What time can’t heal

Content warning: Grief & loss

“Time heals”, they say when you lose someone. And it does. The weeks and months and years soften the blunt impact of shock and disbelief, erode the jagged edges of raw grief. Maybe you cry more frequently for a while as your brain begins to wrap itself around strange, unruly concepts like “forever” and “never”, but eventually the tide relents and the tears ease. They still come, at special moments when the absence gapes an ugly hole in the festivities, or when you’re recounting one of your daftest memories, or when the vehicle in front has the same cheap, hideously abrasive box of tissues in the rear window and the car you can suddenly smell isn’t the one you’re sitting in. But these moments grow fewer and further between. One day, you’re okay, mostly.

“Time heals”, they say when you lose someone, and it does. But what they don’t explain is that it’s when wound starts to smooth into scar that the missing sets in. “Forever” and “never” take on new meanings again, your comprehension continuing to evolve, because you’re living them now. You feel the time passing in the changes in your life, in yourself, that you haven’t been able to share. In the news you can’t announce. In the stories you can’t tell. In the phone calls you can’t make. In the photos you can’t send. In the advice you can’t ask for. In the people you can’t introduce.

Time heals grief. But it creates, cultivates, amplifies missing. “I miss you more every day” is a cliché everyone knows, probably because there’s so much truth in it. Every day, more of the ocean of my experiences fills the chasm left by your loss. Ten years now of life I’ve lived since I last shared a moment of it with you, and the more it accumulates, the heavier the weight of everything I’ve done and seen and said and felt and wondered that I can’t tell, ask, celebrate with you. I miss what we didn’t have yet perhaps even more than what we did. I miss the grown-up relationship we’d barely begun to build. I miss the chance I never got to know your life. Who really knows their parents at 18? Though I did, at least, know you had the softest heart and silliest humour of maybe anyone I’d ever know. And the woman I am today might be almost unrecognisable from the girl I was ten years ago, but there’s enough of you woven through me that you’d know me anywhere. I know.

Ten years since I last saw your face, held your hand, kissed your stubbly cheek. It’s such a long time. And that time has, largely, healed my grief. But my God I miss you, Dad. Every single day.