Tending Hearts

28/03/2026

Just lately, I seem to have held a lot of families saying goodbye to a dear parent. We have talked a lot about the 'right order of things' and yet, it doesn't change the vast shift of a lifetime that happens when our elders leave us.

I've shared this a few times to folk recently, so thought I'd share here too. Thanks to....Echoes of a Woman...🙏

Go gently, tender hearts...🩷xx

'When a parent dies, it alters every goodbye that came before. That’s the real claim of Mary Catherine Bateson. All the airport waves, the end of Christmas, the slammed teenage doors, and the drive back to your own house after Sunday lunch. You realise you were always leaving inside a structure that assumed return. Death removes that assumption and rewrites the memory.

Bateson wrote that line in a memoir about her own parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who weren’t ordinary parents by any measure. They were public intellectuals, travelling, arguing, thinking in big patterns about culture and family while their daughter watched. She grew up inside ideas as much as inside a home. And still, when they died, she was simply a daughter.

Because what she’s getting at isn’t only grief. It’s the way memory behaves once the future is closed off. When your mother is alive, even if you haven’t spoken in months, some part of you assumes there will be another attempt. Another phone call where you mean to say the thing properly or another visit where you’ll be less irritable. You don’t phrase it like that, but it’s there. After death, every earlier moment solidifies and can’t be revised.

And that’s unpleasant to face because many of those earlier partings were careless. You were distracted and impatient and already half turned toward your own life. There’s a selfishness built into adulthood. You build your independence by leaving and that’s healthy. It’s also, at times, indifferent. When death happens, the old exits don’t feel neutral anymore. They take on a finality they didn’t have at the time.

It makes me think about how we rehearse separation. University and moving in with someone. Each step is a practice for leaving home, and parents encourage it. They tell you to go and say don’t look back. Then they die and you realise every one of those encouraged departures has been folded into a final one. Did they feel each of them more sharply than you did? Probably. You were busy becoming yourself while they were already counting the absences.

Joan Didion wrote about the way grief distorts time, how the mind keeps trying to reverse what has happened. Bateson’s line goes somewhere slightly different. It’s recognition that the story of your life with your parents has an ending now, and endings change the earlier chapters whether you want them to or not. You read them differently. That argument when you were twenty becomes harder to shrug off and the apology you never quite managed becomes fixed in place.

There’s also relief sometimes. If the relationship was strained, death can bring a kind of order. No more unpredictable phone calls and old patterns. Then the earlier partings reappear in another light. You see where you withdrew and where they did. You can feel regret and release in the same moment.

I wonder whether this is why middle-age feels so crowded. Parents dying, or ageing toward it, children growing up and edging away. You’re in the middle of departures in both directions. You tell your daughter to enjoy her trip, text when you land, and you hear your own mother’s voice in yours. The chain is obvious.

Bateson spent her career writing about learning and adaptation, about how people revise themselves over time. Death interrupts that revision. You can’t test a new version of yourself against the person who first knew you. That can be freeing but it can also feel like losing the only witness to certain earlier selves. Who confirms that you were once shy, or reckless, or adored? Siblings do some of that work, friends a bit, but parents held the original record.

Maybe that’s why the past surges forward when they die because we’ve lost the future reference point. Every goodbye we treated as provisional becomes absolute. And you’re left standing in a string of doorways you walked through without looking back properly, realising they were leading somewhere you can’t return from either.'

©️ Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

18/03/2026

I'm always astounded to receive gifts and cards in the post from families after a service. I find it incredible that at a time when they are going through their most difficult moments, they have the inclination to think of others and say thank you.

Such a generous thing to do. My heart has been so warmed recently by cards in the post, a delivery of flowers, chocolates on the doorstep and gift vouchers for a local restaurant.

Humbled, grateful and heart opened...

Thank you so so much 🙏xx

You are in my heart 🩷

15/03/2026

Beaming love to all the tender hearts today...go gently....🩷xx

08/03/2026

I feel so blessed to work alongside some amazing women ....celebrating and giving thanks for you all today ❤️

The wonderful Sam and all the crew at W.R. Bettelley Funeral Directors
Amazing Izzy from Isobel Whittaker Funeral Services
The one and only Kate at The Old Chapel Etruria - Bespoke Funeral Venue
And a fantastic array of female FDs and all the staff & bearers from C McGough & Sons Funeral DirectorsJohn Garside and Son Funeral Directors H Dale Funeral Directors
Field Funeral Services Kevin Lownds Funeral Services

It is a pleasure to walk beside you,

So much love 💖

PS...Oh, and the lovely John of course 😉

06/03/2026

Grief doesn’t make you noble. It can make you smaller. I remember standing in my kitchen not long after my Mother died, staring at the dishwasher that needed emptying, and feeling a surge of fury because the world had the audacity to continue asking me for ordinary effort. A friend texted about a promotion and I felt a flicker of resentment before I felt pleased for her. That startled me. I’d always believed I was generous by nature. Grief showed me how quickly that generosity could shrink when I felt loss.

