Fragments of Hope: Finding quiet strength in early grief

Grief changes everything, but within it, we find a strength we never knew we had.

As we step into a new year, I find myself thinking about how time has changed. For most people, January is a time for fresh starts and resolutions, a chance to look ahead with hope. But when you’re grieving, time doesn’t move in the same way. It bends, blurs, and breaks apart. There’s only before and after. And somewhere in between, you learn how to keep going.

The start of a new year is usually a time for reflection. But when you’re grieving, time stops obeying the calendar. Dates lose their meaning. The only timeline that exists is before grief and after grief. Maybe that changes with time, I don’t know. Ten months into this after-grief world, I’m not sure it ever will.

Time lost its meaning, and the world felt divided into before and after. Before Paul. After Paul.

Hospital and loss

Paul died suddenly and unexpectedly. I took him into hospital on March 3rd. I left without him on March 24th. We thought it was an infection, something a strong dose of antibiotics could fix. It wasn’t. It was stage 4 cancer, and no amount of medicine could help.

In the days that followed, everything felt unreal, as if I was watching someone else’s life unfold.

Early grief

Life became surreal. It still is, in part. It feels like a sliding doors moment, and your mind keeps searching for the door that could take you back. I’ve searched and searched for the sliding door but it is nowhere to be found.

Eventually, the practicalities took over. There were things to do, forms to fill, people to call. Doing became my way of surviving.

Coping and hope

Without Paul, I had to become my own anchor. The only way I could do that was by choosing hope over anxiety. Hope had to become my best friend. Staying in bed all day, as my children would call “bed rotting,” would have been easier. But it wasn’t a road I wanted to take.

When the tasks were done and the silence returned, I had to find new ways to keep going. That’s when writing found me.

Writing and healing

So I created my own grief activity pack, filled with writing prompts and small exercises for the days when anxiety tried to take hope’s place. It helped me find small moments of calm when everything felt too heavy. I’ve shared it on my website in case it might help someone else too.

Then I began writing Paul’s memoirs. It became the most comforting thing I’ve ever done.

Life is a little more manageable. It’s not easy, but I never expected it to be. I am still writing his memoirs. I am still surviving, and I am still letting more hope into my thoughts than anxiety.

The initial shock has gone, and the daily routine of life continues. The weekly supermarket shop no longer reduces me to tears. I still give myself one thing to do each day. The type of tasks have progressed from the early day survival tasks such as “make an edible dinner” (I can highly recommend subscription food boxes for those first few months). My tasks now include my writing, stepping outside my comfort zone, and living more in the moment.

Today’s positivity may not carry forward to tomorrow. Something may trigger the spiralling pain of grief. Anxiety might win for that day. I allow days filled with Netflix when grief exhaustion sets in. But each day you survive with grief in your soul is a day that proves that you will make it to the next.

You look back on the life you’ve led with grief and you’re not entirely sure how you made it this far, but you did. Knowing that you got this far means that there is a strength within you that will get you to the next point in your journey. That might be getting through the next day, or week, or month.

I’ve still got the death anniversary day to deal with. Right now I’m not sure how it will be, but I know that I will survive it and make it through. There were times that I felt like giving up. The desire to be with Paul was huge, and I had to dig deep to keep finding the fragments of hope in each day. On the bad days I would send a friend a photo of these hope fragments so that I had to recognise them and acknowledge them.

Grieving is not easy. It is messy and it is brutal, and yet it can also teach you how to fill your life with love and hope if you allow it to show you.

Paul was always the positive one. I was the glass-half-empty kind of person. Now, each day, I try to live the way he would want me to, to keep going, to experience life, and to find joy in the everyday. I believe I’ll see him again one day, and when I do, I hope I’ll see pride in his eyes.

Grief changes everything, but it also reveals a quiet strength you never knew you had. Each day you survive with grief in your heart is proof that you can keep going. If you’re reading this and walking your own path through loss, take a moment to notice how far you’ve come, even if it’s just one small step at a time.

If you want to use writing then why not write about what daily life felt like in the early days of your grief, and what it feels like now. What small shifts or moments of peace have you noticed along the way?

Be proud and recognise how far you have come.