Urns are very expensive. Confusingly so. One of those strange costs of adulthood that don’t line up at all with your expectations – like large rugs, or getting a picture framed. So we choose to keep you in this simple cardboard tube thing. We figure we aren’t urn-on-mantlepiece people anyway. We figure we will scatter you. Soon. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere perfect.

some
time
passes

You are in the bottom of a wardrobe at our mother’s house. At one point, we discuss where we might take you. A lake. Somewhere where you swam. We don’t say when we will go. Months later, I read that the lake has been illegally pumped with sewage. We don’t mention it again.

then
mum
dies
too

Now we have two cardboard tubes. And nowhere that is perfect enough for either of you. And we feel guilty that we have done nothing with you. That we didn’t buy the expensive urns. Now you’re both on a shelf in my sister’s house. My eyes judder and skip over you when I glance in that direction.

shall
we
take
dad?

I ask my sister. We are going to the seaside. And you loved the seaside. In your last weeks you wanted to go. You wanted a Mr Whippy and the sound of seagulls and salty air against your skin. We couldn’t do it. It was all too fast. But we could take you now. We don’t know if you’ve been to this particular stretch of seaside, or swam in this sea. It doesn’t matter. It no longer needs to be perfect.

but
it is
perfect

The beach is deserted and the morning sun is already warm and glittering on the sea. Your kind of weather. A large black bird lands on a rock close by and stretches out its wings. It holds that position as we wade into the water. We have you – just a few handfuls of you – and we scatter you into the wind. And it feels how I hoped it would. A kind of diffusing, something heavy and concentrated suddenly hitting water and changing form.

Two seagulls steal our flat whites while we are still in the water, tipping coffee all over our beach blanket. We yell Oi! and they stare us out, unbothered. We feel you are providing some much needed levity. We laugh. My son says ‘Tony happy’.

Tony
happy

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I dream of my mother. She looks normal, but we are in an unfamiliar building. She brushes past me and smiles and I reach out and touch her arm and my chest glows warm. In a small kitchen she makes coffees for unseen guests. She has to pull up a chair to rest while the kettle boils. Ah. It is one of these dreams. She is dying again. I watch her. I want to go to her, knowing now that she will soon be, or already is, gone. But I can’t move.

I awake feeling nauseous.

I don’t dream of her often. And when I do, she is frequently unreachable in some way. It is because – I reason with my subconscious – I haven’t processed.

The problem (one of the problems) with two life-defining events happening almost simultaneously, is that it leaves very little time and space for your brain to figure out what has happened. My son was born, and then – almost immediately – Mum died. I could not take to my bed. I could not walk in the rain and cry. I could not sit up all night and reason and bargain and organise and reorganise my thoughts. I was busy. I was shellshocked from birth, from death.

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I think about her daily, but I sometimes struggle to cry. I talk about her with my son and show him pictures, but I can’t watch the videos of her on my phone. I can’t really talk to her out loud or in my head. It is because – I reason with my emotions – I haven’t processed.

Much is made of processing. It frames grieving as ‘work’, as a system that you toil your way through, ticking off stages until you reach some enlightened moment. Processed. The implication is that there is an end point, a completion. And the onus is firmly on you as a griever to get there. Either you are engaging with your grief, moving forward, moving through it, or you are not. Either you have processed, or you have not.

But what does processing mean? In practice? In your actual, real life? I guess it means to understand. To recognise, acknowledge, and know – on a cellular level – that the person you love has permanently disappeared from your life. I think it also signals acceptance. A sense that this knowledge can sit in your body and you can look at it directly, without running from it or rearing up against it in horror.

But how to understand the incomprehensible? How to accept the unacceptable?

I went to a coffee morning for mums who have lost their mums. We told our tales of woe. It was cathartic. One woman said there were days when she simply couldn’t function. She said she spoke to her mum every day. Every hour. There where mornings – even more than two years after her loss – when she couldn’t get out of bed, all she could do was cry.

Now this is a woman who is engaging with her grief, I thought. How healthy that she is confronting her pain head-on, that she is able to look at. That she is processing.

Then she said – I don’t know why I am so stuck. I think it’s because I haven’t processed.

I looked at her, confused. Our daily experiences of grief sit on different ends of the spectrum. And yet we are united in the same suspicion: that we are failing to move forward, that we are stuck, that we are somehow doing this wrong. Maybe the framework is what’s wrong. Maybe the word itself – ‘processing’ – is fundamentally at odds with how grief actually feels.

What if living with loss is not a process, but a transformation? Less a journey of coming-to-terms, more a new and permanently altered state of being. Not something you move through, but something that moves with you. In the language of ‘processing’, this can be misread as inertia or stasis, as failure.

But what if there is no end point to reach? No ‘processed’. What if there is only the ongoing act of carrying – in different ways, on different days, with different weights. What if the work is not to finish the grief, but to make space for it in a life that keeps going.

In that definition, there is room for all of us to carry it differently.

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Guilt is grief’s nasty little twin. She is not hot and bubbling and obvious like anger, or blue and rolling and bottomless like sadness, guilt is insidious and shadowy, needling away at the corners of your consciousness. You’re barely aware of her until she has nested inside your gut, slowly eating you alive.

And there are no limits to the things she will torture you with. True things, untrue things, they’re all fair game to her. In fact, it is the lies she likes the most. The twisted fabrications that make you question everything.

Were we even close? Was I there enough at the end? Should I have– Would they have wanted– Why didn’t I ever–

It’s completely normal. It’s in all the grief textbooks. But why do our brains do this? What an utterly unhelpful response to loss: Ok so she’s feeling the worst pain she’s ever felt… let’s also make her think it’s all her fault. Brilliant.

I think it’s partly to do with control. Guilt implies blame, which implies there’s something in our actions that caused it. It is less terrifying to blame ourselves than to acknowledge the random chaos of a callously indifferent universe. If it’s our fault, there’s a chance we can shield ourselves from feeling this pain again. It’s a desperate grasp at self-protection, in a way.

The guilt fans out. It touches everything. A sharp slap that abruptly follows every moment of joy. The nighttime loop of Bad Thoughts – only the arguments, moments of frustration, fear, inertia, playing on repeat.

What can I do with these feelings now? The only people who could have truly reassured me, banished my fears, are no longer alive. So all I can do is sit with them, nauseated.

I ask my friends, my partner, my sister. Did I do enough? Did they know? Did I do the right things? Yes, they say. Yes, yes, yes. Of course. But they would say that. Only the dead and the needling monster in my gut know the truth.

I have been scared of my guilt. Scared to name it. To say it out loud. In case someone agrees. And says – yes, you weren’t a very good daughter. Yes, you were selfish. No, they probably didn’t know how you felt about them, you didn’t tell them enough.

But this shadowy little creature feeds on silence and shame. She thrives on it. The more we keep to ourselves, the more she has to feast on, the more she has to twist and distort and feed back to us in some new, monstrous form. So I’m going to say the things I’m scared of, and keep saying them until I can hear what is rational, and what is not. Until I am able to look at the bad moments and then look past them and see where they fit in the bigger picture – a picture of imperfect, beautiful, real human life, with all its blemishes, all its mistakes and all its deep, deep love.

Until I can forgive myself.

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A non-comprehensive list of things I feel guilty about:

• Trying to be happy

• Not trying to be happy

• Not maintaining better relationships with your friends

• Not calling your family enough

• Forgetting. Sometimes. Just for a second

• Not having enough framed photos of you in my house

• Not being able to watch videos of you

• The time(s) I snapped at you when you were trying to help

• The time(s) I was impatient with you for being slow

• All the times I didn’t answer your call

• All the times I didn’t call you back

• Moving cities

• Not having a baby sooner

• Not getting married sooner

• Selling your house

• Using my inheritance money

• Not using my inheritance money for meaningful things

• Not keeping enough of your belongings

• All the times I told you I was scared

• All the times I pretended I wasn’t scared

• That I couldn’t protect my sister from this

• That this happened to you and not to me

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The morning after Dad’s funeral I got a WhatsApp from my manager. My extended bereavement leave had not been approved – did I want to come back on Monday or use annual leave?

