No year has felt quite as touched by grief as the past 12 months. There has been a national sense of mourning, a palpable sadness that has permeated so deeply in society that many have got to the point of turning it off completely. So much death and to a degree it is almost impossible to reconcile as an act that is often so private has turned so public, all while we have had to stay at home to prevent further death. Every death is a notable death, every death a life that ended and then rippled out to impact those left behind.

Often death is painted with the extremes of emotions felt by those who love and cherish the person they no longer get to spend their days with. There is as much love in silence as there is the keening wail of someone realising all the things the person they love will never get to see, the laughter, the judgement, the beauty of the world and their reaction to every little bump in life. While death and it’s aftermath are at their core very emotional, as we age death becomes more and more administrative. As a child we learn of the loss, the gulf that death presents but as adults we come to learn the admin you’re meant to do as you’re left barely able to cope.

It’s those moments of loss so deep in which we can barely breathe for the pain of it that our hearts demand support to form around us, to protect us from the breeze that could wind us completely. The pandemic has not been kind to that need to prop each other up, to split the administrative boulder into smaller rocks we can carry together. Families have been made to grieve and mourn in segregation for fear of a virus that has claimed far too many lives.

I’m reminded of a quote, much shared through social media, from WandaVision “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”, in a series that explores the entanglement of love, pain and grief we as the watch the titular character of Wanda explore her own grief, her own devastating loss. We all feel that pang when we loss someone we love and the severing of a relationship that wasn’t ready to end. Life is filled to the brim with what if’s, the questions we pose to ourselves in the dark and quiet moments of life as we re-evaluate all the decisions we’ve ever made, the guilt, shame and blame we assign to them and the selves we want to craft with future decisions. We can mourn the selves we’ve lost through the loss of others while also carrying on, carrying the memory of another with us and weaving their joy into our own. Grief is often a feeling of having to overcome something, to change it into something palatable to others, to fix the record player stuck on a loop but it is more like the ebb and flow of unruly waves. It doesn’t always have to be okay.

During the pandemic, I’ve lost two people, neither to coronavirus, the first my uncle to complications through cancer in June 2020 and the second a grandad-in-law (although I’m not married quite yet) who died in his sleep in March 2021. There is no easier path through death that is slow and death that is fast, like ripping off a plaster there will be pain whether quick or slow.

Things don’t have to be okay, an emptiness is okay, feeling like you’re moving on and leaving them behind is okay because it never is leaving them behind, they’re still there settled somewhere in your thoughts even if not there in person. Our memories of people are not just tied to their physical presence but every place, piece of music, favourite things and quirk they had, those are the things we get to hold onto, even in those quiet moments where we judge every choice we’ve ever made.