Carrying More of Him and Less of His Death

Thirteen years ago today, we lost Dad to cancer, and I genuinely don’t know how thirteen years can possibly have passed. He was immediately on my mind when I woke up this morning, before I’d really registered the date or consciously thought about what day it was. My body seemed to remember before the rest of me caught up. And then something happened that surprised me. I wanted to find a video of him.

Not photographs. I’ve looked at photographs over the years. I wanted to see him moving. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted, just for a few minutes, to watch him being Dad. I’ve never been able to do that before. For thirteen years, the idea of seeing him alive on a screen when I know he isn’t here has somehow felt too much. Too close. As though I might open a door into the grief and not quite know how to close it again. But this morning, I wanted to open it. And I’ve been thinking about that all day.

The things grief makes too big

Dad was my anchor and my rock. He was one of those people whose existence in the world made it feel steadier simply because he was in it, and I know he was that kind of person for more people than just me. He was loved by so many. When somebody like that dies, you don’t only lose the person. You lose their place in your life. The person you would have rung. The opinion you would have asked for or, in Dad’s case, probably received whether you asked for it or not. The familiar voice at the end of the phone. Their particular way of making you laugh or driving you completely mad. The knowledge that somewhere in the world, they exist. Then suddenly they don’t.

People sometimes talk about grief as though time gradually makes the loss smaller. I’m not sure that’s been my experience. If anything, life keeps revealing new edges to it. There are things I’ve done that Dad never knew about. Decisions I’ve made that I would love to talk through with him. Places I’ve been. People I’ve met. Versions of myself that didn’t exist when he was alive. There have been moments of enormous happiness when I’ve wished he could see me, and moments when life has gone spectacularly sideways and I’ve wanted my Dad. And there’s the ordinary stuff too. I think that can be the bit we underestimate.

Grief doesn’t only live in anniversaries, funerals and significant milestones. Sometimes it’s wanting to tell someone something completely mundane and remembering, again, that you can’t.

Thirteen years is both forever and no time at all

Life has carried on because that’s what life does. At first, I think there can almost be something offensive about that. How can the world possibly keep moving when somebody so important has disappeared from it? But it does. There has been love and laughter in these thirteen years. Change and loss. Adventures, heartbreak, new beginnings and a whole lot of ordinary Tuesdays. I’ve grown older. My life has changed enormously. I’ve changed enormously. And still, when this date comes around, the distance between then and now can feel both enormous and incredibly small. That’s one of the strange things about grief. It doesn’t seem particularly interested in our tidy ideas about time.

We can be years away from a loss and suddenly find ourselves right beside it again. A song. A smell. A place. A date on the calendar. Something somebody says. Or you wake up one morning and your body already knows. That doesn’t mean you’ve gone backwards. It doesn’t mean you haven’t “dealt with it”. It certainly doesn’t mean you should be over it by now. I don’t think we get over people we love. And I’m not sure why we would want to.

Perhaps we learn to carry them differently

In therapy, I sometimes meet people who are worried that they’re grieving incorrectly. They think they should be further along by now. They shouldn’t still get upset. They should be able to look at the photographs, clear out the clothes, visit the place, talk about what happened without crying. There’s often an invisible timetable attached to grief, and we can be bloody hard on ourselves when we don’t stick to it. But grief isn’t a project to complete. There isn’t a gold star waiting for the person who can finally talk about someone they loved without their voice catching. Some things are simply too much until, one day, they aren’t quite as much. That’s what those videos have been for me. I haven’t spent thirteen years deliberately avoiding them or telling myself I must eventually become strong enough to watch them. I just knew I couldn’t. So I didn’t. Perhaps that was exactly what I needed to do. Because something has shifted without me forcing it. For a long time, when I thought about Dad, I think I carried so much of his death with me. The cancer. Those final months. Losing him. The enormous absence where he used to be.

Of course I remembered the man he was too, but death can cast a bloody long shadow. Particularly when illness has taken up so much space before somebody dies. And somewhere along the way, without really noticing it happening, I think I’ve started carrying more of Dad and less of his death.

That thought landed differently this morning.

Remembering someone alive

Maybe that’s why I wanted the videos. I wanted to hear his voice rather than being frightened of what hearing it might do to me. I wanted to see his face move rather than protect myself from the pain of knowing I can’t see it in real life. I wanted the living man. Because Dad was so much more than the day he died. He was funny and maddening and loved. He was my anchor. He was a whole human being with opinions and stories and relationships and all the ordinary imperfections that make somebody ours. Cancer gets a chapter in his story. It doesn’t get to become the whole bloody book. And perhaps this is one of the quieter ways grief changes over time. Not by disappearing, but by slowly making room for the rest of the person again.

• The memories before the illness.

• The ridiculous stories.

• The sound of their laugh.

• The things they always said.

• The parts of them you can see in yourself, sometimes whether you like it or not.

• The person begins to emerge again from behind the enormity of losing them.

There are spaces nobody else is supposed to fill

I don’t subscribe to the idea of finding “closure” after somebody dies. It has always sounded far too neat for something as untidy as loving another human being. There are losses that change the landscape. You build a life around them because you have to, but the landscape remains changed. And perhaps that isn’t something we need to fix. Some people leave a space nobody else is supposed to fill.

Dad’s is still there.

Thirteen years of living hasn’t closed it. Loving other people hasn’t replaced him. Building a life I’m proud of hasn’t somehow cancelled out wanting my Dad to be part of it. But I can sit alongside that space differently now. I can understand that missing him and living fully aren’t opposites. Neither are grief and happiness. We don’t betray the people we’ve lost by continuing to live, and we don’t betray the lives we have now when an old grief suddenly comes and sits beside us. There’s room for both.

Perhaps that’s what carrying grief eventually becomes: not dragging an enormous weight behind you forever, and not finally putting it down and walking away either. More like learning where it sits within you. Some days you barely notice its weight. Some days it shifts unexpectedly and catches you off guard. And occasionally, thirteen years later, it wakes before you do. This morning mine did. But instead of taking me back only to the day Dad died, it made me want to find him again.

The living, breathing, opinionated man behind the loss. So today, for the first time, I’m going to find those videos. I’m going to hear his voice. I’m going to watch him being Dad. And I’m going to remember how extraordinarily lucky I was to have him before I had to learn how to live without him.

Maybe that’s where I am with grief thirteen years later.

Still carrying it.......Still missing him.

But carrying more of Dad now, and a little less of his death.

Love you, Dad. ❤️