The Pain of Love and Loss
Last November, as many of my Twitter family will know, I received a message from my cousin to say that his mother had died suddenly. My Aunt Jeanne, the pretty girl third from the left in my parent's wedding photo, was no longer with us. Although she was 88, I was not at all prepared for this to happen, and was hit by a wave of grief that quite took me by surprise. She was my beloved Dad's baby sister, and as he had died suddenly when I was only 19, she had often been the one I turned to in times of trouble. Now she too was gone. West London July 1945 She and I had often sat for hours, sorting through old photographs, with her telling stories of family life from when they were children. She and my Dad had been born in Canada, where they had emigrated to in the early 1920's, in the aftermath of the Great War. I am grateful for the time that we spent in this way, and as I am now perhaps the only one carrying these stories, I feel it's time I did something with t