Izzy’s story

I lost my Dad, aged just 44, to cancer when I was only days away from turning 8 years old. Coping with grief is a phrase or experience that doesn't seem to fit with the early parts of my story. I was simply too young. I understood the permanence of what had happened and I was, in my own child-like way, quietly devastated. For me this manifested as a deep anxiety about anything bad happening to me or my loved ones , developing into OCD in my teens. But life largely - and in no small part in thanks to my Mum and wider family and close friends - continued relatively undisturbed when it came to day-to-day routines.

From around age 14, I began to actually process what had happened to me when I had been to young to truly come to terms with it; for a few years in the wake of my Dad's death, I would project my sense of confused longing onto my favourite books, pretending that he was simply a Greek god who would return some day, or a wizard in hiding. The process of processing was, and is, messy and almost traumatising in itself - not to mention the bad timing that a certain pandemic happened to have. First and foremost, I struggled with the feeling that losing my Dad had happened to someone else because I had only a few memories and glimpses of him that I could lay claim to, rather than stories I had been told or photos and film I had seen.

But gradually, and the older I got, I did get through the rough seas of grief, although the process is lifelong. I came to understand that, while I would always have a void of memories that never got the chance to be made when I would be old enough to appreciate them in the moment, the grief I felt was still very real. The younger versions of us live inside us, and little 7-year-old me lost the best Dad in the world - even if I no longer have the privilege of living that as she did.

For me, grief is the repeated realisation that he will never see me finish any stage of my education, he doesn't know (most of) my best friends in the world, he never got to meet my boyfriend, and he won't see me graduate or start my career or family. I was always a clever clogs, though, so maybe he could have guessed! But grief is also love with nowhere to go and, for the reminder of how completely I was loved, I am grateful.