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From the beginning of my Grief's Journey I have always been affected by the loss others were going through. I know we all have had such feelings when we know all to well what must be going on inside that other persons heart. I stated once before that it is like being in a lifeboat with others who are grieving watching our ship sink in front of us. Once again this is hitting me as I now know people who have died from this virus and another who is quite sick and I think of their families and loved ones who couldn't even be with them when they died. I think this is a new kind of grief that happens when you are a veteran of sorrow and old wounds are sensitive to the touch. Once again I am made aware of the fact that I am not the same. I will never be the same. I am a person of grief who sees the world in a very different way.

It was about three weeks since Lily’s death and we were in Wanaka, visiting my brother and his partner, leaving my sister back in Auckland. One night while I was there, I woke up after having a dream of Lily. In the dream Lily simply said, “Tell Lou I’m sorry I wasn’t there”. So not thinking much of it, I was prompted to call my sister, Louise. I asked her how she was and she said she was fine, although she said she had been to a funeral the previous day. She had managed to get through the service with dry eyes until the end when someone got up and read the very same poem that she, my sister, had read for Lily at her funeral, three weeks earlier. At this point she lost it and could hold back the tears no longer. Lily had obviously been with her at this funeral, trying to let her know that she was still there with her. Lots of love, Erica The poem read: “Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room I am I and you are you, whatever we were to each other That we are still, call me by my old familiar name Speak to me in the easy way you always used Put no difference into your tone Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow Laugh as we always laughed At the little jokes we always enjoyed together Play, smile, think of me, pray for me Let my name be ever the household word that it always was Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow in it Life means all that it ever meant, it is the same as it ever was There is absolute unbroken continuity What is death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you for an interval somewhere very near Just around the corner, All is well. Nothing is past; nothing is lost One brief moment and all will be as it was before How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!” by Canon Henry Scott-Holland