Always You and Me

by Dani Atkins

‘If this is it, then I want to be here in the moment with you, right up until I draw my very last breath.’

‘I will always choose you. In this life and the next.’

Adam Tennant – my husband, my best friend, and the love of my life – simply stopped being.

‘The first year will be the worst,’

I think their words were meant to comfort me, to let me know that life would eventually get better, but at the time it felt like being kicked when you were already down.

Those initial three hundred and sixty-five days had been an assault course of firsts. Some stabbed like knife wounds, others had been paper cuts of grief, unexpectedly sharp and painful. You’d expect the first Christmas, first birthday and first anniversary to hurt – and they did. But even worse are the ones that blindside you.

I learnt that you can’t outrun grief because it always knows where to find you, but you can keep yourself so busy that it can only squeeze into the gaps of your life, instead of burying you under an avalanche of sadness.

Some threads run so deep in your tapestry, perhaps it’s impossible to ever unpick them all.