This Hole In My Heart, Is In The Shape Of You

On 10.10.05 I was woken in the small hours of the morning by a phone call from my mum. It was a call I’d been both expecting and dreading. It was the phone call to tell me that my nan would not wake up again.

My wonderful nan had married my granddad toward the end of World War 2 and they’d had over fifty years of marriage before his passing in February 2004. They had four children, a boy and three girls. They’d lived in the same house in Wallington since their youngest daughter, my mum, was a small girl. And it was in that same house that nan fell asleep in her bedroom never to wake up again following a few short weeks of illness following diagnosis.

It was physically painful to pick up the phone and hear my tearful mum tell me that it had happened. Like a great weight had slammed into my chest. I dressed, drove to her house and sat holding her hand in her bedroom and watched the sun come up through the bedroom window. I cried until my throat hurt and my eyes were swollen and I could barely breathe.

I still think of her often. She never saw Daddy P and I get married, or my brother and his wife, she never met my son, or my brother’s daughter. If love alone could have kept her with us she’d have lived forever.

If you need support following the death of a loved one contact Cruse Bereavement Care