Are we allowed to find magic within grief? 💌

Notes on the contradictions of life.

This week marked the third anniversary of losing the love of my life. 

That’s an intense opener after the flurry of Valentine’s Day promotions this week, I’ll admit. But this too is about love, if you can stomach just a touch more, amor.

This person was my *person*, and rather wonderfully many other people’s person, too. This person knew exactly what I was thinking the second I walked through the door, weighed down with grocery bags and gym kit and quite often a bike for added comedy effect.

This person was Sarah, and our love was platonic. 

We joked (a lot) that it would be easier if we were together in a romantic sense. For one, the world might have been able to understand us. We had the shared council tax, the shared shopping lists, the shared ease at showing the sloppiest sides of ourselves from our respective sides of our shared sofa.

It was our favourite thing to do - everything in the nothingness.

But there was nothing traditional about the life we shared, and we didn’t need anyone to understand us. Sarah would force me off said sofa and out on dates so that I would have a story to bring back to her, because Sarah spent her days counting out the pills she was taking to extend her life. I spent my days wondering what f**king business cancer has appearing in anyone’s life at all.

I feel pretty strongly about trying to find a healthy language for grief, if such a thing can be defined. Like so much of life, grief is full of contradictions. It wields its power through silence; it’s a universal experience and yet it’s so desperately isolating in its grip. And to add another layer of difficulty, of isolation, of confusion - no-one experiences it the same. Needs differ, as they do for most people in most relationships, and I do indeed find myself to be very much in relation with this intangible yet pervasive, living thing. Its very existence and the immense pain it brings is borne out of love, out of something so beautiful. And despite the absolute inevitability of it coming for all of us, we just don’t seem to be able to find space for it, particularly in the western world.

I only knew Sarah for three years before she died. I’ve found this to come with its own strange sense of unease over whether I can lay claim to any kind of grief at all, as if this all wasn’t confusing enough. I’m not Sarah’s blood, and of course I absolutely don’t claim to be. I didn’t know her when she was younger; there are no photos of us moving awkwardly through 90s fashion trends, Spice Girls CDs in hand, grinning through braces and Superdrug frosted lipgloss. I wasn’t her child, her parent, her sibling. I wasn’t her carer, and I wasn’t her partner.

But does it even matter, where my grief is permitted to sit? 

It matters that I knew the cadence of her footsteps on the stairs, which over the course of weeks were slowed from a carefree bounce to a laboured, gruelling trudge. It matters that I knew the tightness of her curls, ones I watched fall softly to the floor when she asked me to shave them.

And I know well the curl on the side of my mouth that’s forming as I type, as I picture her so clearly on that same sofa, head rolled back, shoulders shaking, eyes crinkled shut as her enormous cackle rebounds across the room, unleashed in response to her own joke.

Because in the physical and emotional proximity of sharing a flat, we moved through life to a beat no-one else could hear, let alone follow. Woven by the inexplicable power of friendship, of mutual adoration and a horrific set of circumstances, we made endless, hilarious light in so much that was dark.

There was magic, in spite of it all.

We were in the depths of the UK’s third lockdown when Sarah moved out. The world was weary. Everybody was grieving for something - freedom, hugs, businesses, loved ones - through a gloomy déjà vu that lingered for too long.

We were allowed to walk, and walk only, while shops and restaurants slept restlessly yet again. My dear friend Dee showed up at my door every day to pull me out into the world. To remind me that it continued to move forward and that I should too, regardless of the stillness within the rickety walls of our tiny, borrowed, North London corner of the earth. 

Dee was grieving for me, and grieving her own grief as much as I was grieving for Sarah. But every day she walked with me, through the grief, tracing the same government approved steps across the same park with the same lack of feeling in our fingers. The winter cold found its way through our blood and into our bones; tiny daggers working away at our bodies, as if our hearts weren’t already pierced open. It was unforgiving, but as the bitter cold slapped us brutally across the cheeks we knew, unequivocally, on those freezing morning walks with no news to share and nowhere else to go, that we were alive.

And I felt it, acutely. In roaring whispers that swirled past my ears, a curious white noise catapulted the world into the most vivid technicolour. Colours were made sharp and smells were made potent, while sounds simply drifted, muffled, in and out of range. Through the searing pain of loss I had a new lens through which to view life, and I saw everything as if I was seeing it for the first time.

And perhaps I was.

And here’s our next contradiction. My awkward experience of grief is full of magic, because the way I understand loss is through the way Sarah taught me to understand life. The darkness of it won’t change. The cruelty of her not being here can never be justified. I’m not claiming that there is anything like joy in this. But what choice do I have but to follow the lead of this extraordinary woman who handled it all with such grace, a gratitude so unwavering it was almost frustrating, outrageous humour and not one single ounce of pity? Who in three short years taught me more about what it means to be alive than everyone I’d met in the previous 30 combined?

Even so, maybe I was foolish to think that her anniversary wouldn’t get to me. A heavy, obvious sadness caught me off guard this week in a new kind of stillness, having finally unpacked to create my first home without her. All sides of this new sofa are mine but as fortunate as that makes me, sometimes - and especially this weekend - I really wish they weren’t. 

I let the tears fall for a minute, before facetiously stretching out across the sofa, laughing at her laughing at me. Her footsteps return often, bouncing carefree once more, pulling me out of my head where I can sometimes linger too long. Sarah continues to reinforce that there is nothing more romantic or life-defining than being completely in love with your friends, which is another contradiction of sorts but one that shouldn’t exist, if only the world would stop telling us that romantic relationships are ultimately more valuable and therefore what we should spend our lives in pursuit of. 

So I messaged Dee, and some of the other incredible women in my life that have provided all kinds of magic for all kinds of reasons. I sent her mum some love, and my mum some love too.

And instead of letting that sofa swallow me up entirely, I opened my laptop… and finally signed up to the salsa class I’ve been meaning to join for the past six months.

Which is kind of ridiculous. But also kind of magic.

Because there is magic, in spite of it all.

Life, love, thoughts, feelings, friendships, sunsets, my plants, my to-do list, my current favourite song, fresh coffee, good cheese, getting hooked on a new series, doing something scary, learning something new, the winter air hitting your cheeks, the summer heat hitting your skin, arriving home and taking your bra off, a surprise discount, those rare and delicious days when you’ve hit your sleep quota and your step count and you’ve responded to everyone in a timely manner, saying yes, saying no, being able to sit on this sofa at all… It’s all so fleeting, so fragile, so very uncontainable, and that in my mind makes it even more important to try and find the magic within it, with the time that we do have.

Because if we have a day, or even a minute more to do everything in the nothingness? Then we do, indeed, have magic.