Hello I’m Fi

At the age of just 41, I became a young widow and the parent of a bereaved child. After 3 years of living with acute myeloid leukaemia, my husband Matt died in March 2014. Our son Harry was only 7 years old when Matt was first diagnosed, and just 10 when he died. It’s hard to find the words to describe the sense of overwhelm I felt in becoming a solo parent, but one key memory I have is of feeling the most enormous sense of responsibility to ‘get it right’ for our son when it came to support.

I’d love to say that having worked in the field of children’s mental health for 6 years at this point, I had all the answers … but that wouldn’t be true. Professional knowledge and personal experience are entirely different things.

I did know from my professional experience and the research out there on children’s bereavement, that bereaved children do much better when the system around them (parents, wider family and schools mainly) are confidently working together to support the big feelings children have at these times. The challenge was that I had enormously big feelings too and much of the time in those first few years it felt like a balancing act of my needs versus his … but underneath it all I knew “If I’m okay, Harry will be okay.”

This is the foundation on which Next Chapter Bereavement Services is built. I know solo parenting is a big task that has been forced upon you and I want to help you feel okay so that your children can feel okay too.

I am now 10 years into widowhood and I recognise bereavement has different stages. The first few years I spent doing a lot of emotional processing of my grief, but the last 3-4 years has surprisingly taken me on a bit of a personal development journey. I don’t say this lightly, but it’s been one of the good things that has come out of the something bad … bereavement has given me an opportunity to reflect on the type of life I want to live. There is nothing like the crisis of your partner dying that brings home the message that ‘life is short’. As a result I’ve found myself more recently living by the mantra of ‘feel the fear and do it anyway.’ Believe me, you would not have been reading this website 3 years ago! Nothing takes away the loss of Matt but I know he would be wanting Harry and me to be living full and fun lives (he was, after all, very much about the fun!) If this rings true for you but you’re not sure how to make it happen, I’m keen to support those of you who are in the rebuilding stages of life. I truly believe there is a good and full life to be lived after the loss of your partner.

Through the services I offer at Next Chapter, it’s my hope to capture the range of stages people find themselves in on their bereavement journey. I’ve learnt a lot along the way myself and it’s this unique blend of personal experience and professional knowledge that I’ll bring in my conversations with you.