Grief: A Journey Without Timetables and Answers

Because healing doesn’t follow a schedule — and neither does remembering.

Image provided by the author. Me and my brother as very smiley children.

When my brother died, I wanted everyone to go away.

In the weeks that followed his sudden death, I would go for hours with my phone turned off, and head in a book or crappy TV series — anything to distract me from the darkness of everything around me. I wanted to be left completely alone, and would snap at my boyfriend or anyone who tried to get close.

I couldn’t stand being bothered — as I felt it was interfering with my own grief. I needed silence and the steady flow of time to set me straight again — which a lot of people found difficult to understand.

Dying is never convenient, but when my brother passed away we were a few weeks away from the first Covid lockdown in the UK, and the world coming to a close was a blessing in disguise.

As the world began to move in directions never seen before, I felt the surge of grief with every tentative step I took in a world around me fraught with the unknowns of disease.

I remember feeling like death was literally anywhere and everywhere I looked. I couldn’t escape it. And with the constant flow of messages coming through from people close to me and those I hadn’t spoken to…