8 years ❤️

The first Monday after the Christmas holidays… I sometimes feel like my heart knows before my head realises, the back to work posts, the Christmas recaps… the New year starts, and the quiet realisation that on a Monday just like today, our lives changed… forever.

I know that eighteen plus eight equals twenty-six. I can do the math. But somehow, in my heart, it doesn’t add up. Eight years feels like it should be eighteen… or maybe even just two and it’s like I’ve said many times before, time in grief is strange. It doesn’t move in straight lines. It stretches and collapses all at once, and it’s so hard to put into context. For me, the way I understand these eight years is through the girls. Eight years means that Grace is now nine and a half, and Beth is eight and a half. It means they’re no longer babies. They’re school girls, in Primary Four and Primary Five, growing into these incredible little people and the reality of 8 years is he never got the chance to see them become.

Eight years also means that I am no longer thirty. I am thirty-eight. Life has kept moving, even when my heart sometimes wished it wouldn’t, And that’s the part that’s hard to hold: the years keep stacking up, but the love, the missing…they stay the same, even when so much else changes and grows.

And somehow, eight also means that we’ve had eight years to learn how to live with grief, to learn how to live without him. To learn that love doesn’t disappear just because life moves forward. Eight years to learn that joy and grief can sit side by side in the same heart, on the same day, sometimes even in the same breath. Eight years to learn that we are allowed to laugh again, to hope again, to build again… and that we still deserve all of that.

At the start of this journey into widowhood, I used to write about how desperately I wanted time to fast-forward. I wanted a button I could press that would skip us ahead, past the raw pain, past the heaviness, past the days that felt impossible to survive. I thought that if I could just get further away from the day everything changed, maybe it would hurt less. In those early days, my motive in grief was unselfish. My thoughts were always outward. I remember thinking, If I can just be okay, then maybe he can rest easier. If I can hold everything together, the girls will be happier. If I can smile, function, show strength, then somehow this might all feel a little less heavy for everyone else.

I still remember walking into my very first therapy session and saying, “I don’t need to be happy… I just want my girls to be happy. If I can raise them well, and make him proud, that’ll be enough.” Back then, survival was the goal, survival for them, strength for them, purpose for them.

But one of the unexpected graces of these eight years is that they’ve allowed me to grow a little more selfish, in the healthiest, most necessary ways. Over time, I’ve learned that I am allowed to want happiness for myself too. I’m allowed to laugh again. I’m allowed to enjoy life, dream again, build again, live again. Not instead of grieving, not instead of loving him, but alongside it. And that has been one of the biggest shifts of all: realising that choosing joy isn’t a betrayal, it’s a testament to the love that created it. And how contradictory of me now, that eight years on, I find myself wishing I had a button to rewind. To go back to those early days I once wanted to escape. To hold those moments. To sit in the chaos of love and loss with my tiny girls, to feel their baby hands, hear their little voices, and be in the moments that I didn’t realise I would one day ache to relive.

I think that’s one of the quiet lessons grief teaches, life doesn’t only exist “after” the pain. There is life, meaning, softness, and even beauty inside it too. And maybe that’s why it matters so much to learn how to live with grief rather than outrun it, there is an importance in accepting it, carrying it, and still allowing ourselves to be present in the now. Because these are the moments we will one day look back on too. And if grief has taught me anything, it’s that even in the hardest seasons, there is still something worth holding, noticing, loving, and living for.

Somewhere along the way, writing a blog post became my way of marking each anniversary. Each year, I would sit down, pour out my heart, and use these words to capture where we were and where life seemed to be heading. Recently, I went back and read them all, each one a snapshot of a different season of grief, survival, and love. They felt like little time capsules of the girl I was, the mother I was becoming, and the journey we were walking. I read with tears streaming down my cheeks, lumps in my throat and at times I quietly closes the laptop unable to read anymore. Looking back to 2018, seeing myself as a 30-year-old widow with two tiny baby girls, both under a year and a half. I see a woman who was exhausted, heartbroken, and terrified of a future she never asked for. I remember long nights, endless tears, tiny hands depending on me when I didn’t even know how to hold myself up, and a life that felt like it had shattered into pieces I didn’t know how to rebuild. That was my world then: me and my girls, grief and survival, love and heartbreak tied together. I tell you this only as a way to show you how changeable life and be and how now beyond all of that life in 2026 looks so very different.

Today I’m 38, living in a house that is loud and busy and bursting with life. I share my life with a partner who understands grief in a way most people never will, because he too has lost. Together we somehow became this beautifully blended family made up of heartbreak and hope: two children who lost their daddy, two children who lost their mummy, and then our precious little girl, born in October 2024, who arrived like a reminder that life can grow again out of places we once thought were forever broken.

This is not the life I imagined when I was 30. It is not the life I dreamed of when I first became a wife and a mum. But it is a life that has been rebuilt with love, courage, tears, learning, healing, patience, and so much grace. It is messy and loud and complicated and deeply human. Full of laughter again. Full of chaos and normality. Full of memories made, milestones reached, and love shared in ways I never thought possible in those early days of grief.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing worth doing ever comes easy, and that truth feels especially fitting when it comes to grief. If you’ve followed my journey over these years, you’ll know that getting here was not a smooth or simple road. There were days of darkness, doubt, breaking and rebuilding again and again. And yet, as I sit here now, in what finally feels like the light at the end of a very long tunnel, I can say with honesty and certainty that every step, every tear, every moment of holding on was worth it. Because grief, as painful as it is, is simply the price we pay for love. And I would never trade the love that built my life, shaped my heart, and gave me my girls, even if it means I carry this grief forever.

I have often read that grief feels like fear, and I have felt this so deeply. At first, it was the fear of what life now was, the fear of waking up into a reality I didn’t recognise or choose. And as time passed, that fear shifted into something else, the fear of what life could still bring. The unexpected twists. The turns you don’t see coming. The knowledge that life can change in an instant.

But what I’ve learned over time is that grief is not only fear, it is also courage. The courage to get up and keep going when everything in you wants to stay still. The courage to continue living, even when you know how much it can hurt. The courage to embrace life and all its possibilities again, trusting that not every twist and turn will be the disaster we imagine, that some of them might actually lead to something softer, richer, and more meaningful than we ever expected.

I sometimes think back to being in Primary Seven, when we were asked to write about what we wanted our lives to look like. A story about where we thought we were going and who we thought we would become. I often smile to myself when I think about that now, with a quiet, knowing chuckle. Because none of us ever write grief into those stories. None of us plan for loss. None of us imagine a life shaped so deeply by heartbreak.

And yet, if this is the life you are given, if grief becomes part of your story, I hope you discover the courage that comes with it too. The courage to rebuild. The courage to love again. The courage to create something beautiful from what was broken. Because while grief may never be the life we imagined, it can still become a life filled with meaning, depth, love, and moments of extraordinary beauty.

Love like starlight never dies ✨✨