Today, the parents returned home to Canada and for the first time since the first week in April, it will be just us at home.They, along with Andrea’s parents in the first week after Nicholas’s death, have given immeasurable support when we needed most. They helped take care of many of the details in running the home while we dealt with other matters as adjusting to life without Nicholas.

But they can not stay indefinitely. They still have a life of their own in Canada. We did manage to make their stay enjoyable as possible. I took them to the Celtic festival this past week, they ate at Red Lobster for the first time, toured the Reynolds estate but most of all they had time to spend with Madeleine who proved herself as endlessly endearing throughout their stay.

So now we are on our own.

We started to go to a support group that would allow us to get a grip on our grief from Nicholas’s loss. HeartStrings is an organisation that grew out of a mother’s desire to deal with the grief of her child and finding no group that dealt with this type of grief specifically, formed this group a few years back in Greensboro NC. We had our first session last week and we are encouraged enough by our group to continue with it despite the difficulty in co-ordinating baby sitters for Madeleine.

It will take time no doubt for the soul to heal but life moves inexorably on and we have other things that need attending to soon. But we are now better than we were five weeks ago when all of this happened and we take things one step at a time and I think that is what our families want us to do right now. the non-important things in life will take care of themselves in some fashion but we have to know what happened to us and remain strong as a family but never forgetting who Nicholas was.