long time no speak - evolution of grief

t/w death and grief 

It’s been a while since I’ve had a blog-worthy wobble, and over the last few months I’ve felt uninspired with writing in general. But the blank pages in my journal are probably a good sign, as there is definitely a correlation between my urge to write, and the weight of emotion I’m feeling. That said, I have missed the catharsis writing brings; there is something so magically relieving about the way it forces me to organise racing thoughts, articulating them word by word, as if stringing them in a line, rather than letting them swirl around in an incoherent chaos that I then find easier to suppress and bottle up.

Essentially, the lack of writing has been down to the busyness of the last few months as I’ve been too distracted to make time for blogging and, to be honest, grief in general. As bizarre as it sounds, I’ve found myself going on a subconscious ‘grief strike’ as sometimes it boils down to the fact that most days I simply can’t be arsed to be sad. It is so much easier to bumble along day to day, worrying about trivial and more tangible things such as work deadlines and laundry, than to think too deeply about the fact that (newsflash!) my Dad is still dead. 

Looking back on the first year after losing my Dad, it’s safe to say that grief was a predominant personality trait of mine. I’m forever indebted to my closest friends who endured just how much airtime it got, from the thousands of words I wrote in my journal, the even more tears I shed, and the inability to empathise with others’ situations unless it involved losing an immediate family member. Those things feel distant now, and I’m fascinated by the way it has evolved since then. 

With grief, I tend to avoid the phrase “time is a great healer”, because it implies a subtle pressure to one day get over your loss, and that this will happen in a simple upward trajectory, both of which are untrue. There have been moments in the last few months where even the militant grief striker in me has crumbled, and I have felt the loss more rawly than I did on the 17th January last year. 

However, as the cliché goes, life has grown around the loss, and as a result I’ve developed a greater bandwidth of empathy, energy, motivation, and social battery that I never thought possible this time last year. And whilst I accept grief isn’t linear, I hope to never revert back to that state where it really did constantly consume 100% of my brain.

Despite this progress and the fact that there is no amount of lottery winnings that could tempt me to relive last year, I’ve found that the passing of time has posed its own challenges. One I’ve struggled with recently is that I can no longer visualise him and hear his voice in my head as easily as I used to - I’m so grateful for my Mum being a serial life-long photo album maker and for living in an age where I can access pictures and videos at my fingertips. Similarly, I remember cherishing the fact that I could truthfully tell people I spoke to him “just the other day” but now that last conversation feels (because it was) so long ago. 

I suppose I should have seen these new hurdles coming, but they were impossible to conceptualise last year. It seems so obvious to me now that, of course, memories will fade. That he’ll always be 59 as we continue to grow older. But when you lose someone so suddenly, amidst the shock and denial, it takes a long time to accept that even though it feels like your world has stopped, the rest of the world does indeed keep spinning without them.

But weirdly, it’s that exact motion, the momentum of doing, that’s helped me the most this year. I’ve found unexpected comfort in the continuum of life with the daily routine of work, emails, and life admin. The things I once resented for feeling insignificant compared to grief have, in many ways, helped me structure the shapelessness of loss. The emotional space that has opened up as a result has given me time to focus on the things that make me genuinely happy. It’s not that these things fill the gap, but it gives my brain something else to orbit for a while; something steady, unsentimental, and refreshingly mundane. 

Of course, in this newly grown life without him there is still a lot of sadness and millions of things I desperately wish I could tell him. I wish I could tell him about working in sport and hear his sound opinions on people I’ve encountered and the places I’ve been. I wish I could tell him things I’ve achieved, that I’m moving out with best friends, or that I’m running a marathon for him next year. I wish I could tell him that I’m finally feeling somewhat myself again and generally doing well. I really wish I could hear him say he’s proud of me. 

This time last year, I genuinely believed that I had to accept I was now a sad person and would be forever (you can imagine as an extreme optimist this did not sit well at all). I truly felt I would never feel genuine joy again, and although I still don’t think there will ever be a moment where I feel entirely content in a life without my Dad, I’m incredibly thankful now to know that even if my happiness looks different, it is possible. 

Thank you for reading and lots of love :)