The pain of loss can be overwhelming.
And Lucie Cope knows just how tough it is to lose someone close to you who you love.
Dealing with the grief has not been easy, but the death of her sister Caroline – and also being made redundant from her job – changed her focus in life.
And she’s now using the skills learned through her own journey with grief to help others cope with their own devastating losses.
‘My whole world turned upside down’
Lucie, from Aberdeenshire, discovered a passion for coaching while working as a learning and development manager in the oil industry.
She was running her own HR consultancy when she found out Caroline McVey was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Lucie watched her determined sister take on a six-year fight to get better but she sadly died at the age of 52.
“In 2016 I, unfortunately, lost my younger sister to breast cancer,” Lucie said. “We were very close, there’s only a year, a week and a day between us.”
Losing her beloved sister was hard enough, but she also faced another devastating blow with the deteriorating health of her mother.
“At the same time my mum had been unwell,” Lucie explained. “We got her in to see a doctor and she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
“So my whole world turned upside down, it was a very difficult time.”
In the months following Caroline’s death, Lucie decided she needed to make a big change in her life.
“When you go through that level of loss, you reanalyse who you are and what you want from life and that’s basically what I did.
“And I didn’t know what it was going to look like.
“All I knew was I had to do something to change things because if I didn’t I wouldn’t make it.”
‘I made a radical change to my life’
Lucie decided to put her house in Ellon, in Aberdeenshire, on the market and find a new home.
She’d enjoyed spending time by the sea in Collieston so took on a short-term rental lease for a 300-year-old cottage in the coastal village in 2017.
Perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the harbour, it was the perfect place to find some peace.
“Grief had impacted me,” she explained. “So I decided to make a radical change to my life.
“For six months I lived in a little rented cottage. I used to just come home and try to process and deal with the grief and everything that had happened.
“And I don’t know why, but at ten past three every morning I would wake up.
“I’d go outside with a cup of tea to a bench outside and I would just sit and listen to the waves and the noise of the sea and look at the stars.
“For me, it was the only place my mind was quiet.
“And what I found was that time gave me the time and the space to think and to heal.
“I realised there was something about the power of the sea that created a breathing space.
“It sounds dramatic but it saved me.”
‘Being made redundant hit me hard’
Lucie took on a new role working for an engineering firm in 2018 after winding down her own consultancy business.
But she ended up furloughed two years later when the pandemic hit, eventually losing her job.
“I had just turned 59 and I had never been made redundant before,” she explained.
“I was really surprised how hard it hit me.”
Lucie has now launched a new career as a resilience coach using the skills she has developed through her own personal challenges and career.
The idea was sparked by people close to her commenting on how she coped with difficulties in her life.
“A lot of people would say to me ‘you’re so resilient’, and I thought ‘what is this resilience thing’ and started delving into it a bit deeper,” she said.
‘My sister is my inspiration’
Now she’s helping others through coaching sessions and is launching a group workshop through her new business Coast Calm Life in March.
Her work gives people the tool kit to help them build up their own resilience. And it focuses on the power of nature to help us cope with difficult life challenges such as losing relationships, our jobs, or grief.
“I think there’s something about sitting on the beach just watching and listening to the waves, it takes you back to a time when there wasn’t that pressure,” Lucie, who has since taken up coastal rowing, said.
“And I think when you have that and then you start to relax you start to be able to see things more clearly.
“And as soon as you can start to see things a lot more clearly, you can start to break it down into bite-sized chunks that you can start to deal with.”
Lucie credits her late father John Ross, an Episcopalian priest, for helping to shape her life when she was younger.
And she says her sister Caroline motivates her to face up to challenges in her life.
“Caroline is my inspiration – she’s my hero,” Lucie said.
“I watched her fight, and I mean fight, for six years and her whole purpose was to try to get better because she had three children.
“What she went through, which I know many people go through with any type of cancer to survive, is incredible.
“She’s my inspiration.”
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You can get in touch by emailing me at charlotte.thomson@ajl.co.uk
