_TW: terror threat _

_Wherever there is light, the flowers will find it_” 

That’s what my father used to say about my mother. Like many mums, she had a way of casting her own quiet shine onto situations, somehow making even the worst days feel okay again.

My parents met during the 2000s, both serving in Afghanistan. She was a medic, fiercely capable and calm under pressure, and he was a mid-level soldier, whose awkward flirting drew some side-eyes from their squaddies. Though, judging by the smiles in their wedding photos, no one held it against him in the end.

When their service came to an end, they returned to the UK together and left the army within a few months of dating for real. Dad stepped back into his family's car repair business, and Mum became a paramedic. She always ran toward chaos. Not out of recklessness, but because she had a gift for bringing comfort where others only saw disaster..

On a bank holiday in 2019, a man walked into a crowded shopping centre and detonated a suicide bomb. Emergency services arrived 25 minutes later. My mum was among them. As she tended to the wounded, another man who pretended to be one of the injured detonated a second device.

She died instantly. She was 37. I was 7, my sister 5. 

It was quick according to the inquest. That became a strange sort of comfort as I now get older, and I can read the papers and understand the words and the medical terminology. 7 emergency service workers died, including her, along with 10 others who were in close proximity, and the bomber himself. 

Every year, it makes the news again as people mourn and remember. My dad sobs on her birthday and every year I pretend I don’t know that he lights the candle and blows it out in his room alone.