Back to the office? But I was little more than a husk. Hollow, brittle. Barely able to brush my teeth and swallow a glass of water, let alone be an email-sending, meeting-attending, nodding, smiling, functioning member of a workforce.

I almost rage-quit on the spot. But it wasn’t rage, it was a ragged, desperate despair. I cried on the floor. I couldn’t understand it. In the years I had worked there, I had struggled to even take a day off when I had the flu, I worked from my non-ergonomic sofa every day of the pandemic, I had clocked in from the hospice, filing articles from beside his deathbed. And now, just two weeks after a bomb had detonated in the centre of my existence, they wanted me back at my desk.

This moment shifted something in my relationship with work. With clocking in. With people-pleasing, presenteeisim, and productivity. It switched something off. And almost six years later, it looks as though that shift is permanent.

I have simply stopped caring in the way I used to.

Ostensibly, this is a good thing. Freeing. Most would agree that unlatching your sense of obligation to a workforce that will never love you back is a positive step forward.

But what happens when you abruptly stop giving a shit after constructing a fundamental portion of your personality (and self-worth) around career progression and tick-box achievements?

Well, two things happened to me. Number one, I have had an identity crisis of sorts.

My brain has unhelpfully chosen to interpret this shift, this uncaring, as failure. She smiles at me knowingly, shrugs, and whispers – so you’re not as ambitious as you thought, huh?

In these moments I feel a desperate pull to return to who I was. To prove that she is still in there. To satisfy the gnawing insecurity by frantically clamouring for the external validation that soothes it. But I can’t keep it up. Because I’m not the same person. And the things that used to soothe me – the achievements, the announcements, the next step next step next step – no longer have the same effect.

This leads me to the second thing that happened to me when I stopped caring. I have – slowly and painfully – begun the process of disentangling my self-worth from external perceptions of success.

For me, this has been the greatest gift of loss. Amid the rubble of the explosion, the debris of destabilisation, there is an opportunity to reconstruct a new foundation. A new version of who you are and what you care about. And the beauty is that you get to choose what that looks like.

I am choosing to value things about myself that aren’t solely tied to my productivity, to my output. I am working to get my brain to believe that a shift in priorities does not equate to defeat. This is not an easy thing to do, but I am trying.

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There is no space for grief under capitalism, at least not the version of work I returned to. In a system that depends on mass productivity, we are not granted the time to process, to fall apart, to stop functioning. Instead, we are rushed through our pain, hurried along, made to feel so awkward that the only possible answer to ‘how are you doing?’ is ‘fine’.

There is instant pressure to return to your desk, to seamlessly reembody the person you were before – even though that person is likely gone.

We can’t go back. Loss forces us to look behind the curtain, to see the truth of so many of the artificial constructions that make up our lives, including work – and there is no unseeing.

I don’t think I’ll ever care about work the way I did before – but that is starting to feel less like failure, and more like the beginning of something honest.

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Recently, I spoke to Amber Jeffrey – founder of – for an article about grief and AI for Magazine (which you can read here), and she understood what I was getting at: “Our society isn’t equipped to allow for the natural unravelling of grief. Bereavement leave is often just two or three days, whether you’ve lost a parent, spouse, or child. There’s pressure to return quickly – to work, to social life, to functioning as a ‘normal’ citizen. While support and coping mechanisms can help, rushing this process denies people the space to truly feel their loss… Fast-tracking that return, or masking grief through artificial comfort, risks becoming something deeply dystopian.”

Thanks for reading. 🙏🏽

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Your mother who breathes and smiles and has hot blood in her veins. Who meets you for coffee or calls and asks when you are next coming home or listens to you describe your boring day in meticulous detail or remembers that granola brand you love or buys you practical underwear from M&S that you didn’t ask for but always need.

Your mother who is a witness to your life, the most diligent archivist. The keeper of your memories before you had memories, the holder of your legends and triumphs and failures and narratives of who you are and why you are you. The keeper of your schoolbooks and photo albums and first shoes and the paper copy of your driving license and your birth certificate.

Your mother who shows you how to be a mother. Who remembers how old you were when you had chicken pox, who knows what to do with a fever or eczema or croup, who tells you not to panic. Your mother who comes with you to soft play and baby sensory and Asda, who sits with you in the busy boredom, in the sleepless chaos. Your mother who remembers the exact minute you were born because it transformed her, so she knows how you are now transformed as well. She had been waiting for this moment.

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Your mother who disappoints you or frustrates you, who repeats old patterns or refuses to go to therapy or pushes her hurt downwards or is most comfortable with denial or toxic positivity or victimhood. The mother you swear you will never become. The mother who is just a person, just a woman, something you are understanding more with each passing year.

I am jealous you get to learn to be patient, to be compassionate, as your mother ages. That you get to watch her face appear on your face. That you get to watch both of you age in parallel and realise that she is beautiful, so you are beautiful. That you get to change your mind and decide that actually you do want to be like her.

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I’m not mad that you mention her. It’s not your fault that I no longer have what you have. I want to hear about the nice things you do together. I am genuinely happy you still have her. But I am also jealous. And it is a relief to say that out loud, to stop pretending that I’m not.

Jealousy is an unpalatable emotion. Hot and nauseating and just a hair’s breadth from anger. It is a wasteful, pointless feeling. An unhelpful place for all this longing to land. But we don’t get to choose how grief shows up. So there it sits. Pressure in my throat as I watch them in the cafe. The mother and adult daughter. The way she is listening to you. The way she is watching your face and drinking in your words as you toss them at her casually, so casually. Thinking you get to keep her.

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A few days after someone you love dies, you might find yourself on the phone with a hospitality manager discussing buffet choices. Should guests have a glass of Prosecco on arrival? "Yes, she would like that”, I found myself thinking about my mother. I was planning her wake and it felt like I was representing her in the choices I made. Choices like – falafel hummus wraps or cheese ploughman salad. Skin-on fries or nachos with guacamole. 

The choices felt impossibly heavy, loaded with meaning. They also felt completely absurd. After over an hour deliberating between the standard and deluxe buffet menu offered by the Didsbury gastropub, I felt part of my soul detach itself from my body, float upwards and hover somewhere above my head.

My mother is dead, my soul whispered down to me, and I am choosing sandwiches. 

It felt like both a form of insanity and the most perfect allegory for how we as a society approach grief and death – awkward, avoidant, oppressively polite. Tears blinked back apologetically, emotions washed down with cups of tea and slices of cake. Or falafel wraps.

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The typical refrain is that funerals provide grievers with something to do. The banality of doing keeps you moving forward, forces you to put one foot in front of the other, gives you a reason to get up in the morning. There is truth in this if, like me, you are the kind of person who finds comfort in order and planning and lists. But there is something inherently soulless, cruel even, about a system that forces the freshly bereaved to essentially plan a party in the earliest, rawest days after loss. 

There was part of me that wanted to drop to my knees and scream towards the sky like they do in films. I wanted to peel off my clothes and run until I couldn’t breathe, smash windows, punch walls, rip my hair from my scalp. But there were orders of service to write, invoices to fill, canapés to choose.  

Maybe this is the function of funerals. To keep you shackled to your sanity through the tediousness of endless logistical tasks. To stop you from going completely feral with grief. But why shouldn’t we? Why shouldn’t we lose control, fall apart? And actually, we need to. Particularly in those early days, when the pain is livid, skinless and horrifying, before your brain has a chance to tidy it away into neat little files, before the world can impose its relentless pressure to be OK again, to get back to your life. 

