The Birth Of Recollections Within
Ruth
On a warm night in the late spring of 2015, my Mum died.
She died in her own home, on her own terms. My sister and I, our aunt, and her best friend formed a circle around her, as women have done since time began. We held her, body and spirit, and ushered her from this world to whatever comes next.
Her name was Ruth. Which quite literally means friend. She lived the very definition of it.
She gave me all the good things that I am. I see her every day in my own hands. I hear her voice in my own. She is my conscience and every small joy life has to offer.
I whispered “Bye-bye, Mummy” into her ear and watched her go.
My soul shattered.
The Woman Behind the Initials
On December 6, 2022, in that strange space between awake and asleep, the phrase Recollections Within came to me for the first time. It settled in like something already existed.
It was so unusual that I felt the need to write it down in a note in my phone. Some time later, after revisiting it often, I finally made the connection. Recollections Within. R.W. My Mum’s initials.
It still makes me cry when I think about it.
What They Left Behind
My most precious possessions have no monetary value. They are reminders of who loved me and taught me how to love.
Mum’s handwriting in old cards and recipes. The spatula she used every Christmas. The blown glass pendant that holds her ashes.
My beautiful mother-in-law Annette, gone now too, once asked me what things of hers I might want one day.
I told her it wasn’t things I hoped for. It was the history behind them. The quilts she made over decades. The everyday objects that carry the memory of her life. Her stories of my magnificent husband, Paul, as a little boy.
These things are precious because of the stories behind them. Not the objects.
The love and history they carry.
And underneath all of it, a question that would not leave me alone: what happens to these stories when the women who lived them are gone? Who holds them? Where do they go?
This Is Not a Rehearsal
In January 2025, I found myself in the emergency room with a nosebleed that would not stop. My blood pressure was 207/137.
Sitting there, I understood something with a clarity I had never quite managed before. There is no right moment. There is no later. This is it.
I bought the domain in March 2025. Recollections Within was born on the Spring Equinox, and that has always felt exactly right.
I have not stopped since.
The Full Story
The years between my Mum’s death and the birth of this archive were not simple. They held a marriage that finally ended, a love that arrived when I had stopped looking, storms I did not know if we would survive, and a daughter whose life I fought for with everything I had.
All of it is told in the Journal, in the foundational series From Unravelling to Weaving.