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Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost!

Losing a parent over eight years is a very dark journey. I spent the first four years feeling bad and angry and sorry for myself.

As a parent, it's my responsibility to equip my child to do this - to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don't know what happens after death.

When I had to bury my child, I probably didn't start grieving until a year and a half later.

Obviously, at this age, I've lost people in my life. But with a parent, it's just different. I was very attached to my father and had this naive little-girl notion that he'd always be around. So I'm finding acceptance of my father's death is the hardest thing to accept.

It's everyone's dread to lose a child. You lose someone you love so much, so young. It does hit you like nothing else, and there is a bit of you that thinks, well, if you can face that sort of challenge in your life, then it puts everything else into perspective.

There's nothing that symbolizes loss or grief more than a mother losing a child.

I've never lost a grown-up child, but I have known loss.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.