Those early weeks are the perfect time to lose your shit, to sink into your grief, to feel – really feel – every ounce of the pain. Pain that will ultimately demand to be felt, at some point, in some form.

In my experience, it only gets harder to do this after the funeral. With each week that passes it becomes less acceptable to be spiralling. Help and check-ins dwindle, your boss wants you back at your desk, you’re expected to start being a person again. We waste so much of that precious early grief time drowning in death admin. I was costing up party nibbles when I should have been crying on the bathroom floor.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, my oldest friend stepped in and took the menu away from me. She chose the food, made the calls, held that particular weight so I didn’t have to. It was an act of love translated into logistics. In grief, the people who save you are often not the ones who say the right things, but the ones who quietly remove a tiny unbearable task, without having to be asked.

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My mother was not religious, so there were no prayers at her funeral. My fear was that the day would feel almost corporate with the little trays of finger food and the slowly warming glasses of supermarket Prosecco.

Friends from different religions and cultural backgrounds told me about beautiful rituals they have performed for loved ones, things that involve sitting with the body, days of family in the house, wailing and singing and prayers and fires and dancing. Our version – secular, rigidly scheduled, organised by the Co-op – feels sanitised, oddly removed from anything to do with death. I longed for something earthy and messy, something involving flames and howling and chanting. But none of this was very practical. So I chose the deluxe buffet menu and made my peace with it.

The day happened. We wore black. My sister and I gave eulogies that made everyone cry. I don’t now remember what I said. Mum’s friends and family spoke beautifully about who she was, we read poems, we played her music (Solange and Amy), we swapped stories about her. Everyone loved the falafel wraps. In many ways, it was beautiful. But inevitably, for my sister and I, for Mum’s siblings, parents and those closest to her, there was an insubstantiality to it. The ritual served its purpose, I could see it providing calm and connection and closure for those on the outer rings of loss. But for the inner circle, it barely scratched the surface. I suspect no ceremony would ever be enough. 

As the room emptied and the buffet was tidied away, it didn’t feel like an ending. The real ritual – the lifelong work of carrying a love with nowhere left to land – was just beginning.

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Relationships with siblings can be awkward. We don’t choose them after all. I’m lucky; my sister and I are besties. And I’ve seen in those close to me how vital a strong bond with a sibling can be after losing a parent. But I’ve also seen the flipside to this. It’s painful, sad and compounds grief further.

We all react differently to loss. So when someone you love dies, tension between those affected should come as no surprise. While all of us would hope we could come together at a time when it's most needed – pulled closer by the shared experience of grief – this isn't always what happens. Sibling relationships can bear the brunt of this.

Loss isn't just heartbreaking, it’s also incredibly disruptive. It forces us into places we don't want to be, not just emotionally but physically. We might not get on with everyone in our families, yet there they are. Admin ('sadmin') dominates your life as you swap your day job to become a 'probate tax expert' overnight. Life turns upside down, emotions are raw, and it's in this climate things are said, choices are made that can define relationships forever.

Who are we to each other now?

This is the question that sits in the centre of my short film, These Walls. After the passing of Tara and Jake's mother, there is no unifying presence in their relationship. Now, it's all on them. They must decide if their fractured relationship is one worth fighting for.

The obstacles are there. Tara has been disinherited from the will. She no longer lives in the same city. The pair have been estranged for some years, so the basis of a relationship isn’t readily set. Jake is in a relationship with huge life changes on the horizon; Tara is on her own.

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So much separates them, yet here they are, arranging the possessions of their mothers' house, sharing the heaviest burden of all – their grief.

Not all relationships are made to last. But the choices we make in the most difficult moments can serve to strengthen or diminish them. For Grief Awareness Week just gone, the theme was ‘Growing With Grief’. How losing a loved one feels like an ending in so many ways, but in time, it can also become the ground from which something new begins.

I think this is true of our relationships. While loss can tear us apart, it also provides an opportunity to deepen and enrich our connections to one another. Because in grief, no matter how difficult, bridges can be built between us.

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I shot the film in my family home (thanks Mum and Dad!) and my sister worked on the project with me. She's a brilliant artist who provided the artwork for the film as well as being our production and costume designer. There were times the sight our home stripped of its possessions to its bare walls was triggering and upsetting. It brought home a reality. That one day she and I will find ourselves in this moment. That we will have to arrange Mum and Dad's stuff, and it will just be us. I can never know how that will feel, or what it will be like. But I'm certain we will lean on each other and draw ever closer, that it will mark the beginning of a deeper, new kind of relationship. And that, in some way, it will be beautiful.

I especially hope that in the moments after loss I will have the wisdom to do and say the right thing at every point. I won't of course, but I'll try. That's all we can ever do.

These Walls is now available to stream on Minute Shorts.

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These Walls was co-produced by Catchi Films and Lonely Kite. Written and directed by Jared Garfield. Starring Jake Davies, Shana Swash and Katie Matsell.

About the author: Jared Garfield is a writer, director, producer and actor born and raised in London. He founded Catchi Films in 2024.

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Christmas is weird when half of your family is dead. And by weird I mean bad. But also… I’m having a nice time? Let me explain.

I love Christmas. The little rituals and traditions. The sense of time stopping, of existing outside of normal linearity. I even enjoy the forced jollity of the season. It’s not cool, or radical, or anti-capitalist to like Christmas, but I can’t help it. I love the cosiness, the merriment.

But there were four of us, and now there are two. And as the big day looms, covered in blinking rainbow lights and fucking tinsel, there’s a gaping hole ripped right through the centre of it and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel.

Bad, I guess. On the face of it, the day has been ruined. Irrevocably changed for the worse. Missing key, irreplaceable components that have been lost forever.

But this isn’t exactly how it feels. At least, not all the time. I’m still excited for the day. I still love the songs, the pigs in blankets, the mulled wine and fairy lights. Is this OK? I’m not sure. Maybe I am supposed to be rejecting all of it. Fleeing from it. Hunkering down and ‘getting through it’, not spewing twinkly ornaments all over my living room and delightedly planning festive menus.

‘This must be a really hard time for you,’ people keep saying, and I nod solemnly and try to subtly remove the novelty reindeer antlers from my head. Maybe my enjoyment of this time of year is warped and wrong, and a kind of betrayal.

It is a hard time for me, though. The people who say this are right. It’s just not hard in the ways I expected it to be. And my response to it feels… strange. At times, unhinged. Rather than the gloomy avoidance that seems fitting for a grief-laden Christmas, I’m more holly jolly than ever – only, with a sprinkle of hysteria and a dash of unpredictable rage.

My sister and I have lovely Christmas plans with people we love. But they are new plans. And the unfamiliarity of what the next few days will look and feel like has been spinning me out.

I have been obsessed with and completely paralysed by the logistics of it all. Where will we be? What time will we eat? When do we do presents? All the things I never had to think about when it was the four of us doing our Christmas, because we did it the way we had always done it. The way that feels like Christmas in my bones.

But now the day has been chucked in a bag, shaken up and tipped out on the table, and a lot of the parts are still there, but they’re all out of order.

I’m realising what I loved about Christmas was the safety of repetition. Just like how you return again and again to your comfort sitcom when you’re sad or tired or burnt-out. And in the same way I wouldn’t start a complicated new TV show after an exhausting week, a brand new Christmas plan feels like too much for my tired brain.

But I’m not remembering it right. Christmas as a four wasn’t always the same. There were years at my grandparents or my uncle’s house. Some years our parents had awkward partners who didn’t want us all to be together. There was the fateful year they both went abroad with their respective girlfriend/boyfriend and we were alone. Both of my parents were decidedly less bothered about Christmas than I am.

