Letter to Mike – August 2021.

Hey My Heart,

Ten months came and went without me even noticing. I couldn’t believe it when I’d looked at the calendar and realised I’d missed the actual date. I thought about it in the run up, as I always do, but somehow the day itself escaped me. It was actually my first night in the house alone since you died – an incredible amount of time and a testament to the love and care our friends and family have shown me. And it was tough, I won’t lie – so in a way, I suspect my brain was protecting me by not allowing me to acknowledge the date. Combined, it might have been too much.

Ten months. Longer now than the period of time we went without contact before we got together. The longest I’ve gone without hearing from you since the day we met. And yet you are still such a presence in my life – still with me every day. I talk about you – and to you – every day. Not in a melancholy way – sometimes, but usually just… you’re there, part of my internal life, part of my routine. Where I used to talk to myself I now talk to you. And I like that. It’s a way of carrying you with me, always. A part of me.

I follow an amazing grief blogger on Instagram called Mira Simone. She, more than anyone, puts words to my experience of grief when I can’t. Her writing lifts me up and heals me, helps me to understand that no matter how it may feel, I’m not treading this path alone. It’s a well-worn one, walked by millions and millions of women and men before me. The other day she posted a video about what grief feels like which really resonated with me. She ended it with a simple fact: “grief is love”. Grief is love.

And that’s exactly it. As time goes on, my grief has become precious to me. It’s something I treasure, and nurture. Something I hold within myself. I wish I didn’t have to – of course I do, I wish more than anything you were still here, and me and Grief had never had to become acquainted. But that isn’t possible, and so now all I have is my grief – a marker of the love that we shared, the love for you that I still carry. That’s not to say I wallow in it – I don’t, I am positive and proactive and all the things you would want me to be. But I honour it. I feel privileged to be the person mourning for you, just as I felt privileged to be your person. You were beautiful, inside and out. You were wonderful. You were my soulmate. Grief is the price I have to pay for getting to love you, and I pay it gladly. You were worth it. You still are.

I love you, Mikey. I always have. I always will.

Your Ems 💖

Planning.

I’ve always been a planner.

With Mike, planning was easy. Because we knew so early on that we wanted to get married and have babies and all that good stuff, we were pretty strict about The Plan.

No, we weren’t going to go on holiday because Buy A House was in the plan, and that needed all our money. No, we wouldn’t stay in London because Have A Baby didn’t really fit in to that, and we knew we wanted to do that asap. It was all about The Plan. We knew what we wanted our life to look like, and dammit, we were going to get there.

Well.

That worked out well, huh?

I mean, it did, because I loved my life with Mike and I wouldn’t change it. I’m so glad we ended up in Northern Ireland, so glad he got those last years with his family and by his sea and so, so, inexpressibly, unfathomably, breathtakingly grateful that we had Lyla.

Beyond grateful.

But I realise now that all those years we were pouring absolutely everything into something that was, unbeknownst to us, never going to happen. And some of that energy (and money!) could have been used elsewhere, to make our daily lives more joyful, richer, more full of experience. Made the last years of Mike’s life about living, not striving.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to throw all thoughts of the future out of the window and stop planning altogether. Not only is that not sensible, it’s also so completely antithetical to my personality that it wouldn’t be possible! But what Mike’s death has taught me is that it doesn’t make sense to always be working towards a potential future at the detriment of the actual present that exists right in front of you.

Because the future isn’t going to look like you expect it to. It just isn’t. It might be worse, it might be better – but it will be different to the picture you have in your mind. You’ll be different, for a start. Your circumstances will be different, in ways you probably can’t even imagine. And all those carefully-laid plans – well, some of them will come to fruition, but others won’t, and even the ones that do might not make you happy in the way you imagine.

All we have is today.

I’m not saying I’m going to jump out of a plane every day or give it all up and go travelling, or anything. I don’t think every day has to be a stand out adventure. But I’ve realised that it’s important to make the most of every day – to find the small joys and suck the marrow out of them.

Because that’s all we’ve got, really. We have to do the long-term things – the working, the saving, the planning for the future – just in case.

But first and foremost, we have to be in today.

Just in case.

Quicksand.

Here’s where you get stuck.

So. Your life has changed completely and irrevocably. There’s no way of going back, no way of bringing back your person and having that life you had before. And you know that. Logically, you know that. But the problem is, that life was so good. It was so happy, and content, and comfortable. Everything was right. So of course, that’s your template for happiness. Everything about it is, as far as you’re concerned, an essential element to creating a happy life.

So what now? You’re looking at that life and desperately wanting to recreate it as soon as humanly possible because that’s happiness, right? And without all those elements you can’t be happy? So you just need to put all those elements back together and everything will be okay again, yeah?

Only – wait. Hang on. That big, central piece. The most important element of that life is gone and gone forever. And there isn’t another one.

