It’s been four and a half years since I lost my dear mum, shortly after my 20th birthday. She had been terminally ill for two years after breast cancer spreading as tumours in her brain, and she suffered so much - it was a truly awful, traumatising experience watching her deteriorate mentally and physically until she couldn’t move or speak. I was only 18/19 and there was just no way to describe the horror of it all. She was a beautiful, selfless, funny, caring and genuinely good person. She always wanted to wrap me and my sisters up in bubble wrap and protect us from the world. 

out of the whole broad myriad of emotional waves you go through grieving, one that really hits my gut is every time I remember her being unwell, and her knowing she was going to die. I know she is now at peace, but it kills me to think she would have spent so much time with her own thoughts, scared to die, scared to leave us, heart broken that she wouldn’t watch us grow up, scared she was cognitively decaying… I’m crying thinking about it. I get so distraught thinking how unfair it is that she had to experience that at 54 instead of living another three decades enjoying her life, which had already been tough. I wish I could go back and hug her just one more time to tell her everything would be okay. Sometimes I wish she had died of something sudden so she didn’t have to anticipate it. 

how do you deal with the immense feelings of sympathy and pain for your lost loved one? Most of my grief is missing her, but so much of it is the “it’s not fair she suffered like that”….