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

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

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.

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.

When you've lost a loved one, you realise how grateful you are for any help in those moments, and any scheme that tries to help families during that terrible time gets my backing.

To lose your last remaining parent is the toughest thing. It is a very lonely thing.

When you lose a loved one, you come to these crossroads. You can take the path that leads you down the aisle of sadness, or you can say, 'I'm never going to let this person's memory die. I'm going to make sure everything they worked for continues.'

I've been fascinated with the subject of loss for a long time. In particular, I'm interested in how people, consciously or unconsciously, spend their lives replacing the things they lost when they were children.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.