Author: Oana

No next stage…

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November should have been such a happy month in our household! It is Emma’s birthday and she will be turning 5, which means it is time for me to start looking for deals on booster car seats((I found a good range on Tesco Direct). Today, Georgie should have been nine months too. At five, Emma gets to move into a “big girl” car seat, which she has been looking forward to forever! At nine months Georgie would have progressed in to his toddler car seat, the group 1, front facing, easier to make eye contact with mummy one. I have been pretty good at avoiding things that make my heart sore. I have found myself avoiding baby clothing websites and nappy aisles as soon as he passed away. But the car seat remains a landmark in my mind, seared in my memory. Emma gets to move on, as any child should naturally do. She has grown so fast over the summer and fits well into 5 to 6 year old clothes and shoes. Georgie should …

31 Days of Grief: Explorative Gratitude

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Where am I in my grieving journey and how do I practice gratitude each day? I am at the beginning, this is all I know. I do feel at times I am in totally uncharted territory. Grief is a deeply personal journey in which you have to allow yourself to go down deep into your emotions in order to find your way out. I do have days when I think avoiding pain would be easier. But then I also know that I am only cheating myself. Pain is there and avoiding it will only make the outburst more violent, as pain was not meant to be held in. Pain was not meant to be. Full stop. So I try and grieve a bit each day. Release those pent up emotions as they surge. Talk about them. Cry about my loss. Write a blog post. Shout at God. It feels almost like looking for the pain in your heart, pulling it out from where it is hiding, the dark corners in which it is most comfortable, …

31 Days of Grief: Community vs. Retreat

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I am running behind with this writing challenge so I will most likely write in clusters of two from now on, especially since we will be travelling to Greece this weekend and will be away the whole Halloween week. Last week we remembered, as a community of bereaved parents, our lost children. It was a bitter sweet evening, seeing the Internet light up with candles and the realisation that so many beloved souls are away, waiting for us in Heaven. We also took Saturday evening to spend with local bereaved families, get to know them and their surviving children and remember together our babies, gone too soon. I am so grateful for this community to which we were only introduced this September and I am so thankful that we do not have to do this journey alone. The pain of losing a child is terrible but carrying the burden alone is equally painful. I am also grateful for the fact that Emma has found friends among the children present there and she now understands that …

31 Days of Grief: Dark/Light

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This post was supposed to be about the dark and the positive sides of the grieving process. But I have decided to write instead about the negative people that come into your life during your grieving process, how you identify them, how you mute and eventually remove them from your life, if the negativity becomes unbearable. As you might know, if you have been following my blog for a while, last week I got quite a nasty email from a relative telling me how to grieve, trying to make me feel guilty about the way I choose to remember “my second born” and how my grieving, in all its mess and intensity, is affecting my family. I decided to blog about it in the hope that it will be a lesson, first for the person in case and then, for relatives who are genuinely trying to help a grieving parent but don’t know what are the wrong or the right things to be said or done in such a sensitive situation. I hoped this episode …