And imagine acquiring a new language and only learning the words to describe a wonderful world, refusing to know the words for a bleak one and in doing so linguistically shaping the world that you...

Our mind is who we are; it’s where we feel and think and believe. It’s where we have love and hate and faith and passion.’ I was getting a little embarrassed by your earnestness but...

My job isn’t to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in...

When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry...

A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down.

But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children’s lives.

Usually time alters and affects everything, but when someone you love dies time cannot change that, no amount of time will ever change that, so time stops having any meaning.

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

Grief is love turned into an eternal missing

But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…

I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.

Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels….

However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…

When someone dies they can be any age you remember can’t they ‘ she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued ‘You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were...

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

But, astonishingly, I’m not broken. I’m not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different...

I remembered back to leo’s burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said ‘in sure and certain hope of the...

It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too – yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at...

I don’t believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit,...

For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I’ve since found out it’s common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition...

The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren’t going to earn a living? I know the answer…I worried that the paint was so thickly...

…grief is loved turned into an eternal missing. …It can’t be contained in hours or days or minutes.

Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let’s strip it down to what matters. Let’s have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest...

I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about...

Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage. . .