Life After Loss Grief Cafe .

29/08/2026

Next Saturday Our CIC Found My Niche will have a stall at this event at Doncaster Corn Exchange.
Drop by and say hello 👋

28/08/2026

Word of the day : Choice

Do we have a Choice when we are grieving?

We have no choice when it comes to being bereaved . No one we know is immortal. We can’t, for the most part, know exactly when our person will die .

Where , sometimes this can come with choice . How we mourn them is our choice . For some , culture and tradition play their part in this how .

How we honor them. Go forward with our own lives IS our choice. We can choose to do it alone OR find support. We can choose to remember only their passing , their illness , their pain OR we can choose to remember all the parts of them that we continue to carry as love for them .

We can choose to continue to live with wishes & regrets, anger & resentment or unsaid gratitude OR we can choose to live by resolving those parts of the relationship you had , for the one you now have .
That is always a choice.

Wishing you peace and the courage to know whatever you do is your choice. Everyone will have their own opinions but ultimately it’s our individual choice .

27/08/2026

Grief V Guilt
This is not a post for sympathy but just telling it like it is.
I did a live but wasn’t sure it had uploaded so did a reel as well 🫨

27/08/2026

27/08/2026

Yesterday we held our regular peer support sessions ❤️‍🩹. At both Life After Loss Grief Cafes ☕️we spoke about resilience.

NOT ‘putting on a brave face ‘ or ‘having to get on with things’ but recognizing just how far we have come in our grief .

Self limiting beliefs, doubts and being held back by feelings of guilt or judgement by others are common things people that are grieving can experience.

If that’s you , we hear you , we acknowledge those feelings and we support you 🫶

Visual ⬇️created by yours truly just for you using the mindful digital app Happy Color - Color by Number

26/08/2026

Caregivers and the impact it can have after you lose your person
We spoke of this very thing at our Life After Loss Grief Cafe This morning

Dolly Parton spent much of her life giving to others.

And, in the end, she gave in another way that many of us understand all too well.

After the death of her husband, Carl, Dolly publicly spoke about something that is common among caregivers and those who have loved someone through a long illness. She admitted that while she was taking care of him, she had not been taking care of herself.

After he died, she said, she realized that she had let many things go that she should have been addressing.

How many of us can relate?

When someone we love is sick, our own needs can become almost invisible. We make the appointments. We manage the medications. We sit in hospital rooms. We watch for changes. We worry. We stay alert.

And somewhere along the way, we may stop paying attention to ourselves.

Then comes the death.

And suddenly, there is a different kind of exhaustion.

The caregiving ends, but grief begins.

The adrenaline that kept us going disappears. The appointments stop. The routines change. The person who needed us is gone, and we are left not only with our grief, but sometimes with the physical and emotional toll of everything that came before it.

Dolly's death should not be reduced to a single explanation. Her cause of death has not yet been announced. But her own words remind us of something important:

The person who is caring for someone who is dying is also going through something.

And when the caregiving ends, we do not simply return to who we were before.

Sometimes, only after the person we love is gone do we begin to realize how much of ourselves we put aside while trying to keep them here.

So today, as we mourn Dolly Parton, perhaps we can also remember the caregivers.

And remember to ask them something we do not ask often enough:

Who is taking care of you?

Sydney – Until Death Do We Part

26/08/2026

Can you spot the difference?
Putting this out there again this time with the help of AI

Just to demonstrate something artificial isn’t always the answer.
I gave Chatty man very specific instructions as to what I needed help with particularly around fonts , colours , our logo but it kept giving me its version , not what I asked for .

Real people listen. They help you with what you need . AI has its place but not when it come to Listening with our hearts . Grief support needs people .

*interested in the maths? See comments below⬇️)

See today’s schedule on the comments ☕️🍪❤️‍🩹

25/08/2026

Many of us may well be feeling bereft hearing of Dollys death . Communal grief is the feelings we experience when , despite not knowing someone personally, we have known of them and feel a deep connection to that person .
Her music touched the world .
Her dedication to early years literacy was well known .

Songs we grew up with , played at significant occasions connected to our loved ones perhaps , all form those bonds . So, what you may be feeling now ,is natural . You will shed tears for her and that is beautiful because she was loved as a person an icon and artist .

I too loved her in Steel Magnolias. My favorite film of all time . We only spoke about it at our group last week .
What was your favorite Dolly song?

RIP beautiful lady x

24/08/2026

Long post alert 🚨
Think we all know what DIY stands for don’t we?

But can you always Do It Yourself?

When it comes to grief we need the right people and the right tools for the job . And the job is not to fix us . We’re not broken we’re grieving .
Be it the loss of our person , our trust, our hopes and dreams, relationships . Whatever’s is causing us emotional pain help is at hand .

We can muddle on through, trying to do it ourselves , feeling like there’s no end in sight “when will this feel better?”
Or , we can look on you tube, read reviews ask AI or google where to find help.

In the early stages of bereavement for example , funeral directors , celebrants and solicitors are on hand . They carry us along as we go through the motion. But what then . Once the funerals over?

The images below tell a story . The very day we moved into our bungalow almost 9 years ago my mum was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor . I put my life on hold , spend everyday ,as much as I could, with her at the hospital until she died 12 days later.

My world fell apart . My hopes and dreams shattered . She was never going to see our home , come over for Sunday lunch ? be there at our wedding.

How was I supposed to put heart and soul into the renovations we’d planned for months .

The day after we’d moved in , 3 weeks before Christmas , I came back from the hospital late at night shattered physically and emotionally to find my partner had begun demolishing the kitchen . My heart sank , I wanted to scream “WHY HAVE DO DONE THIS ! I CAN’T COPE WITH THIS RIGHT NOW!!”
But he could . I didn’t need to . He was my on my team . Doing what he could ,in the best way he knew how , to help me.

So as I spent precious time with mum, he came home everyday after work and started the transformation .

It was a positive , a step forward when the overwhelm could quite easily have taken over . We already had the delivery date for the units and appliances . The joiner and electrician booked . We had the right people for the job. We had those things in place .

Life doesn’t always go to plan but having the right people and the right tools in place ,or at least been able to find them easily ,when they don’t go to plan , is important . To move forward ,not move on . You’re taking the love , the ups and downs with you .
How do I know this ? Because I’ve been there .

I could quite easily have spiraled into depression when mum died . I was now an adult orphan at 53.
But, I carried on I found a purpose but all the while I kept putting rocks (aka events and emotions ) in the rucksack of my life .

It wasn’t until over 6 years after mum died I realized I hadn’t truly grieved hers or dads death PLUS a WHOLE LOAD of other 💩💩💩💩💩
So at the age of 59 , I sought grief therapy . Initially to train as a therapist to learn how to help others . I thought I was ok . I didn’t even realise I’d been carrying that heavy rucksack yet alone that it was full to overflowing!

I now have the tools 🧰 to handle emotional pain that comes my way and help others learn those tools too.
Loss doesn’t have to be overwhelming -there is light at the end of the tunnel as and when you are ready to walk alongside the grief towards it .

If your rucksack is dragging you down visit my website www.foundmyniche.co.uk and lets arrange a call , a zoom or let’s grab a coffee if your in

24/08/2026

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Get this up in your tablet or laptop , scan with your phone and jobs a good’en 👍