The Compassionate Friends NSW

11/10/2026

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You don't suddenly become strong when someone you love dies.

You become someone who has to live with something you never imagined having to live with. And that changes you. There is a part of you that will always be who you were before they died. The same heart, the same memories, the same love, the same person who existed before grief became such an enormous part of your life. But there is also someone you have become since, someone you never wanted or expected to be.
And how do you reconcile those two people?
How do you recognise yourself when so much of what made you you has changed? When the way you think, feel, love, trust and experience life is no longer quite the same?
And how do the people who have always known you understand that you are still you, even when they no longer recognise parts of the person standing in front of them?
Grief changes more than how we feel. It changes our relationship with life itself. Our sense of safety, our understanding of happiness, our capacity to cope, our expectations of the future and even the things that once mattered so much to us.
There is a sadness in realising how much of yourself you have lost alongside the person you love. And there is another sadness in knowing that the people around you may continue looking for the person you used to be.
You haven't become stronger simply because you've survived something devastating. You have become someone who knows what it is to live with devastating loss.
You are still you. But you are also someone who has been forever changed by having to live without someone you could nerver imagine having to live without.

09/10/2026

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And I think about you all the time ...

Not every second as a thought with words.

It is deeper than thought now.

You are there in the part of me that knows you are gone, even when I am thinking about something else.

You are there in the way I experience time, love, fear, joy, sadness and everything that came after you.

Your death changed something fundamental in me.

I can concentrate. I can work. I can make decisions, have conversations, make plans and live the ordinary hours of an ordinary day.

But beneath all of it lives the knowledge that you died.

It never switches off.

I don't wake each morning and remember that you are gone. I wake already knowing.

I don't have to think about missing you to miss you.

I don't have to say your name to feel your existence within me.

Loving you and losing you have become part of the way I exist in this world.

Your absence isn't something I visit and then leave behind.

I live with it. It lives within me.

It moves through every part of who I am, quietly at times and unbearably at others, but it is always there.

There is no part of me that has ever stopped knowing you are gone.
Artist Credit: Unknown via Pinterest

07/10/2026

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Hi, I’m Clara and I’m a mom of child loss two times over. My baby Samuel was born “still” and I honestly didn’t know if I was going to ever smile again. My grief was paralyzing. I held that perfect little boy in my arms and I felt my heart shatter quite literally. He was a beautiful child — even his eyelashes were perfectly formed. But, he never breathed. I fell into a depression and thought I’d never return to a good place in life again. It took five years of hard work, millions of tears, and daily walks, but I finally found my way back.

Life was good once again. Family life went on. The other children grew up, remained healthy, and I was so thankful.

Then it happened again. The phone call came on a warm Friday evening in May. This time my heart exploded and was ripped into shreds. I literally fell to the floor with sounds coming from me that didn’t sound human. My 42 year old son Michael died quickly and unexpectedly of a massive heart attack.

This time I grieved hard and deep and constant, but it was a different kind of grieving than with baby Samuel. I now had to catalog 42 years of memories with my son knowing that there would be no more. I also wept uncontrollably for his wife and 3 young children that were left behind. Layers upon layers of grief to work through.

My heart felt numb and 11 years later my heart still has days when it feels numb. I can feel joy, but it’s a “cautious joy”. I feel “flat” about holidays. I struggle to get overly excited about anything. I’m constantly aware of the fact that life can change in an instant. It’s as though I’m living life on “thin ice” if that makes sense.

The second loss let me be fully aware that my heart still had open wounds from the loss of baby Samuel. Can we ever heal completely from the loss of a child? Should we even try?

Living with a heart that has been broken has taken its toll. I know I’ll never be the old me. I’m in the process of loving and caring for the new me — the quieter, more reserved me. The me that guards my feelings at all times. The me that knows today is all that is promised so I’d better make the most of it. Yes, two losses. A heart that broke two times over. And two very different kinds of grief experiences. What about you? How has grief changed you?

05/10/2026

“How did you survive it?”
“I didn’t. I am somebody else.”
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There is a painful truth in these words.
We do survive the death of someone we love, but survival does not mean remaining untouched by it.
The person who existed before the loss could not simply continue as they were. They had known a life in which this person was alive. They had not yet experienced the finality of death, the enormity of absence, or what it would ask of them to keep living with both.
And so, slowly, painfully, another version of the self begins to emerge.
Not an entirely different person. Not someone who has lost everything they once were. Parts of that former self remain. But grief changes what we know about life, what matters to us, what hurts us, what we can tolerate and what we can no longer pretend matters.
We learn how to carry love differently. We learn how happiness and sorrow can exist in the same life. We learn that we can laugh again and still miss them desperately. We discover parts of ourselves we never wanted to have to find.
Perhaps that is what surviving profound loss really looks like.
You don't return to who you were before they died.
You live long enough to meet the person you are becoming after they died.
With thanks to TCF Victoria.

