Things keep changing and feelings swinging constantly. One time I can be proud of where I am and how I’m doing, the next, I’m scared and anxious and not sure of anything. I was so pleased to win the university challenge trophy and placed it facing your ashes so that you could share it and know you helped me achieve it. I struggle like mad, I seem to get a brief lull in the waves and then they crash up out of nowhere and I keep thinking how I’m supposed to get through this. I miss you and think about you every day, I need to talk to you but I want you to answer me. I’m scared I’m not good, that I don’t deserve to achieve the things I want, that I’m a narcissist, that I’m fooling myself and everybody else and I want you to tell me the truth, I want to know how to keep fighting and if it or I am worth it. I’m scared again mum. I want to be a strong 45 year old woman who is in control and not keep needing help or reassurance. I need b12 injections like dad had to have recently. I hope it helps and I hope I storm through my last year of uni like a Duracell bunny. I should write my thoughts to you more often but I think of you so much anyway and try to feel your presence to bring me peace. I look forward to being with you again so much but I want to live first in a way that will make you happy. I love you so much.

I’m trying to sit back and just go with everything now. I am sorry, , I think you know I’ll be ok. I miss you but hoping time doesn’t exist for you, that should be part of heaven, you don’t leave us and then we are with you. We all love you so much. Xxx

A year on and I can picture you at peace vividly right after you left us. I wish I knew the regrets I’d have. You were still burning hot when we left you even though we had been cleaning the blood off your face and neck and making you “comfortable” without that stupid mask you hated. Your body temperature was still blazing and I now wish I’d stayed with you longer, at least until you began to cool. I miss your peaceful face, how the years and pain had fallen away and left you pretty and relaxed. I didn’t really recognise you in the chapel of rest and that’s why I wish I’d stayed with you longer in the hospital. I had my mum back, you weren’t in there but you were still who I recognised and while looking at you left that gulf of grief, it took away my anxiety of the previous 26 hours… which have strangely been twisting my stomach since the day before yesterday. Not today though, today I wake and as I did a year ago, I try to force myself to sleep again because I don’t want to think and face what’s happened. My body feels heavy and empty and I just feel defeated. I know it won’t last but it shocks me how all of those feelings from a year ago have replicated themselves within once again. The one feeling that fills me more than anything aside from the obvious love for my mum, is pride. It blows me away every day, the woman you were, the mother you were, your strength and love for your family and your resilience to overcome all of the bad things in order to be that lioness figure for us. I wish I was half the mum that you were. I’m just glad I’m becoming the woman you were… better late than never.