Join us on Tuesday 5th March at 6.30pm as we welcome Clare Mackintosh to St Nicolas’ Church to discuss her new book, I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This: 18 Assurances on Grief. This event is supported by Child Bereavement UK.

Grief is universal, but it’s also as unique to each of us as the person we’ve lost. It can be overwhelming, exhausting, lonely and unreasonable. It is there when we least expect it and is seemingly never-ending. Wherever you are with your grief, and whoever you’re grieving for, I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This is here to support you. To tell you, until you believe it, that things will get easier.

After Clare Mackintosh’s little boy died in 2006, a neighbour brought her a bunch of daffodils and promised it wouldn’t always hurt as it did then. Clare didn’t believe her, but as the years passed, those words began to take root. It didn’t get better, but it did get easier. Now Clare grows daffodils – a sign of hope after a long winter – as a way of remembering her son. Fourteen years after her son passed away, Clare tweeted about her experience of discovering grief no longer controlled her life, making some promises to others who might be going through the early days of their own grief, and it had the most incredible response all over the world. Yet what you can fit into a tweet is limited and Clare couldn’t reply to the thousands of people who reached out to her – and thus the idea for this book was born.

With 18 short assurances that are full of compassion – drawn from Clare’s experiences of losing her son and her father – this is the book she needed then.