This is the rose-tinted mysticism of grief. And I will not allow myself to be fooled by it. Christmas has always been an ever-changing beast. Every few years it resets itself as life chucks something unexpected in your path; someone dies, someone moves abroad, a baby is born, a relationship ends. And we adapt, and we shift, and we keep the parts that feel important, ditch other parts.

What I’m longing for, then, is a feeling I have created for myself by piecing together things I have loved from lots of distinctly different Christmases. This year will be different again. Yes, I’m sad I won’t have Mum’s incredible nut roast (two halves sandwiched together with stilton and cranberry sauce), or get a bit pissed while Dad djs our living room disco. Really sad. But I’m so much sadder about so many other things, bigger things, year-round things. At least at Christmas I get to be sad under the warm glow of twinkling lights.

So, I am looking forward to it. To the parts that I love. The parts that were ours, theirs. Even as the day changes shape, I can carry those parts with me. And every year presents the opportunity to create new magic that will slip into lore and become the way we have always done it.

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My sister and I had a mental block over clearing our mother’s house. We couldn’t figure out the endless admin of it. We both live in a different city, neither of us have cars. How does one clear a whole house? Where does all the stuff go?

Losing both of your parents by your mid-30s is both ageing and infantilising. Sometimes we feel wise beyond our years. Other times we feel like dumb little girls with no clue what to do. This was one of those times.

In the end, we left it down to the wire. We found a bereavement clearance service (it’s just a guy called James and his van) to take everything before the new owners were due to move in. In the weeks before, we made a few trips to Manchester with empty suitcases to salvage the photo albums, the baby books, important documents, hand-written notes and cards, art work, jewellery, a few items of clothing she wore all the time. But the other stuff, the ‘non-sentimental’ stuff, that was all to go.

To go where? To the tip. To charity shops. Into other people’s homes. Into the ether.

It’s fine, I told myself on my way up to visit the house for the final time. It’s just stuff. We have to be practical. I live in a small flat. My sister is renting. We can’t keep it all. What would we do with it anyway? It’s just stuff.

Ten minutes after arriving, I found myself crouched over and breathless in Mum’s bathroom, clutching a soap dish from TK Maxx to my chest.

It makes sense to cry your heart out over old photos, to press your face into a cardigan in search of the lingering ghost of her scent. But crockery, towels, appliances, lamps, bedside tables. These are inanimate, lifeless objects. Only, they’re not.

All this stuff – the piles and piles of stuff – are fragments of her. Brimming with life, her life. Bursting with visceral memories. These things, these ordinary things, were the things that made up her daily existence. She chose them. Picked them out especially, from all the other stuff, to make it her stuff.

“It’s the perfect colour,” Mum had said, palpable delight in her voice. We had discussed the soap dish as many times as it is possible to discuss a soap dish, which is more than you might imagine. She loved it. It was a dusky pink. Mum’s favourite shade. It matched her liquid soap dispenser perfectly.

Downstairs on the kitchen surface was the matching Smeg kettle and toaster set she was so proud of. She refused to use the toaster for months for fear of it “getting crumby”. In the cupboards, there were at least 50 copies of Feast magazine that she religiously saved from her weekend Guardian, the vegetarian recipes meticulously underlined. On the bookshelves were the same sun-faded, dog-eared novels she had carted from house to house since my childhood.

I managed to fit the awkwardly shaped Smeg kettle in my backpack. Now it lives in our kitchen and gives me a sad/happy pinprick to the heart every morning when I make a cup of tea. But the rest… I couldn’t carry it all back.

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Now that it’s all gone, now the property is empty and sold, I can no longer kid myself that she is still up there, living her lovely life, in her lovely house, surrounded by her lovely stuff.

We no longer have a home in Manchester. Nowhere to flee to. Nowhere to take refuge and stop being the adults for a few hours, or a couple of days at Christmas. It’s a destabilising thought. The safety net has gone. We’re the grown ups now. We have to figure out the logistics on our own. We have to create our own sense of safety. It is terrifying.

A few days after the bereavement clearance service finished, I got a message from James. He found something he thought we would want to keep.

“There was a BAFTA under the bed.”

Dad’s BAFTA. He used to keep it his bathroom. We almost lost it. What else has been lost forever? Treasures less obvious than golden trophies. More treasures than we can ever account for. A soap dish in a perfect shade of dusky pink.

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In an alternate reality, my father walks me down the aisle. I feel his hand gripping my arm (he’s as nervous as I am) as we stand just outside the room, a last moment on our own. I’m imagining this part. But then a strange thing happens. My memories and imaginings melt into each other. I stitch the real memory of a rare time I saw my dad cry (the day I left for university) onto this pretend one. The effect is uncanny. The moment is real. He pulls me to face him, chastises himself for being a baby, and together we take a deep breath. Then the music starts and we walk in together.

This kept happening throughout the day. Little moments where my brain imprinted my parents seamlessly into the scene. My mother sitting in the front row during the ceremony, holding her grandson. My baby boy switching between his two grandmothers’ laps. They both have their magic nana tactics to keep him quiet.

At dinner, Mum sits with our Jamaican family. She laughs with my aunties, they are the loudest in the room. They pop a bottle of champagne and toast to the love in the air. I’m not creating this image, it exists – it happened at my mum’s 60th birthday. I see them together, huddled on Mum’s sofa, giddy and giggling. Her wide smile and tipsy cackle, happiness radiating from her, visible and glittering.

On the dancefloor, later, dad has requested Poison by Bell Biv DeVoe. He moves like he’s 23, in the clubs where he used to DJ. He mouths the lyrics, word-for-word. I run to him, sweeping my veil out of the way so I can dance with him properly. I feel proud that he is so cool, so handsome. My mind overlays the memory from my best friend’s wedding, November 2019, the last party before he got sick. The moments are separated only by tracing paper. I cheat it into existence.

At some point he whispers a goodbye in my ear and gently shakes himself free as I cling to his arm. He doesn’t say a word to anyone else. I have so many memories of his Irish exits to choose from. I choose one where I get a final wave from the doorway.

‘We carry them with us’ is one of those platitudes that can be annoying for grievers because it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to ‘sense’ they are there, to ‘know they are watching’. No. I want to literally sit opposite my dad and eat curry goat with him. I want to present my mother with her first ever spicy margarita and watch her face as she takes a sip. I want to hold their hands, hear their voices, see their faces. I want them bodily, bodily, not spiritually.

My mind can do that. Sort of.

My memories of the day are blurred by adrenaline, extreme joy, and sparkling wine. The moments that come back to me are flashes, unconnected, unreliable. Why can’t I tinker with them further? I can drop my parents in, spin them around, place a drink in their hands and a smile on their faces. Why not? They’re my memories for me to return to, the ones with them don’t feel much less real than the ones without them.

I’m grateful for the tricks my mind can pull. The elaborate coping mechanisms that make the hardest days (which are often the most beautiful days) a tiny bit less hard. “You have everything she wanted for you,” my mum’s friend messaged me, the day after the wedding. Such a beautiful sentiment, but I want, so desperately, to show her, to show them both.

We do carry them with us of course, and I did sense their presence, but sometimes it just feels like I’m pretending. Other times it feels like hope.

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When someone you love is dying, they will still annoy you in the same ways they did when they weren't dying. And you them. You will irritate each other as only you can, your sharp edges continuing to clatter against theirs with an achingly familiar rhythm.

You imagine there will be a transformation. Of them. Of you. Of everything. That, in the face of an unavoidable, horrifying new reality, you will somehow rise above everything you've ever been, and become new people. Better people. People who say only the right things, in the right way, at the right time. People who do not get annoyed or snappy or tired or distracted.

You think it will be like in the movies. That there will be a moment where the world will stop and you and your person will sit in the eye of the storm, facing each other, and you will find a way to crack through the protective outer shell of normal life and reach something essential. That you will be able to articulate it neatly and conclusively, and doing so will provide peace.

