This sensitively-written story traces a young girl’s journey as she works through her grief after losing her mum.
A smiling visit to hospital is followed by a phone call in the early hours. A little girl learns that her mother has passed away. Struggling to understand, she moves through the next few weeks in a blur of tears and flowers. At the funeral she overhears snippets of grown up conversations about cancer and she also hears people talking about her. She feels lost and afraid and her grief follows her round like a dark cloud. She worries that nothing will ever be the same and she feels angry all the time.
But then one day, as she and her father are looking through her Mum’s things, she finds her Mum’s favourite jumper. She wraps it around herself and inhales its special smell. She wears it every day.
Throughout the story we see the love and support she gets from her Dad and when he talks to her about grief he explains that it’s just like her Mum’s jumper. At the moment the jumper is too big but one day it will fit her snugly. The jumper will stay the same size but the girl will grow in to it. In the same way, although she will always feel grief over the loss of her Mum, her world will grow around it so eventually the pain won’t seem so big.
This is a truly wonderful book and the representation of death from the point of view of a child feels very real. The text is simple and easy to understand but the story is filled with meaning and will offer a lot of comfort to a child (or adult) in a similar position.
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