People often look at me with horror when I tell them my story, share with them my experiences of death and dying, and I suppose that, objectively speaking, by the time I was sixty I had had perhaps more than what might be considered my share of death: I was fourteen when my father died suddenly; twenty six when my first child died only three days after his birth; fifty two when I lost my husband while he was waiting for an organ transplant. All the deaths were terrible, agonising, earth shaking experiences – but all of them also taught me things which, although I never would have hoped to discover in such a way, I am more than grateful to have learned. Patience; forgiveness; compassion. The power of great love. My spirit has been honoured and emboldened by death’s lessons – and as                             taught me that first, lonely summer following my husband’s death, when I told her it felt like I was also grieving the loss of myself, that the happy woman I always was had somehow died, too, I would come to know a joy deeper and richer than I ever knew before – and so I have. So I have.