But it won't be like the movies. Everything will be brighter, louder, more chaotic. It will be messy and hot and often you won't shower and there will be so many phone calls to make and so much admin to do and you will be anxious to the point of constant nausea, not sleeping, barely able to string a sentence together, bone-tired from the effort of not completely falling apart.

You will try to have your moment. Maybe. If you can manage to spit the words from your mouth, they may feel strange or unnatural. You might feel awkward. You might not be able to hold their hand or look them in the eye as you had planned. Your person might not react how you want them to. They might shut down, they might not give you what you hope for in return. You will likely discover that saying the correct combination of words doesn't bring you peace or closure.

The problem is that you're trying, in a moment defined by difficulty, to establish a brand new way of communicating with each other, using words and tones and gestures that feel alien to your relationship. You're trying to be different people. But you can only be who you are, even when staring down disaster. Especially when staring down disaster.

You might get your moment. Or a version of it. I forced myself to say the words over the phone. It was the best I could manage. When dad died, I tortured myself with the idea that he didn't know how sad I was, because I had been trying so hard to be strong. I wasn't going to let that happen again. So I told her how sad I was. How scared. And then, of course, I tortured myself for burdening her with that. For making it about me.

In other moments we reverted to our normal patter. She came to stay with me. I was impatient and snappy with her for getting in my way in the kitchen. She was emotional and harsh. We argued. We made up. She forgot about it quickly, I held onto it for longer. She was being her and I was being me. We couldn't be anything else.

There were other moments, later on, where I managed to unstick more words from my insides. Things it felt vital for mum to know, to hear. To be honest, I don't have very clear memories of these conversations, but my partner assures me they happened. The moments I do remember clearly are more unremarkable.

When someone you love is dying, they will love you in the ways they loved you before they were dying.

Mum asked about the innocuous details of my life. She let me talk about boring things, over and over, to help me riddle them out in my mind. She listened and cared and asked and asked and asked, the things no one else thought to ask. It was un-cinematic and mundane, it was us as we had always been. We talked about nothing, which of course was everything.

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We all have those dd.mm.yy etched in our minds.

Some are happy, some are sad. From wedding anniversaries, to birthdays, to FA Cup final wins, the date something happened is a chance to cast your mind back.

For me, the 1 September will forever be held in my mind and I always have a strange mix of emotions in the lead up to it.

It was the day we lost my father. It's become a date in the diary/calendar/family planner to note, in the same way birthdays, wedding anniversaries and other days are. And I've found it interesting how it's affected me as the date draws closer.

The other year I was away for it, away from my family, my children, and it meant a long drive back home to reflect on it – and it didn't move far from my mind. It doesn't take much for the mind to wander back to what my Dad was going through, and then he was at peace that very sunny (I always remember just how bright the sunshine was) morning.

And my sister's scream, I'll never ever forget that sound, when my Dad did slip away.

It's a poignant date as the 1 September is when lots of things change and the shadows start to lengthen with the signal of Autumn on the way. It's back to school month, it's the start of the run up to Christmas for many in their working lives, Parliament returns, people start and return to university. Life goes 'back to normal' in many ways.

But I've found in the week leading up to 1 September, I can have a little less zip. I said to a friend last year as the day approached how, “I'm not feeling too positive this week” – I guess code for being a bit grumpy – this was in response to his unusual 'Tigerness' and bounce that week. I don't usually say things like that out loud, so it was a big step for me to vocalise that – I tend to try to stay 'steady state'. All part of being a father myself, I think.

I've written about my Dad before, on what would have been his 70th birthday, and I think finding ways to remember and mark the key moments – which now sadly includes the day he died – are all part of the process of grief. You have to embrace them, rather than let them loom up on you.

This year will be five years. I honestly can't believe it has been five years. So much has happened. He has missed so much. But in a way I know he's still there, whenever my son smiles, whenever I've just had a tricky conversation, whenever my daughter is running off ahead, whenever I run into bowl at cricket. He'll always be there. Encouraging, cheering on, providing guidance.

Because the people who loved you more than any others are always there. And they always will be.

To mark five years, we're going to remember my father by getting together. The hospice who helped care for him, at home, is encouraging a 'Sip and Support' event.

We'll gather, friends, family, colleagues, and my Dad would have absolutely loved it. He loved a party. He loved togetherness. If he were watching Oasis he'd be the one in the middle of a big line of people with his arms around everyone belting out Live Forever.

And he always will, in my heart and in my mind.

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While we waited for the doctors to tell us how long my mother would live, I went hiking in the Italian countryside.

The plan was to walk from Bologna to Florence. My boyfriend and I booked the trip before Mum became unwell, before the diagnosis, when the world still felt light and beautiful and hikable. But now, trapped in a limbo of not-quite-arrived horror, the idea of leaving was impossible.

I didn't want to go. I didn't want to be out of the country. The whole trip was only a week long, but time had melted in the face of disaster and every second felt terrifyingly weighted. I had learnt that life could collapse in on itself in a second – so anything could happen in a week.

Mum insisted. She wouldn't hear of us cancelling the trip. She even drove me to Decathlon to help me pick out hiking gear; cushioned socks, a luminous pink visor, walking boots with flecks of pink and purple between the laces ('those are the least ugly' she said).

'I can't,' I said to her. 'I can't go right now.'

'I need you to,' she replied.

A few days later I found myself in the blistering heat of Bologna, wearing the least ugly walking boots and weighed down with giant water bottles, blister plasters, protein bars, and the heaviest item of all – a sense of impending doom.

We had the trail mostly to ourselves. We walked for hours each day without encountering another person, or a car, or a building. Every day brought with it a new landscape. Flat meadows patchworked with lilac wildflowers, shadowy forests with dappled light and twisted roots underfoot, steep, rocky hills that took us up and up to slightly cooler air and postcard-perfect views. The hills rolled on, as far as we could see. I felt wonderfully insignificant. My problems, my fears, my life, were smaller, shrunk by the force of a beauty that existed before we arrived, and will continue long after us.

As we passed through tiny villages the locals watched us from shaded benches, sometimes shouting things at us with an incredulous smile. We didn't have to speak the language to know they were calling us crazy. It was too hot. Europe was baking in 40 degree heat. We had started the hike at the wrong time, the height of summer. But we didn't care. We hiked topless, sweat dripping down our backs, finding relief in stretches of shaded woodland, hyping each other up to make it along the punishing exposed roads. It all added to the challenge.

Every evening we arrived at a B&B, ate our weight in pasta and collapsed into bed, our legs humming. I had underestimated how physically challenging the hike would be, and neither of us had really trained. I naively believed gym fitness would translate to mountain trails, but this was a different kind of endurance. On the longest days, there were moments it felt impossible. My legs were numb, my feet torn up and in agony. I would ask my boyfriend and keeper of the map how much further, trying to keep my voice light, and would almost collapse on the ground when he told me there were still hours to go.

But we kept walking. Every time I wanted to give up, I mustered the necessary energy from somewhere to keep going. Not because of any great moral character or inner strength, but simply because there was no other choice. The only thing to do was to feel the pain, acknowledge it, and continue to put one foot in front of the other. It was an excruciatingly on-the-nose metaphor, and it helped.

I liked the idea that I could endure anything. No matter how painful it was. Because there was no choice, no option of turning back. The inevitability of this was comforting. I was practicing for what was to come.

My mother's appointment with the oncology team was to happen on the final day of our hike. I had no roaming data, so I would have to wait until we reached Florence to hear the news, find out the plan, if there were to be a plan. My biggest fear was that we were too far along, that there was no plan. Nothing more we can do.

Throughout the day, images of my mother in sterile waiting rooms, stern doctors, wringing hands, and tear-smeared cheeks, flashed across my consciousness. I tried to remain in my body, focusing on the slight burn in my lungs, the heartbeat in the balls of my feet, the spires of Santa Maria del Fiore that bobbed closer with every step.

