The sudden death of my father, taken ill and gone within a matter of days, felt less like an event and more like a subtraction. Something essential removed without warning, without preparation, without any sense of proportion. One moment the world held its usual shape, familiar and dependable in ways I had never really questioned. The next, there was a gap in it. Not just in my life, but in the structure of things themselves.
It is strange how quickly the mind reacts in those moments. Not with calm reflection, but with urgency. Mine became a kind of collector, scrambling through memory as though time itself had started to decay. I found myself trying to preserve him in fragments. The way he stood. The way he laughed. The particular tone he used when he was gently mocking me. Things that had always been there, unnoticed in their constancy, suddenly became precious because they were no longer being added to.
It felt like trying to hold water in my hands.
And alongside that came the future, stretching out in front of me in a way that felt incomplete. Not broken exactly, but altered. There were moments ahead that I had always assumed would include him. Moments I had not even consciously planned for, but which now felt diminished by his absence. The birth of my son stood at the centre of that. A moment that should have been full in every direction, but carried with it a quiet hollow. I could picture him there so clearly that his absence felt almost like an error.
He had been such a natural grandfather to Lucy. There was no hesitation in it, no sense of learning the role. He simply stepped into it as though it had always been waiting for him. There was warmth in it, and patience, and a kind of steady presence that children seem to recognise instinctively. And yet that version of him exists only in that one relationship. Daisy and Jack never had the chance to know him in that way. It feels like a story that opened beautifully and then stopped, leaving the rest unwritten.
My Mum’s death carries a different atmosphere in my memory. It was sudden, but it was also approaching, like weather you can see gathering on the horizon long before it arrives. After her stroke, she seemed to live on in defiance of it, pushing forward with a determination that was both admirable and, in hindsight, quietly exhausting. There was a sense that she was holding something together through effort alone.
But time has a way of continuing regardless of effort.
There were small signs. Subtle changes. A slowing, a dimming, a slight withdrawal from the person she had been. Nothing dramatic, nothing that could be pointed to as a clear turning point. Just a gradual shift. When she died that afternoon, only a few hours after I had spoken to her, it felt like something that had been building had finally reached its conclusion.
I had spoken to her as though there would be more time. That assumption now feels fragile, like something I held without ever examining it.
And then there’s Jennie.
Her death feels different in a way that is difficult to fully explain. It does not settle into the past in the same way. It resists being placed neatly into memory. Instead, it remains active. It moves. It interrupts. It insists on being felt in the present.
When I look back now, there are moments that stand out with a painful clarity. Things I did not recognise at the time, or perhaps chose not to fully see. They feel obvious now, in the way that hindsight can make everything seem inevitable. It is like looking at a map after you have already taken the wrong turn and realising the correct path was always there.
That is where the weight sits.
It is not just grief, but something layered on top of it. A sense of having missed something important. Of having been present but not aware. My mind keeps returning to those moments again and again, turning them over, examining them from different angles, searching for the point where something might have been different.
There is no resolution in that process.
Only repetition.
I do not know if this feeling of responsibility is justified. It may not be. It may be something my mind has created in an attempt to impose order on something chaotic. But whether it is rational or not does not seem to matter. It is there, persistent and difficult to dislodge.
And within all of that sits another quieter thread. The timing of Jennie’s death — just over two months since Mum had died — still makes me wonder how much it contributed. Another life lost for her own, was that beginning of her end? Did she feel alone then, was I not around enough to support her, to love her?
I find myself thinking of that sequence often. There is a part of me that sees a kind of unintended mercy in it. That Mum did not live to see what came next. I cannot imagine what that would have done to her. The thought of it feels almost unbearable.
But alongside that is something more complicated. A recognition that I did not grieve for Mum in the same way. Not with the same depth or intensity that I have for Jennie. It feels uneven, and that unevenness brings its own discomfort. As though grief should have followed a certain shape and did not.
I remind myself that grief does not organise itself according to fairness.
Still, the thought lingers.
Jennie remains present in a way that is both comforting and unsettling. She moves through my thoughts without warning, appearing in the middle of ordinary moments. Sometimes it is just a brief awareness, like catching sight of someone passing by in a crowd. Other times it is more sustained, her presence filling the space in a way that is difficult to ignore.
She appears in my dreams occasionally, though never with any sense of permanence. It is as if she exists just out of reach, present but not fully accessible. Those moments carry a strange quality, something close to comfort but edged with sadness. Waking from them often brings a renewed sense of loss, as though something had briefly been returned and then taken again.