30/09/2026

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Walk-to-Remember registrations available on our website until midday on Oct 20 at: www.tcfnsw.org.au
For registrations after this date, please email: [email protected]

29/09/2026

So true . . . . . 💛

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I will carry you in my heart until there are no more days left to me.
- Fate and Faith via Pinterest

To carry someone in your heart is more than a beautiful metaphor for remembrance.

For those who grieve, it can feel like something far more real.

They remain part of who we are. Their life, their love, their place in our family and the depth of what they mean to us do not disappear simply because they are no longer physically here.

Grief may change almost everything about the way we live and the way we love them, but it does not get to take them from our hearts.

There is a place within us where they are still deeply and unmistakably ours.

Not held only in memory.
Not left behind in another time.
Not reduced to the life they lived or the day they died.

Carried.

Through every year that separates us from the last time we saw them. Through every change in the life that has continued without them. Through all the days we are still given to live.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest truths of grief.

Death can take away their physical presence.

But love continues to carry their presence within us.

And for as long as there are days left to us, there they will be.

25/09/2026

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“If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”

There is something almost unbearable about those words.

Because when someone deeply loved dies, there can be so much love left behind that their death feels impossible beside it.

How could a person be loved this much and still die?

How could every desperate wish for one more day, one more year, one more lifetime have absolutely no power over death?

We would have given anything.

Not the kind of anything people say casually. The real anything.

Years from our own lives. Every possession we owned. Every future we had imagined for ourselves. We would have carried their pain, taken their illness, changed places with them, rewritten whatever moment took them from this life.

Anything.

But grief forces us to live with one of the most devastating truths love will ever encounter.

We could love someone with everything we had and still be unable to keep them alive.

And that can tear at the heart in ways that are difficult to reconcile. Because love is supposed to protect. We hold our children close. We care for the people we love. We spend our lives trying to keep them safe.

Then death comes and shows us there are places even the greatest love cannot reach in time to stop what is happening.

But never mistake that powerlessness for a failure of love.

They did not die because they were not loved enough.

If love alone had been enough to keep them alive, death would never have stood a chance.
- TCFV
Artist Credit: Unknown via Pinterest

20/09/2026

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I hate that there are things I know now because my child died.
I know how quickly a normal moment can turn on me.
I know I can be laughing and then suddenly remember exactly what is missing.
I know there are questions I still don’t know how to answer without doing the math in my head first.
I know I can sit across from someone, carry on a whole conversation, and have another one happening silently in my head.
I know I can miss my child terribly and still have a good day.
And apparently, I know how to keep living without them.
That last one is the hardest to admit.
Because I never wanted to know I could do this.
I would have been perfectly happy never finding out.
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— Izzy Roe
Bereaved Parents of the USA

17/09/2026

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TCF NSW WALK TO REMEMBER 2026
Sydney Walk - 25th of October 2026, Centennial Park
Regional Walks - 24th or 25th of October 2026
Registration using the online form is not possible
after 12:00 pm, 20 October 2026

For registrations after 1st October, depending on availability,
we may not be able to provide you with t-shirts that you might wish to order.

If you are interested in registering after this time, please send an email to: [email protected]

14/09/2026

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Please don't be afraid to say my child's name.
For bereaved parents, a child’s name does not become too heavy to carry after they die. If anything, it becomes more precious. Yet so often, the world grows quiet around that name, as if speaking it might cause more pain, or reopen something that should be left alone.
But love does not end with silence.
When you speak my child’s name, you are not reminding me of my loss, I live with that every single day. What you are doing is acknowledging that my child mattered. That they were here. That they are still deeply loved.
There is a special kind of comfort when someone says their name out loud. It tells me you remember. It tells me you are not afraid to stand with me in this space where grief and love coexist. It tells me my child’s life is still seen.
You don’t have to say it often. But please, don’t let fear be the reason you say nothing at all.
Because to a grieving parent, hearing their child’s name spoken with kindness is never a wound, it is an act of remembering that keeps their child’s presence alive in the world.
Artist Credit: Jim Warren via Pinterest