‘It was heartbreaking but you just have to surrender to it’

A FASHION designer from Dunshaughlin has opened up about the heartbreak of losing her mother to Covid-19.

Asta Jakubson revealed the devastation of not being able to hug her mum goodbye or tell her that she loved her in person before she passed away in Lithuania after testing positive for coronavirus.

Asta’s mum Genovaite Jakubson (75) contracted the virus in hospital after being admitted for high blood pressure in March.

Grieving daughter Asta who said her mother was “the last person you’d expect to become ill” admits that it was “painful” to see her active mother lose her independence. She said: “It was a huge shock. My mum was always very healthy, she was never sick, she was so energetic, we couldn’t believe when she became ill.

“She went into hospital to be treated for a blood infection and she got the virus while she was there.

“She was in Lithuania and we were not able to go over to her with the Lockdown.

“It was heart-breaking but you just have to really surrender to what’s happened.

“We spoke to her on the phone whenever she was up to it and I was sending to her my deepest love every day and praying for her and that’s all we could do.”

Asta’s brave mum passed away peacefully in June with a family friend by her side according to the fashion designer.

“She had a friend of ours there with her and we prayed for a nice and calm end and thankfully that’s what she got.

“We were just happy that she wasn’t going to suffer anymore.”

It was her mother’s passion for sewing that fostered a love of dressmaking for the Lithuanian born designer.

“She taught me how to sew, she would be sewing and I would get the little pieces of material for her and asking if I could help.

“She would put me on her knee sewing before I could even reach the pedals.”

The Dunshaughlin dressmaker who is also a certified life coach says that coping skills she has learned through work on her own mental health following a trauma in her childhood has helped her through the grieving process.

“Because I had worked already with my own mental health, it has actually helped me so much now.

“I lost my dad when was I just ten years old, he committed suicide and that brought me pain for many years and only when I fixed that in me that I realised that a lot of us are living with the shadows of the past.

“It was only when I was 34 I realised that something was not right with relationships in my life because deep in my heart I didn’t believe in love anymore.

“Trauma we experience in our childhood keeps going with us until we really deal with it.

“We need to look after our mental health. I’m teaching other people how to be calm, how to meditate and connect with nature. I want to help as many people as I can.

“Customers come in and say ‘I already feel better and I just came in to get a hem turned up’.”