Author: Grace Woodward

Grace’s Story

It’s tempting to start this by saying I had been grieving the loss of my mum for most of my life, but to be honest that’s too simplistic. She wasn’t dead to me, far from it, she was painfully present in my mind. But at some point she had given up on life, and like those zombie hands reaching out of cartoon graves, she seemed to want to take everyone down with her.  From what I’ve leant since, losing your mother at any age is debilitatingly hard, but losing your mother right after having baby yourself is like being rocketed into space and floating around in a tin can with a dodgy FaceTime connection to earth with sometimes only bleeps and images of faces getting through. I also now realise when I see eulogies about other people’s lost leading ladies, that losing a great mother is very different to losing someone who had failed, for whatever reason, to be one. There is no comparison as to whose pain is greater, there are no medals to …