Your 35th birthday is coming up on Saturday 23rd April 2011

Hello Matthew,

Here I am again! Not doing too good this week, but that is how it goes some times................

I love this photo of you.

I can see your eyelashes and your fine hair.

And almost rub the stubble on your chin.

Feel the warmth of your breath as you give me a hug...............................

I miss you.

Sometimes something triggers the underground well of grief, and on Sunday evening I was in church with your dad, when I became aware of the blue flashing lights of emergency vehicles shining in through one of the windows.

It was a trigger.

8.40pm on a Sunday evening is the time we will never forget.

And we were in church then too.

So seeing those lights, suddenly brought the memory of that other fateful night back to the fore....

And as the last song began, it happened to be the one we sang at your Thanksgiving.

I simply felt the whole floodgates open and I sobbed, until I could sob no more. The pain was as overwhelming as it had been in the days and weeks after you were killed.

It was so immediate and real.

I love you so much, and miss you so much it cannot be measured.

So as always after that happens, and the pain has burnt itself out for awhile, I am exhausted. Even now, after 4 and a half years.

But I know it will always be so.

Most of the time I can get on with living, and remember you with a smile, and enjoy the world around me. Meeting friends, gardening, reading, the everyday routines which are part of daily life, still making progress with my French, which I began when I thought one day you would end up working in a French speaking country.

You would be amazed now Matt, at how well I can converse!

A lot has happened again since your last birthday.

Grandad's funeral, James's wedding, your Uncle Andrew's Ordination as a Baptist minister, and now your brother is going to be a dad!

And I am going to be "Granny Sellers" !!

And your dad a grandad!!

You would've been a brilliant uncle.

Next week we will all be at the wedding of your cousin Sarah in Skipton. Another special

day without you.......................................

And oh, Matt, how you would've loved the spring sunshine we are having just now. The cherry trees have never looked so beautiful, the back birch tree is in leaf, and in the grounds of the school opposite here, a lovely white flowering cherry planted in your memory, blossomed early.

The birds are in full voice.................................

I miss you. Forever

Your mumxx

Poem for Matt written in 2008

Poem for Matt

There's a hole in the world

Where you used to be.

It is perfectly shaped in your form,

A vacuum, but it's there.

Like reaching into the space where you

Lived and breathed.

It's a mocking illusion.

There's a hole in me

Where you used to be

Gaping,raw,aching,

Arms cannot wrap around space.

There's a hole everywhere I turn

It travels with me silently

Wherever I go

It is always with me

A reminder of all that we have lost

And, on returning, the memories

Burning

Down the years where you were real

Tangible,loved, living, breathing.

There are holes in the world

I recognise others-

Children lost forever

Parents who grieve

Over what might have been.....................

And now snatched away

Suddenly,

Leaving only brokenness.

There's a sadness in their eyes

Like a reflection

From a deep well

Of pain

Hidden but always there....

Surfacing at times to overflow.

And it goes on until

We leave a hole in the world."

Mothering Sunday 2011

My mum and dad with Matthew near their home in Rawtenstall.

I still find Mothering Sunday so hard and once again this past year more changes in our lives. I feel the loss of my dad keenly. My mum died in 1990.

And there are still times when I need to write about Matthew more than others.

I've ceased caring what others think about it.

He was my flesh and blood, carried for 9 months and a wonderful gift.

How can I not feel that loss above all others so deep, so vast, so forever.

And the wonderful news about our first grandchild, due to arrive in the autumn, has stirred so many memories. They come unbidden to the surface.........

How it felt to hold him, his smell, his smile, his tiny fingers and toes, his cuddliness, and warmth.....his aliveness.

This year we will be on our own on Mothering Sunday, as our son lives in Bristol, with his lovely wife, soon to be another family unit, with two cousins already living nearby, and close family on the doorstep.

Then the grief is strong. The emptiness of my life where Matt used to be, and now there is only a sense of his life in Birmingham, impressions of him, stirrings of the voice which used to speak to me, and living not far away.

So I have closed my Facebook account today, for the time being, to take refuge in other words.

I could not face the Mother's Day wishes that I would inevitably read there , on a day when I will not see either of my sons.

Cowardly?

No, I need to be able to sometimes have the strategies for dealing with how I feel.

It is always the special days that are the hardest.

Birthdays, Christmas, Anniversaries.......and each one who knows loss says the same.

Being a mother is the deepest, most profound experience, and having physically given birth, the bond is one which is absolute.

It goes on forever.