Somewhere on the final stretch, my knee gave out. A twinge became a limp that became an inability to put any weight through my right leg. We were a couple of hours out of the city.

My boyfriend suggested a bus. We had practically done the whole route. No one would know. But I would know. The universe would know. I had to complete every step. It felt bigger than me.

We passed a pharmacy and strapped my knee up as best we could. Then I hopped, hobbled and limped the final two hours of our hike. When it got too hard, my boyfriend half carried me through the throngs of Florence tourists. It was a Herculein effort. The heat had intensified as we dropped down into the city and we were drenched in sweat, stopping frequently to sip water and catch our breath. The pain in my knee was making me nauseous. But we were almost there.

Without warning, the winding, crowded side-streets opened up to reveal the cathedral in the centre of a giant plaza, sunlight bouncing blindingly off marble. It was bigger and more ornate than any I had ever seen. It was our finish line. I lifted my arms and burst into tears. We made it.

Then I remembered mum. I connected to the wifi and called her. Her voice soared to me across the ocean. I was holding her hand. She was next to me as I perched on the edge of some ancient fountain, waiting for her to tell me what happens now. She sounded bright and clear.

There was a plan. There were things the doctors could try. There was time. Not a lot of time. But there was some. I undid the laces of my walking boots and released my throbbing feet, resting them against the sun-warmed stone of the fountain. I tried to hold on to the feeling from the mountains, the safety of feeling small. But mum always had a way of making me feel significant. She asked me about the walk, she asked about the food and the weather and the views, she wanted all the details of my joy. She wasn’t going to let me disappear.

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This weekend we are walking again. My beautiful friends Ryan and Scarlett are walking the Suffolk Coastal Path across five days to raise money for Pancreatic Cancer UK, and in memory of Scarlett's wonderful mum Bee.

My boyfriend and I (and our thrill-seeking one-year-old) are joining for the final day of the walk – and we would be so grateful if you could spare a small donation to help them reach their target of £10k (they're SO close).

Please follow this link to donate:

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Around 10,500 people a year are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the UK, but it has the lowest cancer survival rate with 9,000 dying every year. As well as unimaginable odds, patients also face limited treatment options and are often not diagnosed until the cancer is at a late stage. Sadly 7 in 10 people are diagnosed too late to receive any treatment at all.

With your support, Pancreatic Cancer UK is aiming to double survival rates, so that many more people survive to live long and well. Research is the answer, and progress is coming, but more investment is needed to accelerate the breakthroughs so badly needed for people facing this awful disease and save lives.

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Our Manchester was the green spaces that skirt the peripheries of the city. The parks and lakes, canals and manor houses where we would tromp through long grass and hidden paths, weekend after weekend. Our old favourites and newer discoveries – Dunham, Tatton, Lime, Jumbles, Hollingworth. Each one became our garden for the day.

They say Black men don’t go walking, but you never took much notice of what was expected of you. My sister and I would skip and trot to keep pace with your long strides, break off to hide behind trees, drag enormous sticks like trophies, create elaborate stories for you to play along and do the voices. You hoisted us on to the lower branches of trees and let us take turns riding your shoulders.

Later, our walks became therapy. We told you about boys, friendships, our studies and then our jobs, cradling coffees for warmth as you endlessly listened, never losing interest in our minute dramas and tiny calamities. You knew the names of all of our friends. You knew the names of birds and trees, you knew the fields we could cut across and which gates would be locked. You always knew the way.

Our Manchester was the city centre. You pointed at the helicopters that circled the Arndale the day the bomb went off. Your senses – attuned to disaster from years in the newsroom – warned you to get us home. We felt the shudder of the explosion as we sat on the tram minutes later, you told us not to worry.

We watched the city rebuild itself, better than before. The wet concrete of the centre of town became our common ground, an equal meeting place from just about anywhere. On the rainiest days we huddled in shops, hanging around the sportswear, giving just enough longing looks to a pair of Nikes for you to eventually roll your eyes and take them to the till.

Some languid Sundays were spent in the cushioned darkness of the Cornerhouse or the AMC. French arthouse, blockbuster sequels; there was no hierarchy, you loved them all the same. You rustled your sweets too loudly, and laughed too enthusiastically. You always said ‘how much?!’ when you paid for the popcorn.

***

Our Manchester was opposite ends of the Metrolink. You just outside of Bury, us in Altrincham. Our bond transcending the M60 as we shot up and down it in your car, battling for the front seat – for the right to sit next to you. You would pick something from your playlists especially for each of us (90s hiphop, Britney Spears, or some UKG) and mutter to yourself, ‘yeah, you’ll like this one,’ as you hit play.

Your house, the house where we had living room discos and ate sandwich spread for breakfast, is empty now. We have to sell it. We don’t really know what we’re doing.

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None of us were born in Manchester, but we were drawn to this city with the inevitability of a tidal pull. By now, we are all Mancunian on a molecular level. But the streets of this city scream your absence.

I look for you at Piccadilly Station every time my train pulls in. My eyes lift just above the line of the crowd, searching for your giant headphones, for your tall frame decked out in oversized North Face. Waiting for the smile and the dip of the head as you spot me, waiting for you to hold me at arm’s length and say; ‘It’s good to see you Miss Morris.’

In London I distract myself with manic energy, work, friends, the frantic pace of the capital. I can almost forget – even for half a moment. But in Manchester, the fact of your gone-ness smacks me in the face, waits for me to get up and then hits me again.

Manchester is where the pain is worst, but it’s also where these memories are their sharpest. You’re etched into the fabric of the streets, the buildings, the lakes and the trees. It’s easier to find you, to visualise you. And, beneath all those layers of aching, I know this city holds your DNA in its core – I can feel you here.

None of us were born in Manchester, but it’s ours now, and always will be.

This is the place where we lost you. But it is also the place where we had you. Where we loved you. I hope I am able to wrap this feeling around me, no matter how much it hurts. I hope to be able to look directly at this city again.

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Today’s bonus newsletter is a repost of an article I wrote in 2021 for Aurelia magazine, which unfortunately no longer exists. It’s a love letter to Manchester, and what the city meant to us. I was sad it wasn’t available to read on the internet anymore, so sharing it for you all here. Thanks for subscribing/reading/sharing/all that good stuff. I hope your Father’s Day has been gentle.

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The first big loss of your life – and I'm talking inner circle, close family, someone you speak to every single day level of loss – unravels you. You become a different person. A person who knows (really and truly knows) that death is a thing that can and will happen, rather than understanding it as an abstract concept. It becomes concrete, tangible, instead of something that happens over there, to other people.

Once you have felt it close-up, the nauseating permanence of it, you are transformed.

We lost our dad first, my sister and I. There was no trial run, no build-up with second-tier losses to ease us in. We were straight in with the big guns: the destabilising loss of a parent. And unstable is an accurate description of how I felt for the first year. The first two years.

My reaction was dramatic. I don't mean that it was over the top, it felt perfectly proportionate to the level of catastrophe that had occured, but dramatic in the sense that my behaviour felt almost filmic. I was in an existential crisis ripped straight from the scenes of my favourite movies. I stayed up all night questioning the afterlife, the purpose of humanity, the very fabric of existence. I walked in the rain, letting the tears fall freely. I literally called out to him, looked for signs that he was listening. It was all I could do not to drop to my knees and scream towards the sky as an aerial camera slowly zoomed out from my face.

Internally, the overwhelming emotion was fear. I was unprepared for this deep, rattling terror. In Dad's eulogy I spoke about losing my safety net – the person you call in a crisis. But I had lost my sense of safety in a much broader sense too. If this could happen, anything could.

To put all of this another way, I could simply say that the first big loss forces you to confront your own mortality. Once that door has been opened and you have peered into the abyss, there is no closing it again.

