Nico's Legacy Blog

Eternal Flame 0

Eternal Flame

I used to pass my days at home in silence.  I like to work in silence and I find background noise distracting, but it also means that I can spend over 8 hours a day in complete silence, which sometimes seems to make me just too thoughtful, too introspective.  So some months ago I tried having Radio 2 on in the background, just for a couple of hours to break the silence and give me some contact with the world outside of my head and my computer. One day I was listening to the radio and a song came on that make me literally shake and made tears run silently down my face.  That song was “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles.  Not...

Signposts 0

Signposts

Of the people I follow and of those who follow me (on Twitter and via this blog) and of the people I support away from social media, some are much nearer to the start of their journey, some are still loving and fighting for their children and some are further on in their journey than me. At the beginning I found these almost endless variations of these journeys hard to process, but now I’m further down the road I am starting to recognise the signposts.  Things that people told me a year ago which made no sense then, now make so much sense as I too reach that place.  I remember things that people said and now, it comforts me.  I have...

What matters 0

What matters

When I was 8 months old my Social Services file was altered to include the words “No Negro blood, no Jewish blood – suitable for adoption” and with these words my life was changed.  As a consequence of this new page in the file I was adopted by a white middle-class family. I identify as white with mixed heritage. I have fair hair, fair skin and blue eyes.  I’m 20% white European and the rest of me is Sephardi Jewish, Gujarati and Gambian.  I can trace my family back for 39 generations, which is a lot of history and some of that history is not very nice.  Between the Spanish Inquisition, the East India trading company and the Royal Africa Company, there’s...

The Write Stuff 0

The Write Stuff

It was never a plan. I never meant to stay away so long. There was never a point where I sat down and decided “I won’t write anything more”. It just happened. It happened because the act of writing became too hard. Remembering to breathe had become rather difficult and those moments in between taking breaths had also become something I needed to think about, to concentrate on, in order to make it from one breath to another, from one moment to the next. Just existing took all my energy. Then there was the sorrow. Some days it washed over me and rolled over me like surf, sucking me under until I couldn’t see daylight. Some days it felt more difficult to...

Nico’s Legacy 0

Nico’s Legacy

This is the blog I desperately searched for and couldn’t find after the death of my son.  I needed to read the words of someone who had gone through the same situation as me and I couldn’t find them. This blog is my personal reflections about my personal journey, but I hope it will be helpful to you. Some of it will be sad, some of it will be angry, some of it will be uplifting and some of it will be funny – because that’s how life after death is.