Where I am tracing back a habit to its origins, to find it was an act of self-loathing born from disastrous life and a traumatic relationship.
2026 is the year of farewells. What I did not expect was that losing things, the medication, the nicotine, the woman who made me who I am, would force me to finally look at what was left standing.
He left twenty thousand pounds of debt and a hollow ground beneath my feet.
I traced my bloodline all the way back, through my mother, my grandmother, and every woman before them who was handed a child and no tools to raise one. I carry them all. I have decided I will be the last in the line. Nobody comes after me.
When therapy strips away every story you built to survive, you are left standing over the body of your former self, and the hardest part is not the grief. It is the recognition.
Where I speak about a childhood guilt across decades, for a rottweiler named Rocco who spent eleven years in a garden, seven winters curled against a door he was never allowed through, and a lifetime without the family he loved.
Where I realise that the veil between worlds is thinner than we think, and the dead still find ways to keep in contact.
Where I trace the origins of my oldest wounds, back to the child who was asked to carry what no child should, and forward to the adult still learning to set it down.
I cross a continent in a single day to say goodbye , only to find, standing before the open coffin, that grief does not always arrive when it is expected, and that love needs no performance to be real.
In the days following my grandmother's passing, I discover that love, stubbornly, refuses to end where life does.
In the aftermath of Nan's passing, I discovered an unexpected peace, and the presence of a spirit who had guided me in life, and would continue to do so beyond the veil of death.
"We still have lots of things to do together, and we had no time for everything we needed to do."
"I told her it is all right to be weak, just this once — to let the hands that held us all together finally rest."
My letter to the Universe, written in the space between grief and grace, as my grandmother lies in a hospice far across Europe, still breathing, but already halfway home.
On the return of old demons, the slow loss of the woman who saved me, and the fierce refusal to surrender the peace I fought so hard to find.
On the quiet torment of anticipatory grief, and the mercy we dare not speak aloud
A reflection on grief, resilience, and the quiet courage of moving forward
About my last conversation with my Nan, before her surgery
A granddaughter's meditation on love, loss, and the slow unravelling of the woman who held her world together
My grandmother with dementia suffers for years with dismissed complaints until a catastrophic fall reveals terminal cancer that should have been caught long ago.
About discussion's of my first therapy session and my first real journal entry about what we discovered
Writing up life-changing questions before my first therapy session