Florrie shares this beautiful blog post as she remembers her mum, and urges everyone to hug their loved ones that little bit tighter.

There have been many times that I have wanted to post about my mum. On Mother’s Day, on her birthday, on my birthday, on any day I think about her, on the day she died. On these days I often find myself wanting to say something profound, meaningful, to shout about how beautiful she was. I always managed to persuade myself not to, to not draw attention to the horrible fact that she is gone.

My mum died two and a half years ago and every mother’s day that has come since, I have
wept. I have told myself to not go on Instagram, to avoid all of the posts about mums who are alive, who are ‘the best mum’ who are ‘the most important people’, who are dancing, who are singing, who are laughing, crying and often holding the people who follow me and I
follow them. But I never do, I never avoid any of it. People will say it’s some kind of torture,
maybe it is.

But I will always watch those stories and stare at the posts which celebrate my friends’
mother’s aliveness, and I will weep. I will weep for the video I cannot take, I will cry for the
time spent searching for the perfect picture to post and not being able to find one, because
there just aren’t enough. There aren’t enough pictures, videos, memories of our mothers, of
our loved ones and there never will be.

When you lose someone you may try to collect all the memories, all the pictures, all the birthday cards, all the little things which you thought made up that someone, and you may try to piece them all together to create a shape which looks like, which sounds like, her. But that feeling of having someone sitting in the next room, of having someone downstairs in the kitchen, or just across the hall is intangible. It is intangible and it is a feeling that you can only grasp onto when you are there in that exact moment.

So when your mum is downstairs singing to herself or hanging washing on the line or calling
your name to go out and enjoy the day, just take a breath and grasp onto that for one second.

Bathe in that moment, in the physical feeling of knowing for sure that that person is a few
steps away from you, waiting to be held, to laugh, to cry, to tell you they love you.

Florrie Evans

If you would like to share your grief journey like Florrie has, please get in touch with us by emailing blog@letstalkaboutloss.org