Grief is the Thing with Feathers’: A Personal Account

‘She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone’

How earth-shattering it is to read an author’s first-ever book and find yourself smitten, broken, and lost, all at the same time. I picked this book up 3 years after my dad left. Passed. Died. I still struggle to say that word. It’s almost like it makes it real. Like this is all a dream, it’s just taking a bit of time for me to wake up. Yeah, that’s it.

Like a collection of broken limbs, unable to mix and match, heal, since he.. went, I struggle to pick myself up. A friend gave me this book. ‘It’ll help, I think. It helped me.’. I left it sitting on the shelf for one entire year. As if picking it up would mean I’m accepting his death and moving on.

It’s terrible, to know you’re still alive when the person who brought you into this world no longer is. It’s heartbreaking. Mind-numbing. Life-altering. To continue to breathe after the person who taught you to is gone.

But I still do. I breathe. With each breath catching in my throat, burning through my body. It feels wrong. Why am I warm when he isn’t? Why do I feel when he can’t? Why do I exist when he no longer will?

3 years in, my deeply distraught inner self, stuck in a loop of the first day, begs of me to pick the book up. ‘Maybe you’ll find some solace. Some peace. And, if not that, maybe it’ll just let you feel.’. Maybe it will. You’re right. I’ll do it.

One line in: ‘There’s a feather on my pillow.. yours too.’ and I find myself pulling my legs up, as if to hold myself tighter, knowing this book will either make or break me. I’m hooked.

Before myself, my mother read this book, braving through new and unoccupied waters to perhaps give her grief some space to take up. She couldn’t finish it. It hurt too much. Reminded her of him too much. It did everything too much.

My father was a good husband. A loving, kind, gentle, and funny one, at that. He loved her more than he loved his kids, the whole is greater than the parts. We always understood. My mother loved him the same. He knew it.

‘I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much, it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is missing her.’

If I had to guess where my mother put the book down before never picking it up again, it would be after this quote exactly. I remember early into our grief journey, I told her I’m glad it was him because he wouldn’t’ve survived losing her. It would’ve killed him.

And this quote is exactly what I meant. If the Earth was at a standstill, he’d move it for her. He’d catch the stars and bring them to her for every night she spent in darkness. He embodied Hozier’s profound words:

No grave can hold my body down,

I’ll crawl home to her.

We were greeted by the crow, too. The night everyone left, when the house was empty, his house, the crow was at our front door. A solemn smile and an overwhelming presence, an unexpected and, frankly, unwelcome one.

But slowly and surely, he became all we had. A painful reminder of my father’s absence yet a comforting one that he did once exist. No matter how anyone spoke about him, he did exist. And somewhere he still does.

‘Again. I beg

everything again.’