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4d • The Lantern Room 🏮
The Lantern Room 💜🏮💜
Why I Created The Lantern Room. 🥰
People often ask me why grief feels so important to me. I think it’s important that I tell some of my story for context 🥰🌱🏮
The truth is, grief has been woven through my life from a very young age.
On my thirteenth birthday, my mum married her second husband. Just a month later, he died. None of us knew that years of alcoholism had caused so much damage to his body. Within weeks of their wedding, he was in hospital. His leg had to be amputated, but it was too late. A blood clot travelled to his heart, and he died.
Overnight, my mum became a widow. I was just thirteen.
What followed shaped me in ways I wouldn’t understand for many years. I found myself carrying responsibilities no child should ever have to carry. I helped organise the funeral and was expected to be the strong one, supporting the adults around me while trying to make sense of my own grief. I was taken to view his body because I was told I was needed. It was an experience that stayed with me long after everyone else had moved on.
Just over a year later, my mum remarried and moved to Spain, shortly before my sixteenth birthday. It was another profound loss, and one that left me navigating much of my teenage life on my own.
By the time I was sixteen, I was already working in care. Not long afterwards, I was offered a role on a palliative care unit. Looking back now, it feels as though all those difficult experiences had quietly prepared me to sit beside people during the hardest moments of their lives. It became work that I loved deeply.
Grief, however, continued to find me.
My sister died at just thirty-six from alcoholism, leaving behind her teenage daughter. The grandfather who had always made me feel loved passed away, and I wasn’t told until after he had been cremated. Then, years later, my mum’s third husband died suddenly while they were living in Spain. At eighteen years old, six months pregnant, I flew to another country to organise another funeral. It felt as though I had stepped back into the same role I had been given as a child.
Later, I moved into mental health, where I discovered the power of creativity in supporting emotional wellbeing. I became fascinated by art therapy and watched people express feelings that words alone could never quite reach.
Eventually, my own path led me to study illustration at university. Looking back now, it feels as though every part of my life has been gently leading me here. My experiences of grief. My years in palliative care. My time in mental health. My life as an artist.
The Lantern Room is where those paths meet. 🏮
This isn’t about fixing grief, because grief isn’t something that needs fixing. It’s about making space for it. Through creativity, gentle reflection and shared humanity, I hope to create a place where people can honour the people they love, tell the stories that matter, and discover that they don’t have to carry those stories alone.
This is only a small part of my story, and I know you have your own.
So, if you’re ready, let’s light The Lantern Room.
One story.
One memory.
One creative moment at a time.
💜🏮💜
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The Lantern Room 💜🏮💜
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