Now I am in the Autumn of my life, or as the late Dr Wayne Dyer would say ‘the afternoon of my life’, I am increasingly hearing of the passing of someone I know.

Loss is a fact of life. We all lose loved ones. By the time we get to middle-age many of us are ‘orphans.’

I think about all the people throughout the world, who daily lose loved ones, sometime losing entire families. How do they cope?

I don’t think we ever get over the loss of our loved ones, but slowly we learn to live with it.

In the first days after my husband passed, I would wake in the morning and for a few seconds I would forget what had happened and then I would remember. During the first weeks I would just curl up in bed, I did not know how I would survive without my beloved.  As the months passed I tried to submerge my grief by keeping busy; writing and gardening. I would not let myself give in to it, for I thought if I could not keep that grief  contained, it would do me in. Of course that can not be healthy. Repressed emotional pain causes physical illnesses.

Many of us have pain and suffering in the depths of our consciousness we try not to acknowledge. We keep ourselves busy trying to fill our days. We do not want to open the door to our sorrow and our depression to come up.

When I started writing my memoir ‘I Was Only Nineteen’ I had to stop writing it for a year, because it brought back all the pain at the ‘loss’ of my baby. Since I have had my book published, many women have come forward and told me, my story is their story. They still carry within them, after all these years, the pain of having to give up their baby. For us young women, giving up our babies was to us like they had died.  We didn’t forget the pain  – we just slowly learnt to live with it.

I do not know if she was the first person to say it, but Queen Elizabeth II said, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”