Lots of things have changed in the past year, but one of them is not that my dad is dead. Or that he died alone in a care home, about an hour after I last saw him, or that I wasn’t brave enough to say ‘I love you’ before I left because our family don’t really go in for verbal displays of emotion. He was too ill to come and watch me run my first marathon, even though I was partly doing it for him, and now he’ll never see me even if I do another one. He’s never been to the cottage where I live now and he’ll never see the house I’m in the process of buying, or even know that I’m buying it. He’s just dead. He’s in a box in the ground, without even a headstone because presumably the funeral directors have all been a bit busy in the last few months.

Grief is like depression in some ways. With depression you can’t fix it because your sadness doesn’t have a concrete cause, and with grief you can’t fix it because the cause is irreversible. You can question all sorts of things, like whether you should have been there when he died or whether he didn’t want that and was waiting for you to leave, or whether it was great timing really because there were no Covid restrictions back then and we could have a proper funeral with lots of people, or whether it’s a blessing (I felt so angry any time someone used this phrase) because he’s not suffering anymore, but it’s like throwing screwed up pieces of paper at a brick wall – it doesn’t change anything. He’s still dead.

And it hurts, it hurts so much. Sometimes I don’t think about it, but then other times it’s all I can think about. Today isn’t even a special day, the anniversary of his death is next week, but today I’m sad. Before he died, however sick he was there was still hope. There might be a visit with one last lucid conversation, one last smile, one final happy memory to make, but now there won’t be. The stock of memories is finite, like some limited edition painting, and we just have to try to dredge up the good ones and squash the bad ones. Sometimes the good ones bring despair, because we can’t have them back, and sometimes the bad ones bring relief because they can never happen again, but sometimes it’s okay. All of these things are grief, and that’s not going to change ever.