So when I read the wish 'if grief won’t soften, then let it soften me', I don’t hear poetry. I hear someone trying to interrupt that contraction in real time. Because the default response to pain, at least in me, is self-protection. I gather my emotional resources closer. I ration my empathy and become brisk. It feels efficient but it also feels lonely.

And I don’t think this is rare. We like the story that suffering deepens character. Sometimes it does but sometimes it’s just exhausting. When you’re tired of carrying loss, you don’t necessarily become more compassionate. You can become impatient and stop listening properly.

Andrea Gibson wrote those words from inside prolonged illness and from a life that treated mortality as a daily companion. They were open about chronic Lyme disease and later cancer. Their work never pretended that pain was tidy. So the line feels like it was written in the middle of a difficult afternoon, not at the end of a healing journey. It feels like catching yourself hardening and deciding, deliberately, not to continue in that direction.
Because hardness has its appeal. It simplifies relationships. If you expect less, you’re disappointed less. If you don’t let people close, they can’t devastate you. After my loss, I told myself I was becoming discerning. In reality, I was becoming avoidant. I cancelled plans more easily and kept conversations surface level. I didn’t want to be asked how I was, because I didn’t trust myself not to fall apart or, worse, not to feel anything at all.
Softening, then, is risky. It means staying available to love when you have clear evidence that love ends in absence. It means allowing other people’s joy without interpreting it as an affront to your sorrow. That part is harder than we admit. When you’re grieving, someone else’s happiness can feel like a reminder of what you’ve lost.

Joan Didion described grief as a kind of madness, the mind replaying events in the hope of a different outcome. I recognise that loop. The bargaining. The revision. And in that mental whirl, it would be easy to grow sharp with everyone around you. So the wish to be softened reads like a counter instinct. Almost like saying, let this break me open rather than seal me off.
There’s also the question of age. By midlife, loss is no longer theoretical. Parents falter. Friends receive diagnoses. Marriages end. You accumulate farewells and if each one adds a layer of armour, you can find yourself efficient but unreachable. Capable but distant. You can host a dinner flawlessly and still avoid any conversation that edges near your own hurt.

I don’t want that version of myself. I can see how easily she could form. Competent. Controlled and slightly superior about having survived. The line feels like a refusal of that trajectory. Not a promise that grief will ennoble you, but a request that it might widen you instead of narrowing you.
That widening is about small choices. Answering the call when you’d prefer to withdraw. Letting a friend talk about their happiness without shifting the focus back to your loss. Admitting you’re not coping as well as you pretend. None of it is glamorous. All of it keeps you permeable.

Grief may not soften. Some losses remain raw. But if they are going to stay, I’d rather they carve space in me than fill me with stone. I don’t say that with certainty. I say it as an intention I have to renew, especially on the days when hardness feels far more efficient.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

02/03/2026

I shared this in a service last week for a beloved wife, mother, sister and dear soul to many.

Sometimes, the gathering of grief paves its way in the lead up to the ceremony....the shock, the loss, the sadness...it lines up outside the chapel door, waiting to take it's place in the pews. I sensed it from the car park, felt it's hum, and the familiar ache in my throat as the grief struck its chord.

I felt the uneasy yearning of those wanting to be in the company of others, feeling the same thing, to be together and connected in communal loss - in all its pain and challenge, it's also wanted, needed...

Into the chapel we go, hearts bare, and the room fills with tears. The energy rises and falls, in waves of emotion, silence, laughter, baby cries, softly holding on, holding back, letting go.

Finally the music plays, and the breeze rides in through open doors, an exhale coming to find us.

The sun pierces through, illuminating hugs and handshakes, shoulders drop, Love is everywhere.

Moments like these remind me why it's so so important to gather in ceremony to say farewell. We lose part of ourselves when a loved one leaves, we need to commune. We need others around us to help us make sense of how we feel, to find a new way to connect, to know that love remains...

