So how do I, Emma, now carry on?
April 25, 2024 11 Commentswritten for Julia’s funeral on 15th July 2019, posted on 18th July I have had four too-close deaths in the past few years. My dear friend Don, a best male friend of 30 years who died in September 2015 My youngest brother Edward, who died in January 2016. His daughters Isabelle & Nina are here […]
Read MoreFearful, Fear-full, Full of Fear
April 25, 2024 4 Commentswritten on 20 June 2019, posted on 17 July Image Courtesy of Sarah Treanor www.streanor.com I haven’t written for what feels like ages. I’ve missed it. And that’s because there are two enormous pieces of my life – even three – that I feel are taboo – certainly in terms of the internet and my […]
Read MoreAn Exploration of Being Nice and Kind
April 25, 2024 No CommentsWriting Prompt from Megan Devine on 28 May 2019 Artwork by Sarah Treanor (streanor.com) We don’t tear into people when they say insensitive things. We don’t point out how unhelpful or mean something is, even when it’s flat-out rude. Why? Because we’re being “nice.” If you point out that “everything happens for a reason” is […]
Read MoreFête de Granny May
April 25, 2024 3 Comments1st May 2019 In my family (as in, among the five-now-four siblings), I like to think of myself as the “reminder of important dates”. The Purveyor of Dates. For decades I have reminded one or other sibling that it is yet another sibling’s birthday coming up, or mum’s or dad’s, or even, a tad obnoxiously, […]
Read MoreA tiny, yet perceptible, shift
April 25, 2024 2 CommentsImage courtesy of Sarah Treanor @ streanor.com 25 April 2019 Yesterday I had a lunch date with a friend. Which might sound like nothing much. But it was something to me. And to her too, I think. She’s been quite persistent in asking and asking again and then asking yet again. For the last longest […]
Read MoreOn Being French for 24 Hours
April 25, 2024 No Comments16th April 2019 So yesterday was another (yes – yet another) landmark day for me in that I officially became French. A process that has taken almost three years, encompassing my most challenging times. A process that began the day we had been back in France for five years, after moving back into our village […]
Read MoreYet Another Trigger Date and How I Have been Kind to Myself
April 25, 2024 2 Comments13th April 2019 On the 13th April 1996, Mike and I got married. On the 13th April 2017, we held Mike’s funeral, five days after he died. It was such an impossibly hard day. It was our 21st wedding anniversary (what should have been). And yet it became the day we held your ceremony and […]
Read MoreYour Last Day
April 25, 2024 6 CommentsFeatured Image “Letting Go” by Sarah Treanor (streanor.com) 8th April 2019 – originally written on 13th April 2018 I had broached the subject with you early on about not staying overnight at the hospice. I had felt torn – wanting to be there for you, yet knowing we had three kids who needed me at […]
Read MoreA Tsunami of Dates
April 25, 2024 No Comments31 March 2019 I am in my “Tsunami of Dates”. “The” Dates. The numbers in the calendar that are no longer meaningless, no longer innocent, no longer equal to all the others, but that instead are hard. Damned hard. Layered, weighed down with meaning and heavy sighs. There are Mike’s dates, and there are my […]
Read MoreNothing is Wasted – or – It’s Not About the Car
April 25, 2024 3 Comments25 March 2019 “These things I know: How the living go on living and how the dead go on living with them so that in a forest even a dead tree casts a shadow and the leaves fall one by one and the branches break in the wind and the bark peels off slowly and […]
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