There were days when I would stand in front of his photograph and plead with him. “WHY did you leave me?”

Yvonne calmed me down and proceeded to give me some simple steps. She chuckled as I repeated them back to her so I would remember them.

Mum was the champion of reframing before it was invented! She could always put a spin on something so that it became much better than it appeared.

Four and a half thousand kilometres away, in Perth, Western Australia, the man who would become my husband a decade later was also a planet-nerd

I come back to the present with a start and look at the empty seat beside me and that’s when I start crying into my coffee.

“Would you mind swapping places with me? I’m feeling a bit scared about sitting on the edge!” she asked.

My little dog Layla is 14 years old. That’s 98 in human years. She’s partially blind, quite deaf and she often trips over nothing.

Mum has Alzheimers now. I see her about once a week, and we have hilarious conversations. She never tires of observing.

This is my ‘month of letting go’. I have been letting go of a lot of things, physical and emotional.

“Don’t be afraid of your fears. They’re not there to scare you. They’re there to let you know that something is worth it.”

I’m sitting in Greg’s chair looking out at the spectacular garden in my backyard … the garden that he never really got to experience.

Oh I tried and I tried. But I didn’t learn how to neatly *schedule my day*. (Or my week. Or my month. Or my year). I simply didn’t become of …