'The You who lives with that person inside not out...'

C.....Fly high, fly free, loving you, loving me ❤️xx

19/02/2026

14/02/2026

Love lives on, today and all the days....❤️xx

08/02/2026

Really looking forward to going to hear Kathryn Mannix. Sharing here in case anyone feels called…Dougie Mac community, fellow end of life doulas & palliative care community….

I love both her books and have learnt so much from her about how to be beside those at the end of their lives, but also, how to deepen into compassion & tender times.

With love 💕 xx

📖 Are you or a friend part of a local book club?

This one’s to share with them… tag in the comments!

📖 Award winning author and leading voice in palliative care Dr Kathryn Mannix will be in interviewed by East Cheshire Hospice Patron and BBC journalist Nick Robinson.

Kathryn’s books, With the End in Mind and Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations, have touched hearts across the globe, earning critical acclaim and sparking a movement to bring compassion and honesty into life’s most difficult conversations.

We invite our community to join us on Friday 13th March at Kings School, Macclesfield with the in-person event at 6:45-8:30pm.

🎟️ Find out more and book your seat via our website www.eastcheshirehospice.org.uk/an-evening-with-dr-kathryn-mannix/

HerSpace Macclesfield Library Waterstones Panadero Lounge Suzan Holder Author Builders Arms, Knutsford

25/01/2026

On Love & Grief....words from Christine Colyer - Writer 🙏

I've been thinking about the union
of love and grief.
And I'm wondering:
are love and grief inseparable?

Are they simply two sides of the same coin—
like heads and tails,
top and bottom,
up and down,
life and death?

Can one exist without the other?

Take pain and pleasure,
light and dark,
hope and despair—
not opposites, necessarily,
so much as two sides of a coin,
each holding value for the other—

each side offering perspective
and meaning to the other...
the kind of perspective and meaning that comes from experiencing both sides of something in order to fully appreciate each one.

For example, could we truly know
and appreciate real pleasure
without having intimate experience with pain?
Would we recognize what light was without its absence in the form of darkness?
Would we understand hope—or even need it—if there weren't such a thing as despair?

Though many might argue that hate is the other side of the love coin, I'd argue that we do not need to know hate to understand love.
I'd argue that it's grief, not hate, that gives love its meaning, its sanctity, its superpower.
Because isn't grief, when stripped down to its essence, simply love flipped upside down, momentarily robbed of breath, searching for a new way to exist, to be expressed?

Grief does not exist without love.
And there is no love that doesn't come with a built-in promise of grief.
Unlike hatred, which cannot coexist with love, grief silently holds hands with love, like light with the dark, and like hope with despair.

Love requires us to eventually know grief, it's true, but it also assures us that grief will never take away our love because grief is love—it’s just love in a different form.

Grief guides us toward the expansion of our souls, revealing the power of love, much as despair guides us toward hope, illuminating the same power.
Hatred does not reveal the power of love. Instead, it fights against it and eventually shrinks in the face of love’s ability to overcome.

So, yes, love and grief,
life and death,
light and dark,
hope and despair...
what extraordinary, symbiotic, perfect design!

19/01/2026

Long after someone is gone, their voice can still interrupt an ordinary day. Someone is present in the tilt of a sentence, in a recipe that never quite works without them, in the exact tone we use when offering comfort. Sometimes it happens in the kitchen, late afternoon light on a counter, a phrase rising fully formed that we know is not ours alone.

Loss does not arrive all at once. It flickers. Grief does not obey speed. It insists on duration. It asks for slowness. It asks us to sit still long enough for a voice to arrive uninvited. To tell a story is to say someone mattered. The mind does not archive the dead as finished chapters. It keeps them in circulation. Memory becomes an active practice, not nostalgia but maintenance. We don’t just remember people. We consult them. Memory is not passive. It requires attention. Keep holding the thread. If you remember them, they will be with you always. Love does not end. It just changes its address.

(From the novel, Eva Luna by Isabel Allende)

07/01/2026

I saw this somewhere and it made me pause and think...I listen to stories of lives and what lasts is less than we'd imagine...not the big stuff, but the little, seemingly insignificant things....and how we left people feeling.❤

"What we are while we’re here is an accumulation of our experiences, shaped by our actions and choices.

What we leave behind is the residue of those same actions and choices.

In the end, what are we but the memories held by those still here.

Act accordingly.'

Susanna xx