bereavement
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Anniversaries & Birthdays
Anniversaries are really sneaky. Birthdays too, but for me less so as I’ve never been a big birthday person. For my 40th I was 9 months pregnant. Nathan was due the next day, but decided to wait another two weeks before making an appearance. As if that wasn’t enough, we chose that day to move… Continue reading
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Time to Talk
Talking about mental health at work isn’t enough to remove the stigma surrounding suicide. The problem is, I don’t know what is. I’m not that big on social media. TikTok is beyond me (I plan to keep it that way), and I deleted Twitter (I still can’t bring myself to call it X) as soon… Continue reading
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Mum
Almost exactly a year and a half after J’s suicide, I was faced with the unexpected loss of my mother. Mum had caught Covid the previous year. While I don’t believe that caused her death, I wonder if it lowered her immune system enough to allow something dormant to take hold. We had been to… Continue reading
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Telling the kids
How do you tell your kids that their step-dad died by suicide? I have always tried to be as honest as possible with my two sons when they’ve asked me questions. Even the awkward ones. A few years ago on the school run, Dylan (then eight) asked me how babies were made. Completely unprepared, I… Continue reading
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The first few months
The first few months after losing J to suicide were, unsurprisingly, the hardest. During that time, I wrote to him every single day. Writing to J made me feel closer to him and gave me somewhere to offload what was happening, in a way that I couldn’t do anywhere else. I recently listened to a… Continue reading
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Seventeen minutes
Warning: This post contains the details of J’s suicide. The time it took for my life to change beyond recognition was a measly seventeen minutes. The amount of time it might take me to run three miles very slowly, or listen to a short podcast, or make chips in the air fryer and eat a… Continue reading
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The backstory
I lost my partner J to suicide in April 2022. J and I met at a time when I thought I was going to be single for a long while. Having recently split up with the kids’ dad C, I had only been alone for five months. It was as amicable a split as you… Continue reading