I spend a great deal of my day concentrating on what I have: my health, healthy children, a safe house and a degree of security. However the irony is that I have, until recently, lost sight of the things I have lost.

It is two years since we moved to Edinburgh, almost two years since Keith died: the full complexities of loss and grief are only now visible in their intricate patterns. I grieve greatly for a career I once had and also for the people who were in it. I suppose I grieve also for moments that have passed, this is probably a normal part of growing older, but the lens of loneliness I now inhabit can’t help but magnify the loss that I feel acutely through my core. It erodes some of the hope I have within me, bit by bit, slowly, every day.

I am well aware that some of this grief I feel has been self inflicted: I have withdrawn myself from circles of support (admittedly sometimes through need to leave a physical place) and I have misplaced a great deal of friendships along the way – we as a race can all be guilty of this, over time.

I also grieve greatly for the person I was. Perhaps we all do this, as we get older. It’s hard for me to separate the natural form of things from any other – I can’t tell how much of this is purely the wisdom I’ve accrued as I head into my late thirties. I’m a much more serious person that I think I have ever been. I used to believe I shone a small amount of light in a room, now I don’t think I do that any more. I feel more mineral than organic, I don’t want to dance either, and that is very sad. Recently my dreams have been filled with faces from the past. I wonder about these people, old friends from school, university, other lives. I wonder what they would think of me now. On holiday this summer I came to a great deal of peace accepting I am unlikely to be the person I always wanted to be, doing the things I always wanted to do. Again, is that because I am lonely and widowed, a single parent with the pain of my children on my shoulders? Or has it come from growing older, accepting really that dreams and hopes are for our children? My youngest daughter told me not too long ago she had forgotten what I look like when I smile.

Fortunately I have them, my children, my healthy sparkling children who can be the jewels and silk and colour in my life. They dance and sing and dream and demand of me every day to make me feel needed and wanted enough. Around us the Edinburgh festival is exploding with standardly riotous energy, it enfolds us in its dynamism and vigour and sweat. For now we will take in as much of it as we can, and enjoy absorbing the creativity of others. Right now the best way for us to survive is to be as much as we can in the moment, focusing on what we have, and how very lucky we are to have it.