I made myself a promise very early on that I was going to walk straight through the centre of my grief. No shortcuts and definitely no avoidance. I needed to do what I had not been able to with Dad. I wanted to feel it all.
When Jill was four, her father died. He went to play his weekly game of five-a-side football, had a heart attack and never came home. In 2017, in cruelly similar circumstances, Jill’s partner Matt went to a gym class, suffered a cardiac arrest and never came home.
These two tragic events frame Jill’s story in Life Reimagined as she explores how she dealt with profound grief as a child and teenager and then to her later in life as a partner and mother. When Matt died, Jill committed to processing her grief in ways she hadn’t attempted before: she had to rebuild her father, recreate that grief and lose him all over again. She explored the physiology of grief, attended grief retreats, read every book out there and underwent extensive therapy.
But Jill knows that not everyone has the time, money or inclination to do the same, so, above all, A Life Reimagined is Jill's space to share what she has discovered and learnt – both about herself and about how we view grief as a society – in the hope that she can help readers feel like they can start to put one foot in front of the other. From trauma can come massive growth and, in this intimate and deeply personal book, Jill talks to you like a best friend, with her characteristic warmth, empathy and compassion, guiding you to find your own way through grief and start to feel hopeful about life again.