Letters for grief
Grief comes in many shapes, and the letters in this theme reflect that. The death of a parent or a partner. The end of a long relationship. A miscarriage. A friend, a sibling, a pet who was your closest company. A body that no longer works the way it used to. A future you had quietly assumed you would have. The slow grief of watching someone disappear into illness or addiction. All of it counts, and all of it is welcome here. Letters in this theme are written by people who have moved through their own version of it and remember exactly what it asked of them — the supermarket cry, the anniversary ambush, the unbearable lightness of a Sunday afternoon. They do not try to soothe the loss. They sit beside it.
My mum died and I still pick up the phone to call her sometimes.
I'll have something to tell her — something funny one of the kids said, or a thing on the news she would have had an opinion about — and I'll be halfway through finding her in my contacts before I remember. And then I sit with the phone for a minute and feel completely stupid and completely sad at the same time.
If this is you — picking up the phone to ring someone who isn't there to answer it — you are not losing your mind. You are remembering them in the way the brain remembers, which is by reaching for them. That doesn't stop. I don't think it's supposed to.
The reach is the love still working.
— from someone whose Mum is also gone