I guess this is why the second big loss, in my experience, has felt so different. It has been an altogether quieter affair. Last autumn, as I tried (unsuccessfully) to prepare myself for my mother's death, I braced for an unravelling on the same scale. I waited for the tidal wave to hit. But it never came.

With dad, the feeling was high-pitched and keening, scalpel-sharp and penetrating between two ribs, high up in my chest. This time it is duller, flatter, deeper – somewhere in my gut, lead and heavy in my limbs. There is resignation, sick familiarity. Horrendous sadness, yes, but no fear.

Of course I've felt guilty about this contrasting response. Because grief and guilt come as a package deal. Why am I not wailing into the night or questioning my purpose? Why am I functioning better this time around?

I think there are a few factors. 1) I'm older. I'm a different person to who I was in 2020, and I'm a mum now. A breakdown would require a level of 'me time' I am no longer afforded. And 2) I think grief can only unravel you once.

There are other factors. There were only four years separating my parents’ deaths. There is probably an element of whiplash-induced numbness that may well have worn off if we had more time between the losses. But no matter how much time had passed, I still don’t believe I could be floored in quite the same way a second time.

When I think back to those early months after Dad, so much of what I did and felt was driven by a desperate, illogical hope. Some part of me really thought that if I made enough of a fuss, if I performed my grief well enough, someone or something would fix it. Bring him back. It took years to shake that feeling.

Now, without that desperate, fearful yearning, I am able to sit with my grief in a different way. I drag it with me everywhere I go, sometimes I stare it straight in the face. I'm no longer looking to the sky for answers, because I know there are none. There's only the damp, shivering quiet that follows a storm, and learning to live with the weight.

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My father died on a beautiful day. The sky was a drinkable blue, the air warm in the back of your throat when you took a deep breath, summer sweet on your tongue.

In the morning, as we drove up to the hospice to sit by his bed, it was already warm enough outside for bare arms. I made a silent plan to leave before the heat started to fade, to go and sit in a park in my bra. That's an acceptable thing to do, I thought. The world is collapsing, but I can still sunbathe.

I didn't know it would be his last day.

By mid-morning he was gone. My sister and I burst out into the car park where our mother and my partner were waiting for us. It was COVID and they weren't allowed inside. Usually they waited in the car, often for hours, but today it was hot and glorious, so they were outside. They were laughing about something, tilting their faces up towards the sky. It was a beautiful day.

My mother looked over and saw us. It took her a few seconds to read our expressions. And then she ran to us. The sun was hot on our backs as we clung to each other.

On our way home, we stopped at M&S. Because what else are you supposed to do?

We splurged and bought everything we wanted. Those sweet red peppers stuffed with goats cheese, artichokes swimming in garlic and olive oil, pork pies because those were Dad's favourite. We sat outside. No one ate much. I put SPF on my face and lay back in the grass. The world had collapsed, yet I could still sunbathe. The man on the news said it was hotter than the Algarve. Everyone agreed it was a beautiful day.

Now, beautiful days no longer sit right with me. The sunshine hits me wrong, incongruous in its brilliance, mocking with its expectation of joy. Go to a beer garden, the day whispers tauntingly. Put on a cute dress. Finish work early and go to Hampstead Heath. And I do all of those things, but I can no longer do them with the same lightness.

How can I frolic on a day that feels just like that day?

For grievers, the change of seasons can be an unavoidable reminder of all that has been lost. Lighter evenings, BBQ-scented breeze, the first day mild enough to leave your jacket at home – these are the tangible symbols of the passage of time; the year quartered up, each slice experienced without your person. And then there is the visceral sense-memory of loss. Trauma dissolved into the weather, the smells, the way the light moves past your window, it lies like dust in the corners of your mind, ready to be stirred up whenever those same conditions cycle back around.

For me it is the warmth of the sun on my bare arms. The heat of that day is baked into my bones. It lingers, residual and stubborn, like the hot wind in the underground, trapped down there many summers ago.

With the heat comes the desire to sit and bask, immediately followed by the guilt of desiring that exact thing on the day Dad died. The two things are now inextricably fused for me. Death and beautiful days.

“You never know how many summers you will get, babe,” Dad said to me once, years ago, with his characteristic tendency to turn abruptly and briefly melancholy. He loved summer, he loved beautiful days.

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Thank you for reading The Sun’ll Come Out, and hello to new readers who saw me, keeping it cheery, chatting all things grief on ITV Granada Reports this week. Thanks so much for reading and supporting me in my quest to normalise talking about grief and death. You can watch the full interview here.

I want to show my mother what I made. Don't we always? It is the same urge I have had since primary school, pulling crumpled drawings from my bookbag, desperate for her praise, for a coveted spot on the fridge.

Look what I did mum. Look what I made. Only this time I made a human baby. And I need her to see him. I need her to look at his ridiculous blonde curls, the almond eyes a miraculous shade of blue, the ski slope of a nose that is entirely hers, and mine, but hers first.

He is hers as much as he is mine. And she is not here to witness him. But more than that, I need her to witness me, doing it. Look mum – I'm doing it. I'm doing it!

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She ran to me in those early, blurred days of chaos. My first week as a mother when time and space lost all meaning and I sat on the bed, drenched in milk, delirious from exhaustion, dazed from the brutal crash-landing into a new life.

I saw her, marching at full speed past the window, a flash of pink dress, and then she was with me on the bed, watching carefully as I struggled with breastfeeding, encouraging me to rest, to sleep, warily and gently navigating my postpartum mood swings.

Days out of hospital herself, no business being out of bed, she had booked a train from Manchester to London at 2am and eight hours later she was by my side. She wanted to hold her first grandchild, yes, but she was there for me. Her baby.

Three months later, she would be gone.

We rinsed everything we could out of those weeks. The shortest of crossovers, in which both she and I existed in the world as mothers. I strapped my newborn to my chest and travelled to see her as often as I could. We stayed with her for days at a time, so she could bathe him, sing to him at bedtime, cuddle him in the mornings when he was still soft and rumpled from sleep.

She got to be his Nana. She pushed his buggy to the park, learnt his favourite songs, played his favourite games, saw his first smiles. And then it was over.

They had three months together. I am so grateful we had three months. And I am absolutely furious that we had three months.

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My baby is growing so fast. The fog of postpartum is lifting. I am so happy and brimming with a love that borders on obsession. And I'm exhausted. And I'm overwhelmed. And everything makes me cry. Is this how you felt about me, mum? I want to ask her. This much love? This wild, wild love? Was it this hard and this beautiful for you too?

I want to tell her that I see her now. I see all of her, and all that she did. I want to tell her that my son looks just like her. That nose. Those eyes. I want to tell her that I get it now. I want to say sorry. I want to say thank you.

The day after she died, Rafe laughed for the first time. He is a kind soul and he knew we needed it. That sweet chuckle, the most perfect sound. And my mother would never hear it.

Bittersweet. That's what they tell me it will always be like now. Mother's Day – my first as a mother, without my mother – is bittersweet. What a pretty word for something so crushing. As though these moments will feel like a tart sip of artisanal lemonade, not like you're being destroyed and reborn in the same instant.

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You expect to feel sad when someone you loves dies. Inconsolable wailing at a graveside, sure. Depression that leaves you bed-ridden for weeks, sign me up. But no one warned me I would feel so furious.

We don’t tend to see this part in films or read about it in books. I guess that’s because anger is less cinematically tragic. As an emotion, it doesn’t fit neatly into the narratives we create for the bereaved. It’s harder to dish out sympathy and understanding for someone who is irritable, argumentative, ready to bite your head off for one wrong word.

Despite being well-recorded as one of the official 'stages' of grief, in reality there is very little space granted for anger. Tears, we can just about handle. Isolation and withdrawal, that makes sense. But rage? There's no place to put that. When someone is crying it’s easy to politely look away, but anger explodes outwards, requiring attention, demanding a reaction.

