Four Years Without You, Daddy
· 1 min read
12.01.1944-20.08.2022
It’s been exactly 1461 days since my father passed. Four years since my beloved Daddy suddenly left this world, and somehow that number feels both enormous and impossible. Because grief does something strange to time.
There are moments when it feels like a lifetime has passed, and then there are moments when I can close my eyes and I am right back there. The world as I knew it has just changed forever, yet outside, everything keeps moving. People go to work. Trains arrive. Shops open. People laugh, complain about mundane things, make dinner plans. The sun rises the next morning. And I remember how incredibly unfair that felt. How could life possibly just continue as though nothing had happened when, for us, everything had happened?
I don’t believe anymore that “time heals all wounds.” Some wounds aren’t supposed to disappear. When you lose someone you truly love, the pain doesn’t simply go away because enough calendar pages have turned. You just get better at carrying it. You learn, day by day, to accept the unacceptable. You learn how to live a full life alongside the absence. You laugh again. You make new memories. You fall in love, celebrate, travel, dream and build a future, while still carrying the person who should have been there to see it.
And I think we need to talk much more openly about how strangely our society treats grief. You lose someone you love and somehow grief is allocated a certain number of days. Then you’re expected to return to work, answer emails, attend meetings, meet deadlines and function as though one of the foundations of your entire existence hasn’t just disappeared. We are constantly taught to put death somewhere out of sight. Put the emotions aside. Be professional. Be productive. Get back to normal.
But there is no “normal” after losing someone you deeply love. There is only learning what your new normal looks like. And I don’t think pretending otherwise is healthy. Grief isn’t weakness. Talking about death isn’t morbid. Missing someone four years later doesn’t mean you’re stuck in the past.
It means they mattered. And my Dad mattered enormously.
Thank you Daddy We miss you. I love you.