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So it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Many things have happened in the years I haven’t blogged. Yeah, years. April 2018 was my last post and it was just music. I didn’t have words, you see. I stopped doing a lot of things, for a number of reasons and blogging was one of them. So was writing. Writing has been an integral part of my life for so long that I have wanted to get back to it as part of the healing process, but my notebooks haven’t cut it lately. They’ve turned into commonplace books – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just not what I needed. So while I was listening to a podcast on the plane this weekend I learned about Helen Bailey. She was the author of the children’s series Electra Brown and when her husband of 15 years died suddenly, she started a blog to work through her grief. And I remembered this little space of the internet. I thought: I have a blog that I have been neglecting for ages. It used to fill a gap for me somehow, perhaps it can again! And so here I am.

Talking about pain and grief is not easy but it’s something we have all experienced in one form or another. In light of that it’s amazing just how uncomfortable we are talking about it. How uncomfortable it is for us to comfort or be confronted with someone else’s pain. I feel like we are missing some fundamental framework to deal with some of the most basic and universal things in life: grief and loss, relationships, rites of passage and even just growing up. So many people feel adrift, unmoored or directionless it’s a wonder any of us get anywhere at all.

We’ve all lost someone close to us. At least, by the time you hit your 40’s you have. It changes so many things about your life – and nothing at the same time. I mean your life continues as it has and that seems absurd in the face of the fact that person is no longer in it. Absurd and cruel. And loss isn’t just of people you know, it’s of people you could have known. Like a stillborn child, or a miscarried child. You’re not just losing the person, you’re losing all the potential of the days unlived. At least with an adult you have memories to hold onto. With babies, you never get to meet the people they would have been and that somehow feels more tragic, more absurd than anything else.

Anyway, I’m back. I have baggage. Stick around if you like, maybe something I say will help you. Maybe it won’t. We’re all stuck on this crazy ball of dirt and air and water together, aren’t we?