June is usually a bad month for me, not least because it’s my birthday on the 8th, and while I’ve never had a healthy relationship with it as a day it kind of really started to become stressful about 17 years ago with the death of my stepmother. Her birthday was on the 6th of June (today), she died at 50 from cancer, and it pretty much sent my father into a depression for the rest of his life that he never recovered from.

A year before she got really sick she came to visit me in Brisbane to see her first “grandchild”, she never had children of her own.

And of course she was just as amazing with my child as she had been with me. She really would have been that magical grandmother every child dreams of, which is what makes it so hard to know that 2 years later she was gone, she passed away a few months before my second child was born.

My father was always a better person with her around, and he would have found being a grandparent easier with her help. He was a good grandfather, but his sadness was always there. She was missed by us all, even the children who didn’t get a chance to know her.

Happy Birthday Helen, we miss you.