I know. I know. I’m so, so sorry.

It sucks. It sucks beyond the telling of it. I know the pain it brings you. Because I’m there right now. As much as I wish it wasn’t true, it is. There was only one Michael Waring, and nobody – nobody – will ever be his particular combination of sweet, loving, funny, whimsical, silly, caring, generous, good, smart, and giving ever again. Nobody.

So here are your choices. Here are my choices.

Either we accept that nothing else could make us happy and therefore we’ll never be that happy again. Or we believe that we can find happiness in another way – not the same, but equally good – and we start making it happen.

This sounds like it’s leading to a positive, uplifting lesson but honestly? I’m not there yet.

My brain knows that’s the choice in front of me, and it knows which is the best path to take. But my heart hasn’t connected up with that yet. It’s still wavering between the “but-if-Mike-would-just-come-BACK” and “well that’s it, the happiest part of my life is over, I’ll just have to accept it”.

And it doesn’t really matter how much my head tells me that I need to try and find a new kind of happy – one that might feature another love one day, but equally might not, and might instead be filled with friends and passions and my beautiful little girl – I can’t make the rest of me get there any faster. In fact, trying to force it only makes it worse. Doing anything before you’re ready is excruciatingly painful and utterly pointless.

So for now, all I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope that eventually, I catch up with my brain.

Buckaroo.

Friday was A Very Bad Day.

Most days now I start off functioning okay, coping okay, but as ever, aware of the nagging presence of Grief, sitting there on my shoulder.

She’s still quite a new friend to me – other people I know have learned to live with her, even to value her as a reminder of the love they shared with their lost person, and I can see how that will happen, over time. But for now, she and I are still getting to know each other. Still learning to tolerate our various quirks and hang-ups. Still warily eyeing each other up and testing boundaries.

On Friday she was poking me a bit. Just a little. Nothing I couldn’t handle. A few intrusive thoughts. A few moments of that gutting sense of loss, under control as quickly as it arrived thanks to my honed distraction techniques and coping strategies that keep me from falling apart and allow me to carry on doing my job and caring for Lyla and getting things done.

But then things started to go wrong. Other, external things. A broken laptop. Some (mild) criticism at work about a slightly stressful project. Nothing huge at all. Things that, when Mike was here, I would have shrugged off, or at most gone and asked Mike to talk it through with me, got a hug and been reminded of what’s important in life.

Yeah. That’s not what happens now.

I completely fell apart. We’re talking sobbing, wailing, hyperventilating, even thoughts of suicide (don’t worry, I stayed safe, I have lots of coping strategies for that in place and they work and will continue to do so – but it’s been a long time since I’ve had the urge and it was frightening). I could not get my emotions under control. In the end I had to go and take a Diazepam – something I’ve not had to do for 6 months – and just crawl into bed and wait for it to pass.

So silly. Such a big reaction, for something so tiny. But it always is something tiny. A broken laptop. A child with a cold. A missed bus. An argument with a friend. A burnt dinner. Something so small that when you find yourself wracked with sobs you can’t quite believe it. Such an overreaction. So little resillience.

Did you ever play that kids’ game, Buckaroo? The one where you load the plastic donkey with hats and ropes and lanterns and firewood and, if I remember correctly, a banjo? And it would take everything without complaint until suddenly, without warning, something – one tiny thing – would tip it over the edge and it would buck and throw everything all over the floor?

Yeah. That’s basically what it is. All the time you’re carrying Big Stuff. The usual things that we all carry – working and parenting and day-to-day stresses and the joys of living in a global pandemic – but also my new friend Grief (and let me tell you, she is HEAVY). And next to her, your child’s Grief, because that’s a burden you have to carry as well. And it’s hard going, but it’s manageable – you’ve learned how to carry it, over the months or years. You can carry it and keep going.

But then someone adds something else, and it’s too much. It’s too much and you can’t help but buck, and, to be frank, lose your metaphorical shit.

What a mess.

But there’s no choice but to pick it all up again. Working and parenting and being a friend, they’re things we all have to carry. And Grief, of course – the burden you can’t put down.

So you gather it all, and you load yourself back up, and you wait for the next tiny thing. The rope. The lantern. The bloody banjo, for goodness’ sake. The tiny thing that tips you over the edge.

Buckaroo.

A scream.

I’m writing this on a phone so please forgive any typos and the inevitable brevity. This entry feels a bit like a scream I’ve been holding in for weeks and if I don’t get it out on paper it’s going to boil over into some kind of ugliness. So. Phone composition it is. Needs must.

What I’m struggling with is that life will never be as good again. How can it be? Mike was my soulmate in every sense. Everyone I speak to reminds me of that. That our love was something special. That many people never get to experience a love like it. That it was obvious from first meeting us that we were made for each other. I’ll never get that again. How could I? The chances of meeting Mike were so infinitesimal. The chances of meeting another person who sets my whole world alight, who completes and complements me in every way, who understands me and loves me wholly and fully and also happens to be the funniest, sweetest, silliest, most beautiful person I’ve ever met are essentially zero. They have to be. Nobody gets that lucky twice.

