The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.

God can use a sensitive Christian to be a rich blessing in the life of one who knows pain and sorrow.

As warmth makes even glaciers trickle, and opens streams in the ribs of frozen mountains, so the heart knows the full flow and life of its grief only when it begins to melt and pass away.

My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within; my heart is poured out on the ground … . I remember my affliction … the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.1

You will lose someone you can't live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

As I travel across the country speaking about MS, perhaps I can offer others comfort and hope.

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye.

He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears.

She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling. Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard. She was crying upon his shoulder. So damned hard, so damned hard, he repeated aimlessly; it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does. Frantic

I am absolutely thrilled that Dr Alex George has been appointed as the Youth Ambassador for Mental Health. The work he'll be doing in schools, universities, the NHS and wider public is incredible.

Palliative care is something that you don't know you need until you're in the space where you need it, either from someone who has a terminal disease, like my mother, or for people who live with chronic disease and have particular issues that need care.