The gift I could no longer have

Today marks 3 years since my mum died. Nobody remembered. I did.

Grief has its own calendar. Dates live quietly inside you long after the rest of the world has moved on. Your body seems to know they are coming before your conscious mind has quite acknowledged them. A heaviness arrives, or a tenderness you can’t immediately explain, & then you look at the date & understand.

This week I’ve been grieving, but not devastatingly or in the way grief once arrived & knocked the air from my lungs. This grief is softer. It has become woven into the fabric of me. There’s been laughter, dinners with friends, dog cuddles, work & all the ordinary fullness of life, but underneath it has been the quiet knowledge that this date was coming.

And strangely, in the days leading up to it, I gave someone I love the very thing I can never have again. Time with their parents.

My friends wanted to go away with both sets of parents & needed someone to look after their dog, so I flew from Portugal to England to look after Charlie. It cost money, time & inconvenience, but none of that was really the cost of the gift. The cost was knowing exactly what I was giving.

When you’ve lost your parents, you understand something you wish you’d understood while they were alive. There’s only a finite number of breakfasts, car journeys, ridiculous conversations, disagreements, photographs, family stories you’ve heard 400 times & ordinary moments that don’t look precious while they’re happening. Until one day, you’d give almost anything for one more.

So when I had the opportunity to give people I love a week with theirs, I said yes. Go. Make memories. Have the breakfasts, take the photographs, tell the same stories again, get mildly irritated with one another & enjoy all the wonderfully ordinary things that rarely announce themselves as precious at the time.

Perhaps nobody can completely understand what it costs to give someone something you can never have again. That’s OK. I hope they don’t understand for many years. I hope they remain blissfully unaware of how valuable those ordinary days will one day become.

I’m travelling home today carrying my mum with me in the strange, invisible way we carry those we’ve loved & lost. She’s no longer present in the way I want her to be, but she remains part of how I understand love, time, generosity & what really matters.

Grief could have made me resentful of what other people still have. Sometimes it does hurt to witness people living inside moments I would give anything to return to. But grief has also made me want to protect those moments for them. It has taught me to recognise their value, even when the people experiencing them can’t yet see it.

Perhaps grief is love growing, if you let it. Love can no longer travel towards the person who has died in all the familiar ways, so it has to find somewhere else to go. Sometimes it becomes tenderness. Sometimes it becomes generosity. Sometimes it becomes the instinct to protect something precious for another person because you know exactly what its loss will mean.

One ordinary day, without knowing it, you’ll do something with someone you love for the last time. You won’t necessarily recognise the moment. There may be no meaningful words, no beautiful sunset & no sense that anything is ending. It may simply be breakfast, a telephone call, a lift somewhere or a story you’ve already heard 400 times.

Perhaps one of grief’s strangest transformations is learning to give freely the very love you find most painful to witness because you know exactly how precious it is. Sometimes our deepest losses teach us not to hold love more tightly, but to recognise it while it’s here.

Which ordinary moments with the people you love might one day become the ones you treasure most?