Grief Is Not Linear
Reflections on losing my dad
This time last year, after a tweet I wrote about missing my dead father went viral, I was approached by a very nice editor at a very nice publishing company to put together a proposal for a book. The idea was to amass a collection of short essays on objects that trigger grief and raise some money for The Samaritans in the process.
I’m not a writer, but at that time our family had just been hit with the desperate news that my brother-in-law’s brain cancer was terminal. Christmas was an agony we all wanted an escape from. I decided this writerly exercise would be mine.
Like many creative enterprises, nothing came of this proposal. But I wrote an introduction, and then I wrote a short piece about my dad and how a red jumper happened to me at Christmas.
We lost my brother-in-law, Neil, in February. He died in the same hospice as my dad, leaving behind my sister and their two boys, eight and ten years old. These last six months have reminded me what abject trauma death is for the loved ones left behind, and that we have to figure out ways to navigate our grief in less soul-shattering isolation.
What follows are my thoughts from that particularly painful moment in time, when my family teetered on the cliff-edge of another devastating death, and I watched helplessly…
