The Poems
- Don’t let them tell you how to grieve
- Yesterday
- Talk Words
- Filling up
- Freefall
- Isolation
- Bureaucracy
- Stroking cats
- Absentminded
- Forgetting
- Carpe diem - Seize the day
- Whirlpool
- Loss
- Window
- Norfolk sands
- The photograph
- Grief
- Where are you?
- Silent time
- Lighting a candle
- The beech woods
- Beginnings and endings
- Rain
- Looking at clouds
- Autumn leaves
- Picking blackberries
- Facing death
- Never give up
- Requiem
- I am there
- Always
Gina has added some words with each poem to explain
what was in her mind when she was writing it. |
Foreword
In 1987 my
elder daughter, Nikki, aged 19, took her own life. Just over a year later,
my husband left. For a marriage to survive the death of a child is hard
enough; it is less likely to survive if that death is a suicide. When he
left it felt like another bereavement.
Then in
2003, Robin, aged 32, my son and close friend fell ill in Singapore and died
a few days later of encephalitis. We were all devastated. I had lost two of
my three children and my younger daughter, Rachael, had lost both her
siblings.
It was
during the two years after Robin’s
death that I wrote these poems. I could not have written them if I had not
already gone through the grief of Nikki’s
death. This time, although it was just as painful, I was able to observe and
identify my thoughts and feelings. The poems helped me not only to come to
terms with my own grief, but to create something positive out of the lives
and deaths of my two children. |
