Learning to Carry Loss
I wasn't ready to let you go
I am lying in bed, watching the sunset as I write this. It has been 20 sunsets since Covid took you. I measured your absence in hours at first. Now it is days. I know it will then be every Sunday. Will it ever be every year?
I remember the morning you passed — I opened the blinds and watched the sunrise with trepidation, waiting to phone the hospital. It feels like yesterday, but also impossibly far away.
My love for you transcends your mortality. How do I wake up tomorrow? And the next? I speak about you in the present because I have to believe you are still around me. I have to believe there is something beyond your senseless death.
You lived a life of unconditional generosity, always worrying more about us than yourself. During the first lockdown you wept — not for your own health, but for ours. You sanitized every item, walked laps around the garden with Dad, prayed through the night, naming us each in turn. You were so careful, and yet you were the one Covid stole.
I remember the night before you died. Messaging you, calling, trying to comfort you as you worried about the nurses not having enough oxygen for the other patients. You never asked. When I called you in the early hours of Sunday morning, you spoke. You listened. You said you were ok. I now know you were drowning. Even then, you said thank you. Who does that when they’re dying?
A few hours later, I called the ward, expecting to hear you were stable. Instead, we were summoned to a ward where we were met not with you breathing, but with a white sheet. The scream of recognition still haunts me. We dressed you in your favourite pyjamas and socks so you wouldn’t be cold. I kissed you and whispered I love you — words I hadn’t said enough in life.
Grief is exhausting. It robs you of sleep, of appetite, of memory. Nightmares steal rest, and the cruelest moment is waking each morning and remembering, all over again, that you are gone.
But grief, like the seasons, shifts. The tides become easier to predict. The crying becomes less constant, and laughter slowly returns between waves of loss. My grief will not shrink, but my life will grow around it. You would have wanted that.
It has now been four years. I fought the “why” until there were no answers left. I raged, I carried guilt, I kept my anger close so I wouldn’t collapse. But now I know: your composition cannot be rewritten. It is what it is. And I accept.
Covid took you. It was senseless. And yet the whole world was grieving too. My grief felt shared, and perhaps that has helped me carry it.
When death and life collide, life goes on. You are with me still, in every sunset, in every act of love, and in every step I take toward peace. But I am here.
Infant loss and miscarriage
Losing a baby at any stage of pregnancy, during birth, or even after birth is one of the most heart-wrenching pains to endure. It can feel isolating — like no one truly understands — and sometimes, there are simply no words.
Every loss is unique. Every loss is the greatest loss in the world for the person experiencing it. My role is not to measure pain, but to sit with it, honour it, and help you find a way to hold on when it feels unbearable.
Grief after baby loss is not just a memory. It’s a future re-written. Grief isn’t the past — it’s the future you imagined, undone. It continues, shaping the story we never planned. Grief is a future that didn’t arrive, and a narrative that keeps unfolding.
Your grief is not behind you. It walks ahead, rewriting what could have been.
Walking with grief
We all know the “grief cycle.” It explains emotions, but it doesn’t explain why grief so often feels lonely. The truth is, grief would not feel so isolating if we understood how it shapes our communication. We push others away without meaning to. They respond awkwardly, or pull back, and the distance grows. We cannot forgive them. We want to. But it is easier to stay angry.
I developed a model that shows this process — how grief affects you, how it affects others, and why both sides can feel misunderstood. When we see this clearly, it becomes easier to break the cycle.