Margaret had been married for fifty-three years when her husband Tom died on a Tuesday morning in November. They had met at a dance hall in Coatbridge in 1971, and in the decades that followed they had raised three children, watched grandchildren arrive, moved house twice, and grown into the kind of couple who finished each other's sentences without noticing. When Tom went, Margaret says, she did not just lose a person. She lost the architecture of her daily life.
"Everything was built around him," she says, sitting in her living room in Airdrie with a cup of tea going cold beside her. "What time I got up. What I cooked. What the evenings looked like. I didn't know what to do with the quiet."
Her daughter mentioned Vibrant Health Advocates – Halley about six weeks after the funeral. Margaret was resistant at first. She had never been one for groups, she says, and the idea of talking about Tom to strangers felt strange, even a little disloyal — as though grief were something private that shouldn't be aired in a community hall.
She came anyway, on a wet Wednesday afternoon, mostly because her daughter drove her there. She sat near the door. She did not say much. But she listened to a man talk about losing his wife the previous spring, and something in the specificity of what he described — the way the bedroom felt wrong, the strange guilt of eating a proper meal — made her feel, for the first time since November, that she was not unusual. That she was not, as she had quietly feared, losing her mind.
"I went back the next week," she says simply. "And the week after."
Over several months, Margaret has become one of the quieter regulars at the circle — someone whose steadiness, facilitators say, provides a kind of anchor for newer arrivals. She does not offer advice. She has learned, she says, that advice is rarely what people in grief need. Instead she listens, and occasionally she shares a memory of Tom: the way he mispronounced certain words his whole life without ever being corrected, the vegetable patch he was inordinately proud of, the fact that he cried at adverts and pretended he hadn't.
The facilitators at Vibrant Health Advocates – Halley also connected Margaret with a welfare adviser through their signposting network, which helped her navigate changes to her pension arrangements — something she describes as an enormous relief during an already overwhelming time. That combination of emotional support and practical guidance, she says, is what made the difference.
Margaret does not claim to be through the grief. She is clear that Tom is with her every day and that she expects that to continue. But she has found, as she puts it, a way to carry it. "I didn't think I'd find my feet again," she says. "But I think I'm starting to. And I don't think I'd have done it on my own."
"I didn't think I'd find my feet again. But I think I'm starting to. And I don't think I'd have done it on my own."
If you are recently bereaved and living in Airdrie, you are welcome to attend a listening circle run by Vibrant Health Advocates – Halley. No referral is needed. Get in touch with our team and we will tell you about upcoming sessions.
