'Joy in a joyless situation': How I deal with the loss of two grown-up children

Where others might see only the colourful glass beads she makes, Heidi Hunt sees hope. Along with her husband Phil, she has endured the heartache of the deaths of two of the four children they share between them. In between times, Heidi herself almost died due to a critical illness which left her in a coma for 10 days. Despite enduring more tragedy than most of us could imagine, she has been able to build a new life on the remote Mull of Galloway thanks, in part, to the creative process which distracts her from any sadness she might be feeling. She freely admits that the reason she ended up moving to the very tip of south-west Scotland from Merseyside is "not a pretty story". Her 21-year-old son, Stefan Osgood, took his own life in 2016. "It was extremely hard to deal with," said Heidi. "The stress and the upset of it all affected my health very badly and I had a lot of surgeries and a lot of unpleasant time really." It ultimately meant she retired from teaching on medical grounds and ended up doing some voluntary work at a centre in Birkenhead for depressed and anxious teenagers. The director there was looking for a house and Heidi mentioned they were looking at selling their home