suddenly see them or sense them in the house.
I remember after about 3 months getting so mad that he wasn’t replying or coming through to the lounge when I needed some help to move the television! I had no idea that he had died, to me at that moment he was alive and even annoying (!) as he …read more

It is 4 years since the London bombings, a day which I will never forget as two of my friends were in the tragedy. One lived with severe injuries and one died on the bus bomb. My friend who died was a new mum, and her family was devastated. Her wonderful child will never know her mum – tragic.
The worst part was that her body was never found, I remember taking the call to say that they couldn’t say she had died – as no body – just that she was not alive.
A memorial has opened today and it is …read more

The comments to Don’t Forget the Good Times really touched my heart. Anniversaries are tough and I thought I would share how I cope…as I said in my comment to the blog post
“Pain makes me realise my heart is still alive, it is still feeling….pain means that the love is still alive.”
So often during bereavement you can feel numb, you can feel, well actually not feel anything. It was my Nana who taught me something about heartache. She said “Heartache takes away the numbness. Heartache means that your heart is alive and still capable of loving. Heartache means that your …read more

Over the last 14 days I have had 6 phone calls to say friends or extended family members have died. 6! It has got to the point that I daren’t pick the phone up…just in case….
Once thing I realised about human nature is that on the first phone call I was very shocked and on each phone call thereafter the shock lessoned. Now please don’t read that as though I don’t care about the later deaths…that is far from the truth, I feel numb, so numb…..but somehow my heart locked itself away from further shock and pain. Somehow death had …read more

Over the weekend I got a call from a family friend who told me that her mother had just died. Lucy was one of the special people in this world and I blogged about the effect she had on my life over at The Engaging Brand – here is what I wrote almost 3 years ago
“While there, we visited one of our family friends…Lucy. Lucy is amazing – 93, immaculately dressed, lives 6 months a year by herself in a caravan on the cliffs at Whitby, and never, ever stops smiling. She loves life and is living proof that a …read more

Reuters published a poem written by US writer John Updike who died this week and I thought it was worth sharing with all the widows quest community
It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise – depths unplumbable!

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

‘I thought he died a while ago.’

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

Any widow or widower goes through that stage which I call the ‘if only’ stage. I wrote this ‘poem’ shortly after he died and I had added some more lines today, hope it helps – remember I am no poet it is just my scribblings about how I feel about grief and death
If only I had told you more often that I loved you
If only I had been more patient
If only I had done something, anything to prevent you becoming ill
If only I had worked less and been with you more
…If only as I sit here today I had less …read more

There is an ongoing conversation at the blog post Watching Someone Die, which made me think of final acts of love. If any of you have examples let me know – anna@b5media.com, and I will share with everyone. In my comment, I talked about how Dad seemed to wait until after my sister had left the room to die, so he didn’t leave her with the picture of him dying….I believe it was his final act of love for a daughter he knew was not emotionally strong enough to see that final breath.I think there were other acts of love, like..

 Saying he wanted …read more

Agatha Christie said
“I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find – at the age of fifty, say – that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about…It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
When we lose our spouse especially later in life, we can draw the conclusion that there is nothing left for us. Interestingly, my mum who was 78 this week has more hobbies and …read more

I urge you to read the comment that Jackie left to Grief Brings Loneliness but I am Never Alone, it touched my heart and I will never see a rainbow in the same light.
I so wish that I had received a sign that he is OK. The only emotion that I ever had was returning to the house on the night he died. I was driving and when I pulled into the house, I started to shiver. I felt a fear that was overpowering. It was like a bad ghost was inside the house, I couldn’t go in. I stood …read more