Eleven years after losing my mum the day before Mother’s Day, this is what grief has taught me about love, loss, and carrying them with me.
Grief can do very strange things to you. It’s an emotion that often rears its ugly head without warning and can strike at any time.
I remember clearly waking up on that bitterly cold Saturday morning — 14 March 2015 — when I received a phone call at 6am. A distressed aunt told me my mother had died of a heart attack. It was the day before she was due to fly back to England, and the day before Mother’s Day in the UK.
Just three weeks earlier, my mum, my stepdad, and I had been in the Philippines — the motherland, (as I like to call it) celebrating her 42 years of life in the UK. The irony is that she died there, where it all began. The shock felt like a punch to the gut. It was my first close, deeply personal bereavement.
Trying to organise an urgent flight back to the Philippines while in shock, and then having to tell my stepdad in New Zealand, was horrific. For such a close-knit family, we were suddenly scattered across continents.
At the airport, I boarded a 19-hour flight to Manila alone. Around me, people were excitedly heading off on holiday. I was completely numb.
After two agonising flights, I arrived in the Philippines. Anyone who has landed at Ninoy Aquino Airport knows how chaotic arrivals can be. After a long car journey, I reached the house and there was Mum, lying in an open casket. It was part of the Catholic Filipino tradition: days-long wakes, with people coming and going around the clock. I wasn’t raised there, barely went to church in London, and suddenly I was organising a funeral in a country where I didn’t speak the language, unable to grieve in private. It felt unbearable.
There had been talk about bringing Mum back to the UK for burial, but ultimately it felt right for her to be laid to rest in the Philippines. It was her home, even though she had been a British citizen for many years. She is buried next to my granny, and it seemed only fair that her sisters and brother - my aunties and uncle - would have a place to visit her. It was a decision that honoured her roots, her family, and the life she began there.
After returning to the UK, I stayed with my stepdad and later organised a memorial for my mum’s friends in London. We held it at St Anselm and St Cecilia Church in Kingsway, Holborn - a church Mum used to visit sometimes on her lunch break, so it felt fitting. I’m not really religious and don’t go to church every week for mass, but there is something quietly comforting about stepping inside, lighting a candle, and saying a prayer for her and my dad. It became a small ritual for me; a way to pause, remember, and feel close to them. I still go every year on the 14th of March, and it’s where I will be heading tomorrow, carrying them in my thoughts as I always do.
Finding a resting place for my dad, my biological father, was just as important, and deeply emotional. He is buried in the Garden of Remembrance on Vicarage Road in Watford. It was hard to find somewhere that felt right, but the location is almost perfect. Dad loved Watford Football Club, and the cemetery sits literally between Chester Road, where we lived as a family before my mum and dad divorced when I was five, and the football club. It feels like the place itself tells the story of the life he lived - the home, the family, the passions that defined him.
My father’s death, 22 months later, was different. It was 29 January 2017. I was away, out of the country, when I got the call. His health had been failing, but I asked the nurses to tell him to hold on, as his birthday was the following day, and I was coming straight home to see him. By the time I reached my connecting flight, he had passed away.
For a long time, I carried guilt about not being there at the end. Recently, I watched a programme where a woman explained that if you weren’t present when your parent passed, it’s because their spirit didn’t want you to be. They want to be remembered as they were in life, not at their weakest. Thinking of it this way felt like the universe, or their spirit, was giving me permission to let go of that guilt.
At 38, I lost both my parents and suddenly faced life without the anchors who had always held me steady. Being an only child, the absence of both my mum and dad felt even more profound. I look the same, but something inside me has shifted.
Ten years on, I still carry that loss with me. Some days it hits harder than others, but in its own way, grief has also taught me how to hold their memory close, how to honour them, and how to live with a love that doesn’t end with their passing.
They say losing your parents as an adult leaves a unique kind of silence. For me, it feels as though my roots have been cut away. My parents were my constant, the reason I’m here, the people who held me up. Even though they separated, I was never without their love.
I can stand alone, but there are times I still need them. I have wonderful friends and family, but they are not my parents.
If you haven’t lost your parents, here’s the truth: you don’t get over it. You get through it, and you learn to live with it, but a piece of your life’s puzzle is gone. No matter how you rearrange what remains, it never fits quite the same again and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Grief ebbs and flows. Birthdays and anniversaries are hard. There’s no timeline and no logic to it. You can be fine for weeks, and then something small makes your heart sink.
My parents weren’t perfect, and neither was I. But despite everything, we shared a loving, healthy relationship.
For a long time, I believed that once they were gone, I was no longer anyone’s child. Losing them felt like losing the place where I belonged.
But I’ve come to realise that isn’t true.
I am still their child. I always will be.
They are the reason I’m here. They are part of who I am. Their love, their lessons, and their memories live on in me.
And wherever life takes me, I carry them with me — every single day.##
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