​Written for When Christmas Hurts, St Stephen’s Fylingdales, Sunday 14 December 2025.
 
I loved Christmas when I was a child. My dad's beautiful voice reading us The Night before Christmas on Christmas Eve. Stockings in front of the gas fire before breakfast – a Christmas annual in the top and a satsuma, nuts and shiny coins in the bottom. Church and then home, a homemade mince pie, hot ginger wine and presents. It was a good year if I got something to make, something to play with and something to read.
 
As I grew up and got married, my parents encouraged us to build our own Christmas traditions, and these evolved over the years, but we always kept elements of those childhood Christmases.
 
My first marriage crumbled and my dear friend Tim, the sweet, witty, gentle man I had known since we were both in our early twenties became a rock and a shoulder to cry on. Our friendship grew into love, and despite me saying I would never marry again, we got married. We moved to a beautiful and ancient house in Tideswell where Tim opened a second-hand bookshop on the ground floor that became a quiet hub of the village. We built a life new life together. Became part of an amazing group of friends. Acted together. Celebrated birthdays and weddings and Christmases and New Years together.
 
Christmas was a special time for us. We would catch up with family beforehand, and then after sherry and homemade mince pies in the shop with friends and customers on Christmas eve morning, he shut the shop and I closed my office door. We might spend Christmas eve at the pub, or have Christmas lunch with friends, but the rest of the time it was just us. We hunkered down, ate wonderful food, played board games and watched films. And then headed away for New Year to see some of our oldest friends.
 
Tim had type 2 diabetes. Early one February morning, a few months after his 50th birthday, and half a year shy of ten years of marriage, his heart stopped. He was gone in just a moment. In a beautiful moment of quiet and love, Gillian and Simon, the village vicars, anointed him on his way and my friend Fiona swept me into the warmth of her wonderful home.
 
Breaking the news to his parents and to our friends and my family was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. They surrounded me with love and care.
 
At first, I was numb, unbelieving. Hearing the door downstairs rattle in the draft and thinking it was him coming upstairs. Waking up in the night and reaching for him. Dreaming that it was all a mistake and then waking up to remember that it was real. Then the reality sank in and I understood how lonely grief could be, even surrounded by people who loved both of us.
 
As the end of the year approached I started to get all the kind invitations from people not wanting me to be alone at Christmas. But I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything and I declined them as kindly as I could. I had a quiet lunch with friends in the village. I spent time with wonderful online friends from WAY Widowed and Young who understood. I took it gently – there were times I wanted to be with people, and times I wanted to be alone.
 
The second Christmas I knew I needed to do something completely different. I announced it early, before anyone invited me anywhere, and I booked a shepherd's hut in the Lake District. I loaded my Kindle full of books, took a box of simple food, snacks and drinks and a sack of wood for the woodburner, and slept, walked, read, slept some more and took time to heal.
 
Eight years on from Tim's sudden and unexpected death, I struggle with winter. It starts with his birthday on 1 December, and runs through Christmas and New Year until the anniversary of his death on 24 February. Trauma changes us. I am a different person now – not necessarily better or worse, just different.
 
But I have found love again and built new Christmas traditions, threaded through with the old ones, in the beauty and welcome of the North Yorkshire coast. In a house full of dogs and words and art and music and the sound of the sea. There are still elements of Christmas that hurt, but it's no longer raw – it's more of a bittersweet wistfulness wrapped around many happy memories.

​I have been stepping outside of my comfort zone a fair bit lately in the creative part of my life. I went on a drama course because I’ve lost confidence on stage, and that is pushing me into improvising and devising, rather than relying on words on a page. I joined a group for writers and theatremakers and read some new work there, and I’ve been discussing how that work could perhaps become a performance piece. I’m coming towards the editing stage of a writing project, and that will go to an editor next, which is setting off my imposter syndrome.
 
The reason that I can do this is because I know that my comfort zone is there for me to go back to. A bit like a pet rat exploring a new room – she can step outside of her nest, because she knows that her nest is still there for her to go back to, and she will step out and run back repeatedly until she knows the whole room.
 
