Next week it will be a decade since my first marriage ended. Love after love was high on my list of priorities in those early days, ways to navigate the dark arduous moments of being left to care for my daughter. A decade is a long time to be pondering those wounds, the wounds that […]
April contacted me earlier this month. A reader of this blog since late last year and a person who wanted to share her story. Given this is a collaborative space, where there is power to hear more than one perspective, I invited her to share her thoughts. Her story, of her and her Dad. Welcome […]
August 8 is Dying to know day – whilst I work as a missing persons researcher, the ambiguity of that loss means that we talk very little about the concept of a ‘good’ death because so much remains unknown. Those conversations, the ones where peoples rights are respected, where the journey is as soft and […]
How soon is too soon when we share the stories of victims of a crime? I just returned from two weeks at the beach with my kids. I read 6 books in that time, almost more than I read for pleasure in the whole of 2014. They were perfect holiday reads, stories with tidy conclusions, […]
For a person that exists (for most of my work hours) in the realms of here and gone the idea of losing anyone around me creates fear-inducing, panic-ridden hysteria. I practice gratitude each day in the hugs I steal from my kids, in making sure I stop what Im doing and give my husband a big […]
Grief in online communities – What do you do when you lose a friend you’ve never met? It’s odd how we socially construct ways to live our lives. The invisible to-do or how-to lists that allow the word ‘should’ to creep into our psyche. When I go and talk or teach groups of people about ideas of […]
I was wrestling with a blog post last night. I had crafted it perfectly while reading in the bath and then when I sat down to type it, it was gone. Here and gone. I’ve written this phrase 100 million times in the last 4 years. Its by a woman I look up to – […]
There is a disconnect when you write the stories. That you have to ask to hear them in order to write them. Sometimes in the telling, the sadness bubbles back up to the surface for those who open up and tell. I get that for the most part my layered understanding about the telling of what […]
I saw the tailend of this segment this morning. In between trying to wake up with my second cup of coffee and realising that the new school tights for my girl were navy instead of black. It was one of those mornings. The segment asked whether or not it was too soon to put pen […]