We lost our daughter Evie on 11th January 2018 to a highly aggressive brain tumour. In the months that followed her death, I started writing short pieces that were posted on the Facebook page of the Compassionate Friends, a charity that supports parents who have lost one or more children. I found the act of writing incredibly helpful, cathartic. It de-stressed me in a way that nothing else could. After a while I started to write a book on what it was like to be a bereaved parent; a world that no-one else could possibly understand. The way I wrote was honest, sometimes brutally so, and reached a point where I decided that a FB page wasn’t the best place for it to reach its intended audiences.
This blog was born out of that thought process. The content will focus on life living without Evie, its ups and downs and the rage that I feel for much of the time. It will meander about in it’s subject matter. None of the content is particularly researched, but it is highly personal. You may agree with it, you may not.
I’m doing it primarily for me. It’s a way to unload the thoughts from my head in a format where I can be truly honest all of the time. If these thoughts and writings help other bereaved parents then that is great. Likewise, I am hoping that it will offer a short insight into our lives for the rest of the world that have no concept of the staggering pain that we feel every day. If you know someone that has lost a child, perhaps now you’ll understand a little better why they act the way they do?
So many people out there expect you to ‘move on’ after your child’s death. can tell you now, you never ever ‘move on’. The pain never goes away, you never forget. Why should you? Your child was the very centre of your universe, so why would you want to forget them or move on? The biggest problem that we face is that the death of a child is so staggeringly different from the death of anyone else, that unless you have experienced it, you don’t have the faintest idea what it feels like.