UK: Columnist shares her grief after husband’s sudden death – returns to allotment
Our allotment became so much more than a place to grow veg’; it became a place of healing in nature. Here we are again, in need of that space more than ever.
By Sarah Taffe
Derbyshire News
10th February 2022
Excerpt:
I haven’t sown anything yet; I haven’t done my planning that I would typically love, and I’ve done very little of anything that’s working towards putting some veg’ on our plate.
The truth is that on New Year’s Day, Justin, my seemingly healthy husband and father to our beautiful children, died very suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack.
After a fabulous New Year’s Eve, a meal at Pesto at the Peacock, board games with the kids and Auld Lang Syne to Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, we went to bed in the early hours with great plans and hopes for the year ahead.
In cruel contrast to our evening, just a couple of hours later, our world fell apart.
Twenty one years together ended abruptly.
Now, again, I am navigating grief. It’s not something that I have spoken about openly, but just a month after picking up our allotment key back in 2014, my father committed suicide, following in my mothers’ 2005 footsteps of overdose.
