I try to only post when something is particularly touching; or when I can offer some hope from the other side of this mountain she and her family are climbing & descending day after day. Maybe….they are just too overwhelmed to post. Or…they may just really be creeps! YA never really know. Love & light to you both for your losses; Talula ( a surviver of the dark through sheer persistence.)

But yeah, the last paragraph that appears in the comment was in regard to “so called friends” and not about the uncle.

Like your uncle (no matter in which paragraph he appeared), we lose Owen over and over, at his various ages. Each loss has its own unique poignancy, and devastation. All of us lived those times with our kids, so we lose them in each day we can recall. A constant torture.

Alas, we remember them in each day’s joy, as well. I’m thankful for the joy. There was a lot of it, and I’ll never forget Owen’s smile. I hope the same for your family members in your many losses – remember the smiles. I believe they are all smiling still. Maybe even more often, maybe even more brightly.

Good evening, Kitty.

I think the hardest thing after a death is the realization of who really does not care about me. Those “close friends” who could have easily sent me an email during the holiday season asking how the fuck I was doing, but instead asked for things from me.

I hope I’m not repeating myself, I might have said this here before, but my husband’s uncle told me (a year after losing his son) how he grieved the loss of his son, how he grieved the 17 year old he lost (car accident), then he grieved the 12 year old he was, the 5 year-old, the toddler, all the different ages his son had been. This post reminded me of that.

Of course, I can’t mention this on my own blog because I have an unbelievable amount of lurkers. People who read and never comment. I don’t like making enemies so I keep that crap to myself. Until now. I feel more comfortable talking about it here. Funny.

I heard it playing as I walked into a shop in Horsham last summer, and I found myself compelled to walk over and ask the assistants what it was. I bought the album (which is great) ten minutes later.

The song is mournful and disillusioned, although still I think that it hints at a different and less painful path which might perhaps have been taken. So despite its almost bleak elements of inevitability and regret, I think it does carry a faintly optimistic message forwards – suggesting that with the lesson of forbearance and self-awareness learned, there is still a kind of hope remaining for the future.

Following my discovery of this song last year, and for a month or two, I considered ‘How to Save a Life’ as a title for my book. I liked it exactly because it does have a more upbeat, and constructively redemptive feel than ‘The Price of Love,’ which I sometimes find too overpoweringly sentimental and negatively fatalistic. Eventually I was advised against, perhaps on the grounds that the original title was more transparently self-explanatory. Perhaps I’ll keep it for a chapter heading, nevertheless.

What this song title reminds me of now is that self-pity (whilst essential and compulsory) finally is too bounding a quality adequately to frame the learnings which come with this experience.

Because, more than anything, it’s optimism which I carry with me now. Faith in the strength of the human spirit, primarily in Jenny but later on and to a lesser degree in myself. I think you’re well on the way to the same kind of revelation, too – that the extreme rigours of this journey are exactly the reasons that it does lead to an invulnerable kind of strength.

Spirits up.