I’ve heard grief described in a lot of different ways. A journey with ups and downs. An ocean – vast and wild and coming in waves.

It is such a universal experience, but it has stunned me how little it IS actually talked about. How we ignore it, brush over it – how we don’t know what to say to each other.

And I suppose that’s because it is such a painful and private experience that looks very different for different people.

For me, grief is a snake.

It is secret, sly, and mostly very well camouflaged in the mundanity of my life – sliding silently along in parallel like a shadow.

Sometimes it is close, and sometimes it is far away. Sometimes I only know it’s there by the fear crawling across my skin.

Sometimes I’ll catch a glimpse of it, glittering in the grass, just out of the very corner of my eye, and I will run away – fast – in the other direction.

Sometimes it strikes from nowhere, sinks its fangs in, terrible and beautiful all at once, black diamonds flowing in impossible symmetry down its back.

And it is never where I expect it.

It is not in the anniversaries, or the big milestones. Because then I suppose I am watching for it. Instead it hides coiled in the little things, the gaps I didn’t know were there.

It is in a pile of papers, with his messy scrawling handwriting on it, in the relish of his g and y tails.

It is in his phrases as they drop unbidden from my own lips – you could get a Sherman tank through there, what’s that in real money? you little ratbag.

It is in the funny things he would love and the half-written texts and half-formed stories that don’t have anywhere to go – left hanging without their audience.

It is in the reminder pictures that pop up on my phone, in the tilt of a familiar expression not seen for months now – in knowing soul-deep what it meant and what he would say or do next.

It is in the small, dark moments where I am desperate for comfort and my heart leaps for him and he’s not there to catch it and hold it safe, like he always did.

I am afraid of the snake.

But I am also afraid it will leave – that if I avoid it for too long I will forget.

Sometimes I want the pain.

I want to feel the venom seep through my body and seize my breath, grip my chest in a vice. I WANT to be crushed. I want to BLEED. Sometimes I want to feel the cold burn of each individual poisonous needle pricking each cell of my body – I want to be filled to bursting by the thundering wrongness and emptiness until I am ripped apart by it. I welcome the violence of it, the power.

One day, maybe I will learn to live with the snake.

Maybe it will become a pet, and I will care for it, visit it, let it out of its enclosure to spend time in its presence, stroking my hands along its familiar muscled body.

At the moment, it finds me. And when it does so, the best I can do as it wraps itself around me and starts to squeeze, is to imagine its embrace is my dad’s.

A last hug.

And wish that I could stay there a little longer.

xxx