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‘My grief has been a long journey of healing’ - Louis Tomlinson’s sister shares heartbreaking experience with LBC
13 June 2025, 17:33
Lottie Tomlinson has shared her experience of grief with LBC in hopes to encourage others to open up and seek support.
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The influencer and sister of One Direction star Louis Tomlinson is supporting a new campaign from bereavement and palliative care charity Sue Ryder.
Lottie lost her mother in 2016 after she was diagnosed with Leukaemia.
“I didn’t seek any help. We were quite young, and it was all very new to us…we kind of just thought that the way you deal with it is to just get on with it and try and support each other,” she said.
“When something’s really painful and really traumatic, you don’t really want to let yourself go there.
“In the long run that wasn’t going to help me at all because then I would have these episodes of complete despair where I couldn’t cope properly.”
Whilst still coming to terms with the loss of her mum, less than three years later Lottie’s sister died in 2019.
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She said: “I think [that’s when] I realised that that was a lot of grief, you know. A lot of trauma in a short space of time.”
After therapy was suggested to her, she reached out for support and said it “changed” her experience completely.
Since then, Lottie has decided to use her platform to speak up about bereavement support services, and now works with charity Sue Ryder.
Research from the charity has found that 88% of people feel alone in their grief.
James Sanderson, the Chief Executive at charity Sue Ryder, said: “People tell us that they feel alone in their grief because those around them don’t know what to say, so often, they say nothing. We want to break the taboos around talking about grief.”
Lottie Tomlinson - Back for a moment - Sue Ryder
He added: “We encourage people to start conversations by asking, ‘How do you like to remember the people in your life who have died?’
“It is a simple question but it is one that people who are grieving tell us they want to be asked as it helps to keep their memory alive. It’s an opener to a wider, really important exchange.”
For Lottie, some of those memories of her mum are kept in a special box.It includes photos, and a card given to her by her mum a week before she died.
It reads: “To my gorgeous Princess, the bravest bug eyes in the world. Love you forever, mummy xxx”
In a film for Sue Ryder, Lottie said: “[The card] meant a lot at the time, but it means so much more now, because she’s not here with us. I’ve kept it safe, and I look back at it for so much comfort."
She told LBC: “when you lose someone, the hardest part about grief is that person fading away because you know time moves on and people stop mentioning them.”
Lottie hopes sharing her story will help others feel like they can reach out for help too.
Sue Ryder offers a range of free grief support, including an online bereavement community and in-person Grief Kind Spaces.