This reminded me of how I felt in the early stages of grief. Tim was my comfort zone, my safe space – I described him as the centre of my turning world – and when he died suddenly it was gone in a moment.
 
I had to rebuild my confidence and comfort zone piece by piece, and some days it felt like I would add a brick, and two bricks would fall off. Seven years on and it’s there. That awful loss means I know that nothing is guaranteed. But for the moment, I will go out, play with words, and come back to safety. 

 
I’m not sure that I can remember his voice. I can still remember his face, and his surprisingly deep and rather dirty chuckle. I used to be able to hear his words, but lately, it’s gone. That was an unexpected loss.
 
Remembering their voices is a part of sensory memory, and this is unfortunately a short-lived form of memory. However, we still know their voices and can recognise them when we hear them. I realised this when I plucked up the courage to watch a recording of the last play we were in together – All the Lonely People by Sue Hawkins – and there was his utterly familiar voice. I now know that I can listen to him speak whenever I want in just a few clicks. And while dreaming about him can be heartbreakingly sad or very confusing, I’ve learned to see it as an opportunity to see him again.
 
In this digital age, we have much greater access to recordings – video on smartphones, voice mails and voice texts, even the sound recorded by a smart doorbell. If you have these audio and video files, save them somewhere safe. You may not want to listen to them now, but you might one day in the future.
 
And if you don’t have any audio, hang on to all your other memories. There are things about them that we will never forget.

After Tim’s sudden death, Ruby was my comfort and my sidekick. She’d never been allowed into the bedroom at night before, but now when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep she was curled up on me or at my back, and her purring soothed me.
 
When Dee and her cat and dogs moved in, Ruby lived in my upstairs office during the day, sitting on my desk supervising, and tapping my hand when I didn’t pay her enough attention, and continued to sleep on me at night.

At the weekend, I read a letter in the Guardian to Pamela Stephenson Connolly entitled I don’t like the way my partner smells and it reminded me how much I loved your smell. I would nuzzle into your neck and breathe you in. Before you moved in with me, when you visited and then went back home, I would fall asleep hugging your pillow. I knew when you were stressed or low because your smell changed. When you died, I lay curled up with you on the bedroom floor taking in as much of your smell as I could. I wore your jumper for days after you died. 

After Tim died, I heard the phrase ‘the new normal’ a lot. That I would find my ‘new normal’. That people settled into their ‘new normal’. That the ‘new normal’ kicks in after six months when you realise that it’s all real, or in the second year when all the firsts are over. But what is the new normal?
 
I think it’s about understanding the changes that we have gone through, accepting what has happened, and looking at how we move forward. This is about how it’s happened for me. It’s not the same for everyone, and for people in the darkest days of grief, the thought of a new normal may be too hard.
 
The new normal: Physical and psychological
The trauma of being bereaved, whether it’s suddenly or after a short or long illness, changes us physically and psychologically. Physical symptoms include headaches, chest pain, muscle and joint aches, sleep issues and immune system issues. Psychological changes include brain fog, flashbacks, panic attacks, dissociation and hyperarousal. Trauma also increases the risk of self-harm and suicidal feelings, and of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia and chronic pain, and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME).
 
These changes don’t always last forever – for me, the physical symptoms eased after six months or a year, and the worst of the psychological symptoms after a year or two. It’s important that we look after ourselves, and this isn’t about fluffiness and bubble baths. It’s about genuinely being kind to ourselves, and about taking proper care of our mental and physical health.
 
The new normal: Acceptance
The new normal can be about acceptance, and this was significant for me. I accepted that this was my life now. That things were never going to be the same again.
 
For a while it was just about keeping going, and putting one foot in front of the other. The next phase was reclaiming a space and a life for myself – I cleared and redecorated, I went back to university, I started The Widow’s Handbook.
 
