Liz Lethbridge

Grave to Me: Love letters on loss, grief and self Liz Lethbridge

"I have no idea who or what I am, what do I do? I seem an absolute nothing, just an old lady getting older and more decrepit. I don't think I realised that when you died you would take me with you."

When her husband died after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease, Liz was almost completely derailed with the exhaustion of years of caring for Keith, with the natural grief of loss, above all with the sense that the main prop of her life had been kicked away, and the prospect of life on her own seemed dark: hopeless, pointless, impossible.

She sought refuge in a private journal, where the entries soon developed into a series of letters to her dead husband. These letters record the depths of grief and fear, the feeling of helplessness and uselessness which Liz suffered. But soon they begin to chart the gradual return of purpose, wholeness and a sense of identity, as Liz reflects on a full, adventurous life, and on love, service to God and other people, Keith's continuing influence on people, and her own roles in all this. They conclude with her realisation that her eyes must be directed to the front, not back over her shoulder. She finally bids Keith farewell, and sets out on her own new adventures.

Liz's journey and the lives it vividly recalls, recorded with good nature and humour alongside the pain, shares the courage and wisdom of a woman who finds her way to a new self, after the old had been taken in the death of her husband.

"Dying was the end of a long beginning."