This is now the fourth time that we have had to experience the worst day of our lives: the day that Louise, our beloved daughter, died.

In some ways it is just another day without her; in others it focuses and pinpoints all the grief that is always just there, somewhere, tangible yet intangible, visceral yet surreal. Time is not a great healer, whatever they say. It just makes the pain different; it doesn’t stop you from crying or from dreaming about happier times. Last night, for instance, Louise came to me as a little girl, with her long ringlets, in her thumb-sucking snuggle-rug days. Somehow I knew she was going to die, yet we did all these normal things like giving her and her brother a bath (they were about four and six in the dream). Then she went to bed dressed in a jokey big hat she used to wear. And I looked at her, half asleep, and said to Ross, I can’t believe she is going to die, she is so beautiful. Then I woke up. That pain  – of waking to the reality of forever  – never goes away.

The good part about it all is the loving messages that pour in from all over the world, from young and old, the friends who change their FB profiles to photos with her; the flowers they put on the Bench in Camden; the memorials they have in their far-flung places, from London, to Varanasi, to Australia. It is a global embrace of love and healing.

 

 

This year we are blessed to have one of Louise’s great friends, Dot, staying with us. She is travelling in Malaysia and popped down. We spend the weekend doing the sorts of things we would have done if Louise were with us – cooking and eating  exotic meals, downing cocktails in hip bars in Chinatown and on top of the world at Ku De Ta, Marina Bay Sand’s hotel (‘as close as you could get to heaven,’ my sister says); cycling round old Singapore on Pulau Ubin (Louise was hopeless on a bike); eating delicious local food in formica-topped restaurants while seated on plastic chairs; wandering round Little India and buying costumes and bindis to dress up in – and eating a vegetarian thali, complete with a little meat, just like Lou would have done. It is a great way to remember her, and we manage to laugh too.

 

And of course she is always with us; she just doesn’t grow older like everyone else.

 

I leave you with a link to the song and video Little London Lou by Tim Arnold, the Soho Hobo (recently seen on The Voice), composed in her memory, and the lyrics below

Little London Lou