Our team: Amanda, Eve, Hannah, Jo, Laurie, Lisa, Lynne, Olivia, Roger, Romana, Ryan, Susie are taking part in Edward's Trust #PassTheBaton Team Challenge on Sat 3rd July - Sun 4th July. We will be working around the clock for 24 hours in order to raise awareness and funds for Edward's Trust. Edward's Trust are a local bereavement charity who support children and families facing loss and surviving bereavement.

A message from Amanda and Roger:

Thank you to Hannah, Jo, Laurie, Lisa, Lynne, Olivia, Romana, Ryan, Susie and of course Eve for being part of the Ginger Brummie Pass The Baton Team!

This is an article written by Amanda for Edward's Trust talking about how they have helped:

Our son, Oliver, took his own life at the start of his second year at university in October 2019, just a few days before his 20^thbirthday.  It felt like my world had been blown apart and I would never be able to put together the shattered pieces.  Both my husband and I said that we felt we would never be happy again; all the joy had been sucked out of life.

Yet we knew that we couldn’t stay in this state and we needed to find help. We have some fantastic friends and family who ran towards us rather than away and were brave enough to sit with me while I poured out my grief.  One of these friends recommended that I seek counselling from Edward’s Trust. I had never had counselling before but was willing to try anything that might help with the agony of the emotion I was feeling. 

To be honest, before my first session I thought, ‘How will this help? I am not going to say anything to this person I haven’t already said to my friends.’  I decided that if my counsellor said one useful thing in my first session I would go back again.  Of course, she did.  What I hadn’t grasped before was the wisdom, knowledge and skill of this person who was an expert in bereavement and the grief process.  She reassured me that what I was feeling was completely understandable.  She gave me the tools to work through the different aspects of my grief and sometimes challenged my thinking – in a wonderfully gentle way of course.

For me journaling has been a lifeline.  At first, the pain was so bad I was just trying to escape it but one of the helpful things my counsellor said was, “Sit with it,” so simple, yet turning to face the feelings and giving them permission to come and then recording those thoughts in writing some how seemed to quieten them.  At first, this was a very regular cycle of sitting with painful feelings, then writing, then a few days of feeling a slight respite before it all built up again.  But gradually, although I miss Oliver desperately every day and think of him constantly, the overwhelming periods of grief are getting further apart.

My husband Roger and I have always had a happy and stable
marriage.  This was something that we were certain we could depend on. However, as we are very different people, our approach to the grieving process differed.  Not wanting to upset or over burden each other we retreated into our own thoughts, coping in our own way.  This made the initial time of mourning a very lonely time.  By now we were both seeing the same counsellor and she picked up on this pattern and sensing the loneliness in grief suggested that we have some joint sessions.  This worked really well for us and has helped us share our feelings so that now grief seems a much less lonely place.

I really don’t know what state I would be in without the counselling from Edward’s Trust.  The fact that I was able to continue until the time was right to stop, rather than have a set number of sessions, was really important.  I know that life will never be the way it was before and that it will never be okay that Oliver died but I do have hope that life can and will be good again. Thank you Edward’s Trust!