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Celebrating Mother’s Day after loss
For my first Mother’s Day I was blissfully in the ‘keeping it a secret’ of my second pregnancy. My husband and I had decided to enjoy the time and we would tell people in a few more weeks, we had our 12 week scan and all was looking well, which to us was such a…
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Decluttering my way through grief
I’ve found an interesting relationship to ‘things’ since my daughter died. On one hand I kept every envelope that related to her in some way and on the other found myself letting go of possessions that I’d previously struggled to get rid of for years. On the surface I think I’m organised and things are…
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A year on from finding out ‘why’
An appointment to go through your daughter’s post mortem results isn’t something I had on my 2024 bingo card when finding out I was pregnant only a year earlier. It ended up being a date I anticipated for months after she passed away with no clear explanation. We ended up only having a few days…
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Creating a Sands Ribbon Display for Baby Loss Awareness Week 2024
I saw an email about setting up a Sands Ribbon Display and wondered if that would be something I could do. I liked the idea of the displays and thought the photos I’d seen were beautiful. There wasn’t a ribbon display local to me so I thought I’d keep it on my mind and see…
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A lifetime of lip balm
One of the items I made sure to have in my hospital bag with Astrid was a lip balm. I’m not far from one at the best of times and I’d heard in my antenatal prep that the rooms are kept a touch warmer than most would like, to keep things comfortable for the babies,…
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Getting my ears pierced (again) at 30
A year ago I got my ears pierced, again. It was a really cathartic thing to do in the very early months of grieving and I was thinking about it recently, realising it had been a year. Before I was pregnant, I had a cosmetic surgery on my earlobes after having stretched them as a…
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Rebuilding
There is a building site near where I live and I realised recently it’s nearly finished. It’s been being used as a site for materials years and I really noticed it in the early months I was grieving. As I ventured out of the safety of home, I found that I noticed as parts out…
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Why I’ve banned the word ‘should’
I was talking with a friend recently about how I don’t engage with thinking along the lines of ‘my daughter should be 1 year old’ or ‘we wouldn’t be doing this if she hadn’t died’. In the very early days sure, the word and thought popped into mind and many people around me said it…
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A year of Honeysuckle postcards
Last November we took a rainy drive over to Liverpool and attended our first Honeysuckle support group. I never imagined myself sitting around a table in a community centre with perfect strangers introducing myself and telling our sweet girl’s story through tears, but there we were. One year on and I’m reflecting on the impact…
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A birthday to remember
I decided to create family memory boxes for Astrid’s first birthday. I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it popped into my mind one day that I’d like to give some of Astrid’s family a little gift from her and it went from there. We had been so ready to share our girl…