I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the blue fuzzy noticeboard full of thank-you cards in the family room of the St Barts ward where my father was often to be found in the last months of his life. There were so many, all pinned over each other, so that almost all were obscured. I imagined that they were happy cards of praise from patients now in remission. It was only after we wrote and sent our own thanks to key members of his care team in the days after Dad’s death that it occurred to me that perhaps the noticeboard was full of cards from the bereaved; a total shift in perspective.
I am writing this at around 3am, exactly six months since that dark night, unable to sleep for remembering. In the past six months, people have often talked to me of their own grief, tried to contain it and describe it with easy aphorisms. Of how time softens its edges. Of how it does not grow smaller, we grow bigger to encompass it. Of how it is like glitter: you can try to sweep it all up, but there will always be that little bit stuck to you, that you can only see in certain lights and can’t quite pick off. But all this is too small, too contained. CS Lewis described it as being “like the sky, spread over everything”, which feels something closer. Joan Didion wrote that after her husband John’s death, she too “seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead”. Closer still.
To me, grief feels cosmic; an interruption in the space-time continuum. It cannot soften, or be subsumed within a person, or tidied away. My perception of reality has been altered, a dividing line has been drawn right through my life. There is a before and an after, and the two will never merge, and nothing will ever be the same. I often find myself reading over the text messages I sent to friends from his bedside in those last hours, or scrolling through my pictures on my phone from that time, trying to discern the dividing line. There – between the picture of the rosebush, its roots newly cleared of weeds, and the picture of his Borsalino hat on the bookcase – it happened there. I look at photographs from the weeks before – inane, irrelevant photographs; hot cross buns, the garden centre, my mum’s dog – and think: you had no idea then, that in three weeks your dad would be dead. I don’t know what the purpose of any of this is, except that I am still trying to grasp at the reality of that cosmic event.
Over the summer I reread Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), her memoir of the year following John’s death, searching for some expression or new understanding of what I was experiencing. (Lest you think too highly of me for this literary source of comfort, I turned first to Ricky Gervais’s After Life, which I did not get at all on first watching five years ago, and now get rather too well.) Other than that one about the Styx, two lines stay with me. The first, from the chapter on funerals in Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette: “No matter how calm and controlled [a grieving person] seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal.” In the second, from the 1965 book Death, Grief and Mourning, the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer writes of the trend in the West “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened”. A telling pair.
It might surprise you to hear, given the at times rather melancholy nature of this column (my own “morbid self-indulgence”), that in real life I am really quite good at keeping it together and pressing on. Call me resilient and I will say: thank you, that is the very highest compliment. This at times works to my detriment, for people take me at face value, and consider me somehow recovered, and stop asking after my grief, stop talking about him. But I am like a lover in the first throes, when everything reminds you of that one person, and for every occasion, you have a fitting story to tell about them. It is probably quite tedious to behold. But I suppose I am discovering how much of him – far more than I ever realised when he was alive – exists in my life, and in me.
[Further reading: The Budget of last resort]
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This article appears in the 26 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Last Stand