- It was about a year,
yeah, probably about a year after David died,
we had our third son, Rory.
And then when he was about one and a half,
he ended up in hospital,
which for me felt a bit of a deja vu.
It really sent me into a downward spiral
with regards to my own mental health
that I worried then that something awful was going to happen
to one of my other children.
- My husband has been quite seriously affected
and has been diagnosed with complex grief disorder,
which means that his brain was not able
to rationalize what happened
perhaps in the way that it should.
And that has been very, very difficult.
We've had a lot of ups and downs over the years
with depression and loneliness,
mostly stemming from what happened to Alex.
- I did suffer depression,
and I have received counseling along the way for that.
But I think I got into a habit
of just trying to block it out.
And I suppose I was quite stuck in my grief.
And that was the stage where I probably started
to self-medicate with alcohol.
- I had to go to the GP.
I did get antidepression medication,
which helped 'cause it lifts your mood.
Doesn't make you feel so desperate.
But I also needed counseling,
and I started cognitive behavioral therapy initially.
- I realized that drink was no longer serving me,
and I haven't had a drink for 19 months now.
And my anxiety
is vastly reduced.
I'm in a much better place since then.
I've been able to seek different kinds of therapy
because I've realized that grief wasn't talked about
in terms of trauma when I lost Faye.
But actually if your child dies in your arms,
if your child dies, it's an out-of-order death.
It's not something that we expect to happen.
And I would say it is traumatic, and it is trauma.
- The advice I would give to anybody who has been bereaved
is just to be kind to yourself,
not to expect things to magically get back
to the way that they were.
And also not to feel guilty
for anything that you're feeling
because whatever you're feeling,
that's what you need to experience
in order to help get through it.
- When we get to October, it seems to be
that that's the start of me preparing
for December being a time when it is her birthday,
and Christmas is always difficult without children.
And so I am more aware that from September,
no from October, I do start to feel quite drained
and quite exhausted.
I just am ready for it now and just practice more self-care.
And if I need to just quieten myself,
if I need to remove myself from social occasions,
if I need to go back to bed in the middle of the day,
if I need to not work,
that's how I look after myself in those times.
- If you've suffered from mental health,
and I was clinically depressed,
you do have to be aware that it can happen again.
And it's not a case of allowing it to happen.
You just have to watch for those triggers, you know.
And I know having been through it,
and having been through the therapy,
my triggers were always feeling like I had failed,
I had failed as a mother, you know,
I wasn't doing the right thing.
I had somehow done the wrong things.
- Particularly when you're a parent
and when you've got other people relying on you,
there can be a real tendency to plow on
and to need to be strong to support everybody else.
But I think realizing that taking time for yourself
and being kind to yourself is a strength
rather than a weakness is really important.
You can't look after everybody else
if you're just hanging on by your fingertips.
- We grieve our children forever
because we'd have loved them forever.
And we still love them.
So, you know, grief is love.
There's nothing wrong with grieving.
There's nothing wrong with suffering from time to time.
I do think it's a natural inevitable experience.