Hello, I'm Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place. The space that encourages active

listening and really hearing other people's stories. Today I'm chatting to

Kelsey Parker.

You grief never gets smaller, you just learn to grow around your grief like I'm

never ever going to get over the fact that I lost my best friend, my love and

my life, my soulmate, at 32, like how am I ever going to get the father of my

children? I'm never going to get over this experience and actually how traumatic

the experience was that we went through. Even walking into that room and being

diagnosed with a gliblastoma, I like I can literally pitch that day and I just

have beads of sweat everywhere. 35 weeks pregnant and they're telling me that

Tom's got the worst counts that you can possibly have. It's the terminator of

all counts as I was like as if this is happening to us.

Kelsey's husband Tom Parker was in the boy band that wanted and publicly

announced in October 2020 that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain

tumor. He died in March 2022 and since then Kelsey's been learning how to

navigate her own grief as well as that of their small children,

Aralia and Bodie and she's been grappling with all those emotions on camera

too for her new incredibly moving ITVB documentary Kelsey Parker Life After Tom.

When Kelsey came round to mind the other week she'd literally just got back from

an extreme challenge trekking a hundred kilometers through the Sahara desert

to raise money for cancer charity Copperfield and as you're here in this

chat that's just one of the many things I'm completely in awe of Kelsey for

...