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The truth is I am angry. Some days, I am incandescent with a rage that is entirely unbecoming, unpalatable, unspeakable.

My anger is often directed towards other people's parents or grandparents. Random old people on the tube. Particularly if they happen to look anything like my mum or dad, or what they would have looked like if they had made it past 60. I glare at them, seething silently at their audacious aliveness.

Why do they get to be here when my people are gone? I have mentally swapped the souls of strangers for my parents' souls with a frequency that will most certainly damn me to hell if souls are, in fact, a thing.

When my friends ask me how I am, I tend not to tell them that I fantasised about pushing an old man down an escalator that morning. I have made progress in sharing my sadness, I’m getting better at opening up about things like apathy and depression, but my anger still feels taboo – even with those closest to me.

This isn't to say that people who are grieving should be encouraged to sink entirely into these feelings. I'm aware that the rage I sometimes feel isn’t a healthy mental space to occupy long-term. But there is value in it. It provides an outlet for the pent-up injustice I feel about the cards the universe has dealt me. I can’t yell at the universe, so finding somewhere else – somewhere outside of myself – to put those feelings provides some relief.

Recognition would be helpful

What grievers need is the acknowledgement that anger after loss is normal. We need compassion, understanding, space to feel, even when our response to death isn’t neat and tidy or convenient for other people. Even if our anger is all-consuming, even if it makes us difficult to be around, it is a valid response to death.

I try to remember this. But I still struggle with the guilt.

The anger I feel isn’t typically extreme. Usually, it’s small. It bursts out in fits of irritation, impatience and overwhelm. I snap at those closest to me, my tone is short on work emails. My threshold for things annoying me is the lowest it’s ever been. It often takes me a while to connect these little outbursts with grief. It might not be until someone calls me out that I take a step back and think – wow, why am I being such a bitch today?

Sometimes, my anger affects those around me. Sadness does this too, but in a less direct way. I don’t love this. I struggle with seeing my grief ripple outwards in ways I can’t always control. But, I try to remind myself, we do not exist in emotional vacuums. The beauty of human relationships is that our experiences of life overlap, intersect and impact on each other – both the good and the bad. This is the deal.

Just beneath the anger is an ocean of sad. It’s always there, crashing into my bloodstream, threatening to drown me from the inside. Sometimes it’s easier to lean into the anger than to be dragged down into the sad. Anger, at least, provides some semblance of control, of action. I feel less passive, less helpless, on my angry days.

I might be angry forever. Not in a murderous escalator-pushing way, but in a small way that flinches whenever someone casually shares a sweet picture of their mum on Instagram, or rolls their eyes while on the phone to their dad. I am angry that they don't know what they have, even though I know it is impossible to know until you know.

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It’s February 7th. Mum should be 62 today, but she will always be 61.

I'm not sure what to do with today. It's another day without her, a day that technically hurts no more or no less than the days that have preceded it. But there is a pressure. The air is heavy with it. With expectation. Something is supposed to happen today. I'm supposed to do something. But what? Cake and candles? I am supposed to be... sadder. But I’m supposed to celebrate. More crying, more cake. I don’t know.

I'm not sure what to do with today.

I think about what I would have done if she were alive. I would have called her and sang to her – badly, loudly, not caring about people hearing me on my commute. I would have sent her a card with a long message inside. I would have told her how much I love her, how lucky I am to have her as a mum. I want to say I would have gone to Manchester to see her, but I probably wouldn't have. If I'm honest, I likely would have waited for a weekend that was more convenient for me. I would have taken her out for dinner or to the theatre, but it would have been belated.

I wouldn't have thought it mattered much. It wasn’t a big birthday. I would see her soon. And you don't think it's the last birthday. You never think it's the last birthday.

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The buildup to these days can be worse than the day itself. It is the pressure to perform some version of grief that feels appropriately heavy. It creates an anxiety that you won't live up to the moment, that you won't do it 'right'.

Often, these significant days – the anniversaries, the birthdays, Christmas – are not the dramatic, wailing affairs we might expect. For me, these days tend to be marked by a notable stillness – an empty quiet that hollows me out. Today, her birthday, is not the day that will destroy me, leave me doubled over in agony. No, that will happen on a random Tuesday in an unimportant week of an unimportant month – triggered only by the horrific normality of her day-to-day absence.

What will I do with today?

My sister and I will do something together. Something nice. We will do it for her, for us, for the people who keep asking us what we are doing today.

We will open a bottle of wine, even though we keep telling each other we are going to drink less.

But it's Friday.

But it has been a long week.

But our mother is dead.

So we will drink the wine and force ourselves to talk about her, even though her name lacerates our skin. Even though the memories rip us open at the seams.

A song will play in the bar. The song we almost chose for the funeral but didn’t. We will listen for her voice in the lyrics. We will make it through today. And she will still be 61 tomorrow.

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Time moves differently after loss. It's an odd, disorientating sensation. A simultaneous speeding up and slowing down. The feeling of time as both more solid, and in other moments more abstract, more insubstantial than ever.

Your place in time – how you experience it – alters too.

Before my losses, I always felt myself being pulled through time, whizzing gently forwards, as though holding on to some cosmic travelator with a predictable trajectory. Now, I see myself as standing still, time hurtling through me - a bullet train to the guts. Time still affects me, I still witness it's passing (sometimes with a violent speed), and yet I often perceive myself as static.

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For grievers, time takes on a new weight. We are told that time is a healer, that we will feel better after the first year, that we must move forwards towards something brighter and better, away from the sadness.

In the early days of my grief I clung desperately to this idea that the passage of time would fix everything that had broken. I just had to make it through the first year. All the ‘firsts’ without him. A first Christmas, my birthday, his birthday, each season without his presence. I ticked each one off as they passed, pleased to be making progress.

So when I woke up the day after the first anniversary of my dad's death and realised I was still in pain, that nothing had changed, it sent me into a downward spiral that lasted weeks.

Time heals. We say this to grievers because we want to rush them through their pain. We think it's a kindness, that it offers comfort and hope, but it comes from a place of deep discomfort. We don't want to hear about someone's ongoing anguish, we don't want to accept that some pain is eternal, because that's terrifying. But for those of us who feel that time has stopped, an inability to acknowledge the permanence of our pain makes us feel defective.

If time is supposed to be a healer, what happens when it's not?

I don’t want to feel hurried. I want the space to sit with my pain, to sink in to it, to press my finger deep into the bruise and let the hurt spread itself through me. I want it to be understood that some pain alters you permanently, some pain sits in your blood forever. There is no ‘back to normal’, or returning to who I was before.

Rather than pushing people to feel better as quickly as possible, what if we supported them in this new state of being? What if we saw grief as permanent, rather than something to get to the other side of as quickly as possible?

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Time, for me, has shifted and moulded my grief, eroded it into something smoother and easier to hold. But it hasn't healed it. And I now find the passage of time completely baffling in a way that I never did before.

What do you mean it has been close to half a decade since I last spoke to my dad? That simply can’t be accurate. It feels wrong and confusing in the same way that the first abrupt, 4pm nightfall is always so shocking after daylight savings. My brain refuses to accept it.

Maybe that’s because there is a part of you that stays in the moment of the loss, or in the 'before'. This would make sense to me. A temporal cleaving in two, where most of you marches forwards into the inevitable ordeal of 'getting on with life', but some of you hangs back, stuck in those moments that no longer exist.

Stuck isn't the right word though. Not for me. Those past moments aren't something I feel trapped in, something I want to escape. They are, instead, a haven, a relief, a place I escape to when the relentless propulsion of life starts to give me motion sickness. It is the present, and the future, that can feel stifling after a loss – not the past.

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