Just Carry On Breathing

At every point in this journey through grief I face loss. Louise's death represented not the end of the process but the beginning. The b...

Early on in this journey I came to the conclusion that the overwhelming experience of bereavement wasn't loss, despair, guilt or anger b...

At just before 5pm yesterday I could have been seen jumping about in uncoordinated fashion rather like an overexcited toddler, arms flailing...

This blog now amounts to something like 43 posts and thousands of words on grief and loss. I am honoured and humbled when people thank me fo...

I had to complete a staff survey at work this week.  There were the usual questions on satisfaction with pay and rewards and understanding o...

Anniversaries take on a particular emotional significance for the newly bereaved, even half anniversaries. Six months ago yesterday Louise t...

Louise was the least materialistic person that I've ever known. She wasn't particularly interested in jewellery, had a relatively mo...

One wouldn't expect to find any beauty in grief. It can appear an unrelentingly dark place; the loneliness and isolation, the shock, the...

Louise took her life five months ago. I know this because the calendar tells me so but such has been the distortion in my subsequent percept...

I have come to dread people asking me how I am. I don't know how to respond, to come even remotely close to articulating in a few passi...

Bereavement is almost always accompanied by a sense of responsibility and guilt on the part of those left behind. The relatives of people w...

Its very easy, and in many senses comfortable and rewarding, to assume the role of victim that society wants to assign to me. I receive symp...

Death brings with it a succession of intensely painful ceremonies and events which have to be endured before we are finally left alone to gr...

Grief has an uncanny way of catching out the unwary or the overconfident. I've astonished myself at how well I've been coping in rec...

I've decided that I need to take the sympathy cards  down . They started arriving within 24 hours of Louise's death in the darkness ...

Its times like tonight when I miss Louise the most. Of course I miss her all the time. I feel constantly incomplete, almost physically so, a...

Whenever I am asked to identify my faith for official purposes I always hesitate over  the box labelled 'Agnostic' before eventually...

'Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.' I never swear. Ever. Well, hardly ever. I swear so infrequently that I feel incredibly self ...

I've been doing well this week. Fortified by numbness and that familiar sense of incomprehension and disbelief, I have at times come clo...

As we go through life we all inevitably find ourselves marked by our experiences. We collect and carry our scars, whether they be of disappo...