I accepted that grieving was a long-term thing. That I wasn’t going to ‘get over it’, or ‘move on’. That it was something that I was going to walk alongside. I also gave myself permission to feel happy again.
 
The new normal: Moving forward
Ever since I saw this brilliant TED talk from Nora McInerny, I have talked about ‘moving forward’ not ‘moving on’, because I have taken Tim with me into my new life. While it’s not the life I expected or planned for, it’s the life I have and it’s a life I like. 

A few months after Tim died, I started to pick myself up and get back on with life. I was still heartbroken, but things started to return to, if not normal, a 'new normal'. I went back to work quite soon because as a freelancer I didn't have a lot of choice, and it gave me a structure to my week. However, I found that at around six or seven months, it felt like I'd gone right back to the very beginning. My mental health took a nose dive, I cried all the time, and I had to pull out of two major work projects.
 
Looking back at how I felt at six months, I think that was the point that the shock wore off and the reality kicked in. I was angry at him for dying and for leaving me so much to sort out. I was lonely. I had widow's fire but was too broken and felt too guilty to do anything about it. And the combination widow brain, depression and ADHD meant that my concentration was messed up.
 
The only way I could get though it was to go back to my early coping strategies – grounding, writing, talking to people in the grief and widow community and taking care of myself. 

​Things have been quiet here for a while. And it's… complicated. Just as I was settling down for Christmas, I got flu. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as it could have been, as I'd been vaccinated, but it wiped out Christmas and a couple of weeks afterwards.
 
I've been having a lot of work done on the house. It's very old (potentially one of the oldest in the village) and everything went wrong at once. A ceiling needed repairing. A section of roof needed replacing. Damp needed sorting.
 
Over Christmas, my wife and I decided that it was time to think about buying somewhere together, as she has been living in what was mine and Tim's house. This was a tough decision for me, but it is the right thing to do. It's part of moving forward, and Tim will come to the new house with me. Because he is always there. As part of this process, I'm selling Tim's books, and that's bittersweet.
 
February was the five-year anniversary of Tim's death, but also the day I discovered that Tim's father was dying. And so I've been to another funeral.
 
And finally – I have ADHD. This makes me very easily distracted. And all of the above have been pretty distracting. But I am now back. Thank you for bearing with me.

On the day of the anniversary of Tim's death in February, I rang Tim's mum. I always do. But as soon as she answered, I knew that something else was wrong. They were at their local hospital, and Tim's dad was having a scan. It was the end of a story that had started around Christmas, when they noticed that he was losing weight. It was pancreatic cancer. It was terminal, and he didn't want any visitors. A couple of weeks later, I had the phone call to say that this gentle, funny, glorious, intelligent and talented man had died in his sleep.
Yesterday I went to his funeral. A tender, peaceful celebration led by a wonderful celebrant, and a few hours of talking to people I last saw at Tim and my wedding, and Tim's funeral. I spent the evening with a fellow widow, who just gets it.
​
A week before I went to the funeral of my cousin's son – my first cousin once removed – and it was another celebration of a gentle, funny, glorious, intelligent and talented man.

I've found that each new grief brings back the old griefs again. Funerals are a time to celebrate the people we lose, but I'd quite like a while without one.
​

Tim was a bookseller and a collector, and when he died the house was full of books, magazines, motor racing programmes, Airfix kits and model cars. I cleared the house and sold the magazines, cars and Airfix kits, but I was left with the books. These are things that were particularly special to him, collected over a lifetime and loved, and each has a memory associated with it that I don't have access to. Where he bought the book. The things he read from it. The people he showed it to. He always said he wanted them to be my income if anything happened, and now the time is right for me to sell his books.

I'm listing the books on eBay, and it's hard. I'm getting flashbacks. Good ones, but still unsettling. Getting a book collection in from another dealer and opening the boxes as if it was Christmas. Wandering round car boot sales. Going to Le Mans and stocking up from the racecourse shop. Hearing his stories as we walked around the paddocks at Goodwood revival. It's good that they are going to people who love them, but it's a bittersweet process.