She liked rockabilly music, so she liked going out dancing, she was a bit ‘life and soul of the party’
So, me mam was my best friend. She liked rockabilly music, so she liked going out dancing, she was a bit ‘life and soul of the party’. She was feisty as well, there’s some really funny stories that we got from when we were organising her funeral from her friends and I think, as I was a bit younger when she was like that, you forget, so it was really nice to have those memories of her dancing on tables.
I think having a grandchild gave her a new lease of life. I was actually quite scared when I found out I was pregnant, because in my family we didn’t have any grandkids. So, I wasn’t sure what me mam would be like as a grandma because I’d never seen her, we don’t have a lot of children in the family whereas the other grandparents did. And mam amazed me because the love she had for Tommy it was like watching her with us as kids again. She’d do anything for him; she couldn’t go a couple of days without seeing him and she just wanted to spend all her time with him .
The thing that I always associate with me mam is angel wings. I don’t know why, I’ve got a tattoo of angel wings. We also think of swallows because she loved like swallows and birds and she had quite a lot of tattoos and some of here tattoos was a swallow. When her dad and mam died she had swallows and their names so it’s that type of thing, angel wings and birds that make me think of me mam.
I did everything with her. So, losing her has been like a massive, a massive change for me.
Danielle Sigley was interviewed in 2025 as part of the Trees of Hope Project