On October 16th, my sisters and I usually take a few minutes out of our days to think of our Dad and how his life - and then his death - helped shape us as young women living in today’s world. We’ll let each other know we’re thinking of him and we’ll realise how ridiculously lucky we are that we had one another when it happened, when we were growing up, and now, when the date comes along and we need a little extra loving. 

This year is a little different. This year, we will still message each other. We will still think of our Dad and we will still feel incredibly lucky to have each other. But this year, we get to do something great with our loss. We get to do something that will really shine a light in his memory. 

In honour of our Daddy Adam and in honour of all the children who have lost members of their family, this October 3rd, Rosie, Millie and I will be running all 26 miles of the London Marathon. (Lordy). In order to make this so special, all three of us have been invited to run for a charity that massively supported us as three little girls who had suddenly lost their daddy. This charity set up a weekend camp for us where we got to meet other bereaved children. We played games with them, spent hours learning team building exercises and worked really hard on those really difficult questions children aren’t always asked when they are faced with grief. This weekend for us was monumental. We got goodie bags and goodie boxes and we had down time, where a member of the charity team read us a story. All the team leaders were incredible. They dealt with our grief effortlessly. They provided us with a physical place in the sky where we were able to visualise our Dad being. They helped us understand all the weird things we were feeling and knew exactly what to say when we asked them, ‘where do dead people go?’ 

They, and my mother, my Nanny, and so many other people, guided us through our Dad’s death so brilliantly that when the three of us look back on that time, neither one of us can recall copious amounts of stress and trauma related to it. They supported us in a way that meant today, 23 years after his death, our lives are not, and will never be, defined by it. 

This charity’s name is Daisy’s Dream and since 1996, will have helped endless amounts of children and their families come to terms with a bereavement. They have also recently expanded their services to include families affected by serious and terminal illness, often when grief can slowly start to seep into a child’s life, especially if it is not handled early enough and not in the safest hands. 

To have all three of us running for a charity that supported us irrefutably through what must have been a crazy hard time, is so, so special to my family. We might be nuts running 26 miles but thousands of people do this all the time so it can’t be that bad, right? 

The link to our fundraising page is directly below, along with information about Daisy’s Dream and the incredibly necessary work they do. Let’s get this catastrophe started!