The grief associated with her feels closer to the surface.
It does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it is quiet, a background weight that colours everything slightly. Other times it arrives with force, sudden and overwhelming. There are moments when it feels almost physical. A tightening in the chest. A sense of pressure that is difficult to describe. As though something inside me has been altered in a way that cannot be reversed.
It feels like a space has been left behind, but not an empty one. A space that still holds the shape of what was there, but without the presence itself. A room that remembers being occupied.
And then there is the simple fact that sits beneath all of this.
Of the four of us, there is only me left.
It is a sentence that feels too small for what it contains. It changes the way I experience memory. There is no longer anyone who shares those moments in quite the same way. No one who can confirm or challenge or add to them from the same starting point. It is like holding a collection of stories that no one else can fully recognise.
There is a loneliness in that which is difficult to explain to anyone who has not felt it.
In my own darker moments, before any of this happened, I used to imagine a version of life where everything had been stripped away. It was not a desire, exactly. More a kind of escape route. A way of simplifying things by removing them entirely. If everything was gone, then nothing else would need to be dealt with.
It was an abstract idea, detached from reality.
Now, living in something that echoes that imagined emptiness, I feel a kind of resentment towards that earlier version of myself. Not because he caused anything, but because he did not understand. Because he treated loss as a concept rather than an experience.
At the same time, I can see that he was trying to cope in the only way he knew how.
That does not make the contrast any easier to sit with.
Grief is not constant in its intensity.
There are moments when it softens, when it becomes something that can be held more gently. In those moments, memory shifts. It becomes warmer, less dominated by absence. I can think of them without immediately feeling the weight of what is no longer there. There is still sadness, but it is quieter, more integrated.
Those moments feel like small reprieves.
They do not last, but they matter.
What I find myself missing most is not just the people themselves, but the shared space we occupied. The small, unremarkable details that made up everyday life. The familiarity that required no effort. The sense of belonging to something that existed independently of explanation.
The looks that carried meaning without words.
The jokes that needed no context.
The feeling of a history fully known in a way that is difficult to replicate.
I notice, more and more, how often I echo my Dad. In my tone. In my reactions. In the small, unconscious ways that habits and behaviours carry forward. For a brief moment, it can feel like continuity. Like something has not been entirely lost.
But that feeling fades quickly, replaced by the awareness that I am the one carrying those things now.
Alone.
My family now, Becca and Jack, and those who have come into my life through them, are a source of real strength. There is love there, and kindness, and a sense of support that I do not take for granted. They are present in a way that matters deeply.
But there is a difference between building something and inheriting it.
The history we are creating is meaningful, but it does not yet have the depth of something that has been shaped over decades. That depth comes with time, and time is something that cannot be rushed.
The duality of love and loneliness existing side by side is not lost on me.
I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I now understand better how grief feels less like something that fades and more like something that changes position.
It is an iceberg that hides its dark depths most of the time yet it drifts constantly. Sometimes it feels distant, manageable, almost abstract. Other times it is close, its edges sharp, its presence unavoidable. Most of it remains unseen, beneath the surface, vast and difficult to comprehend.
You only ever encounter part of it at any given moment, but the part you encounter is enough.
The real difficulty —the one that I am still exploring, the one that prompted me to write this — is that there is no warning as to when it will appear, unbidden, and painful.
It arrives in response to small things. A photograph glimpsed without intention. A sentence that carries more weight than expected. A memory that surfaces fully formed. A dream that shifts without permission.
And suddenly it is there.
Cold. Immediate. Total.
So I find myself here, at 4am, in that quiet space where everything feels closer.
The world outside is still, but inside there is movement. The grief comes in waves, not steady, not predictable, but persistent. I try to contain it, to manage it, to keep it within some kind of boundary.
But it does not feel containable.
It feels like something much larger than me, something that I am only temporarily holding back.
I am the child with his finger pressed against the wall of a dam, feeling the force behind it. The pressure is constant. It does not lessen. It simply waits.
Every instinct tells me that if I move, even slightly, it will break through.
And so I stay there.
Holding.
Waiting.
Knowing that this is not a solution, only a pause.
A moment of resistance against something that cannot be resisted forever.
Time feels suspended. There is no past, no future, only the act of holding on, of waiting for it to overwhelm me anew, or final drag itself painfully past.
And in that act, in that quiet and fragile effort, I am the child.
And I am alone.
What are your thoughts?