People keep telling me I’m doing well. It is well meant, of course, but I don’t really know what they mean. What is it to grieve well? I suppose they are saying: well done for being out of the house, showered and dressed, able to hold normal conversation. Well done for turning up to the office (mostly) on time, completing the work you need to get done, refraining from crying at your desk and even managing to crack a joke or two at the pub after. Perhaps they mean that I am doing a passable impression of being normal.
It has been, as I write, just over seven weeks since Dad died. It feels like far longer – so slow is the grind of getting up and out and on. I wish that time would stop: the more it passes, the further I feel from him. I experienced, at first, that feeling so familiar from break-ups and others of life’s crushing blows, of remembering afresh each morning. I felt so guilty the first morning I woke and he was not the first thing I thought of. The immediate shock has waned, its clarity faded into something hazier, its penetrating agony softened into an endless ache (though that sharp pain sometimes returns, unbidden – often in the dark, when visions of that hospital room will not leave me).
Work offers some escape, in that it is so busy it leaves me little time to think of anything else. But the evenings and weekends are, by contrast, lower, more difficult: all that emotional processing condensed into fewer hours. I am constantly exhausted, my capacity to brush off ordinary setbacks far reduced. I talk to him all the time: in the shower, on my bike, in the park across from the hospital, where I am often to be found at lunch.
My brother talks about how he once thought grief was something to get through and get over; now he sees that it is with you for ever, that you cannot help but be changed by it. Some moments draw a dividing line through life that can never be crossed, creating a before and after. The person I was before my father’s death is lost to me; the person I am after is still being formed. I imagine all the pain of life as being like rocks stacked in a backpack you cannot open or take off: you simply adapt, in time, to carrying that extra weight.
When my father was alive, all I could see were our differences, the ways in which he felt alien, unknowable, to me. Now, I see him in me all the time. I inherited the shape of his nailbeds, his freckles and moles (the absolute cheek of the time he played dot-to-dot on my arm with a biro – as if his arms weren’t just the same!), the way if you drew a line down the centre of his face his nose would be very much more in one side that the other. But mostly, I see him in my urge to create, to make something with my hands. I feel happiest, most myself, at my sewing machine. The method, the precision, the reward, they consume me in a way that feels gentler, more natural, than work – perhaps simply because I can take the task at my own pace and on my own terms.
The first piece I sewed after Dad’s death was a bra. This sounds, I am sure, strange, but when sewing lingerie, the pieces are small, the seams short, the work fast. It was not a project of overwhelming, ahem, proportions. My next make was altogether more demanding: a chore jacket in mixed denims, some remnants from pieces I once made for Dad. The pockets alone took me a whole day to sew.
Now, I seek a harder drug still: drafting a dress from scratch, a copy of a ready-to-wear dress whose price I can neither afford nor justify. I am still deep in the process of toile-ing, tweaking, transferring those tweaks to paper and toile-ing again, only to find another problem that needs fixing. Pattern cutters study for years to learn how to do this: I have only determination, patience and a certain amount of sunk cost – as well as YouTube, Reddit and, via FaceTime, the help of a brilliant friend who does this professionally. Dad’s photo watches over me as I work. Here, finally, amid the frustration and the challenge, is, if not peace exactly, relief.
[See also: On freedom vs motherhood]
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This article appears in the 16 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, A Question of Intent