Sharing with you ten things I've learned about grief

Grieving my mum in 2013, then my sister in 2019, has showed me how strange, transformative and, yes, beautiful grief can be. I wanted to share these things I've learned about it with you.

A few days ago, I was cutting up a slightly exhausted looking yellow pepper and grilling a bit of salmon, to mix with some tomatoes and butter beans, and add to an unbelievably useful screw-top metal box I use as a lunch box, to eat in the warm rain outside one of the libraries in Washington DC where I go to write. (Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a cookery page, I just want you to come into the kitchen with me as you read this, although having said that, thank you so much for the recipes and ideas and brilliant comments on last week’s post about cooking. Also thank you for the solidarity. It’s endlessly helpful to know you, too, have similar feelings of violence and regret when it comes to the question of what’s for supper. Safety in numbers will get us through the numbing nature of domestic chores, hey?) I make a packed lunch every day, and carry tea, too, in an old Costa coffee mug I love, because I bought it in my local town of Wantage before we moved to Washington; this mug and the metal lunch tin, have saved me thousands of dollars, as America is fiercely expensive, and if you walk around buying coffees and lunches with casual abandon you cane through a tonne of mone. Also the mug reminds me I really can, literally, carry home wherever I am.

My sister Nell and me (we are pictured here with me on my 18th birthday, two years after our mother’s catastrophic riding accident. I remember this so well and we look solemn, because we were both in a state of deep and unending grief, since Mum was left with terrible brain damage, that meant for 22 years she existed in a state of life in death, or death in life. I can see the process of grief written right across our faces, although I love this photo too, possibly more than any picture I have of Nell and me together)

Anyway, while chopping the yellow pepper, I was exchanging voice notes with my friend, writer Anna Warton who was assembling a flat-packed desk for her daughter while we spoke. We both had our hands full so couldn’t commit to an actual call, but sent one another a volley of notes, as though we were chatting. It was very good. Something we suddenly started talking about was grief, and what it feels like to carry the loss of someone you love very much inside you, after they have gone. Anna was facing the death of a very close friend, something she’s written about beautifully, and I started recording a note for her about my life since the death of my sister Nell, over five years ago. And quite suddenly, standing in the kitchen holding that yellow pepper, the realisation hit me again, like it was brand new, that I’d never see my sister alive on this earth; that sense that she was dead, and would be physically absent from my life forever, felt monumental and in that moment, my feelings were so huge, it was as if a cathedral was collapsing inside me.

I’ve lived with the reality of Nell’s death of five and a half years, and yet in that otherwise stone-cold normal Thursday afternoon, the pain of her absence rushed back inside me as if she’d only just gone. In that moment, my grief and longing for her felt as raw and fresh as the days after her funeral.

I had to abandon the poor pepper and just walk out into my back-yard and let myself feel it all, as tears rushed down my face, soaking my t-shirt, making me snotty and crumpled. It was a big, hard feeling, physically painful, psychologically demanding. And it reminded me that this is the feeling that any of us, who have lost someone we love beyond measure, are holding inside, absolutely all the time. The pain might not crash around at all times as it did in that moment, since normal life also has to be got on with, but it’s always there. We just get better at calming it, holding it tight, smoothing it out, silencing it.

And I was reminded then that holding the pain of loss inside is a dynamic process demanding huge amounts of energy and resourcefulness and grace. And it made me feel a great deal of compassion and love, really, for anyone who is experiencing this, and that means, for human beings everywhere, since great loss, along with our own death, is one of the very few certainties we all share. We’ll all lose someone we love; we’ll all experience this feeling. So, five and a half years after Nell died, and fourteen years after my Mum died, I wanted to share with you, in no particular order, some of the things I’ve learned about grief: