On 26 August 2024, my beautiful mother lost her one year battle with motor neurone disease, and passed away peacefully in her sleep at 66 years old. To watch an otherwise healthy and vibrant woman deteriorate so quickly, losing her ability to first walk, then eat, then speak and finally breathe, was heartbreaking and horrendous. To navigate her passing and the tidal wave of grief that accompanied it at 7 months pregnant was nothing short of excruciating. The day of her death was my first day of maternity leave - time I had planned to use to be with her as much as was possible before the arrival of my son. Not to be.

What followed was the most impossibly difficult year of my life. I haven’t yet been able to come to terms with how challenging it is to manage the grief of losing your mother against the backdrop of becoming a mother (in my case for the second time, with a particularly challenging birth and baby). As I finally return to work and start to string together more sleep and more sense it’s only in the last couple of months I’ve started to feel like some version of my old self.

A constant for me has always been running. It was a safe space during the pandemic before I became a mother. And now, a place to work through my grief. I’m not a natural runner, but as the Rob Burrow Leeds Half Marathon takes place in May, (my mums birth month) and I’m through that first year of postpartum chaos, it feels like the right time to challenge myself and to enter in her memory. Finding the time to get the training done juggling work and two under 5 is an almost impossible task, it involves pre 5am wake up calls most mornings after broken nights to sneak in intervals, runs on my lunch breaks between calls, but we’re getting there. It’s the least I can do to honour the memory of my lovely mum, and to show my children what you can do if you work hard and put your mind to it.

If you’ve made it to the end of this and feel compelled to support an incredible charity who make a real tangible difference to the lives of those suffering with MND (and believe me I know first hand) please donate, and know you have my eternal gratitude. The support they have provided to our family from the point of her diagnosis right through to her passing and beyond has been exceptional, and it would mean the world to me to be able to raise as much money as I can for them in her name to help other people navigate what we’ve been through.

Thank you.