And then even if I did, even if by some miracle someone else came along who fulfilled me in that way and made me feel as loved as he did, they won’t be Lyla’s Daddy. They won’t love her in the way Mike did. They won’t have the shared memories of her infanthood, they won’t know how she liked to be sung to, how she used to do a little sigh in her sleep that sounded like a text alert tone, how we had to bounce her on a yoga ball to get her to sleep. They won’t be half of her. And on this fucking day, Father’s Day, that all seems more important than ever.

What I’m realising that is breaking my heart is that there’s no rule in life that things keep getting better. I think I always believed there was, and that they would. And they had – obviously we had been through tough times but ultimately the trend was upwards. Having Mike by my side was the security that life would keep getting better.

And now he’s not.

It feels impossible to go on with that knowledge, to know that I’ve hit the highest high and things can’t ever be that good again. That I’m almost certainly never going to find that kind of soul-deep connection, that intense love, that absolute wide-eyed adoration ever again. That my beautiful child will always be without her Daddy. It feels so pointless even trying, although I know I will, for Lyla. But it’s getting harder and harder. As the shock wears off and the hope gets extinguished, life gets duller and more painful. Every night now I go to bed with a headache from repressing tears all day, holding in this scream that is always threatening. Every night I have flashbacks to finding him, to screaming his name, to CPR and all the absolute horror that followed. Every day is bookended by that waking nightmare. And then I have to just get up and carry on and smile and interact with people and all the time I’m just internally screaming…

I just want to yell at everyone, shake them and ask how they can possibly be going on as normal when Mike, my Mike, my wonderful Mike is no longer in the world. I don’t want to be like that, full up with negativity and anger but I am. I worry that one day it’s all going to come spewing out, this toxic sludge of all the horrors I’m holding in, the flashbacks and the anger and the fear. And I have no idea what that will look like but I know it won’t be good.

Even now I want to minimise this, to say “it’s okay, I’ll feel better tomorrow, I just need some sleep”. But it’s not okay. I’m not okay. I’m drowning. And there’s nothing anyone can do because nobody can bring Mike back. Nobody can tell me – honestly and truthfully – that things will be okay, that I’ll be happy like that again, that Lyla will be okay. Nobody can hold this pain for me or stop the flashbacks or cure these fucking headaches. I have to just go on with it all. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair. He was the best thing in my life. The best thing in Lyla’s life. The best thing in the world. And now he’s gone and everything is worse and always will be.

How the fuck do I live with that?

In the weeds.

I’ve been having a tough time of it lately. A lot of widowed people talk about 6-12 months as being particularly tough, as the protective numbness from the shock is starting to wear off and the realisation that this is it – forever – starts to kick in. Plus the mental and physical exhaustion from being so unhappy for so long is a real challenge.

On top of that, the lifting of lockdown restrictions means that I’m being confronted by new “firsts” on a daily basis – first dinner invite without him, first day commuting, first visit to my family, first time in London again, first family lunch out – etc etc etc. And Lyla is getting ready for preschool and potty training and making the transition from cot bed to “big girl bed” – all things he should be here for.

Add to that the endless news cycle discussions of the footballer who suffered a cardiac arrest (and all the ill-informed nonsense about CPR and defibrillators that goes with it) and I’m feeling extremely vulnerable, sad, lost and alone.

It’s tough.

Tough is a bit of an understatement, really. It’s taking most of my energy to keep myself going and functioning when really all I want to do is crawl into bed and howl until something changes. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. And it’s hard because to the outside world, things should be a bit “better” by now. I’m almost 8 months in, I’m back at work, I’m socialising etc. But actually things are no better. In fact, in many ways they’re worse.

And I’m finding it harder than ever to keep plastering on a smile and being positive and determined and trying my best. I feel angry – angry that this is my life now, angry that Lyla and I have to go through it alone, angry that anyone is expecting anything of me when my world has completely fallen apart and I have no idea how to put it together again. And that’s on me, not on them – nobody is being unreasonable – but I’m struggling so much with the expectations of the world.

And just so, so tired of being sad. So tired of missing him. So tired of walking around with all the joy sucked out of my life, like this big deflated balloon. I arrange nice things – things for Lyla, things for me, even – but they come and they don’t help; in fact they often make things even harder because his absence is louder than ever. I’m full to the brim with missing him and longing for him and there’s less and less room for anything else, especially patience. I find myself digging my nails into my palms to keep from screaming, sometimes. Because life is going on around me but mine feels like it’s over forever.

That’s what I’m finding the hardest to adjust to. That this is it forever. And yes, the pain will dull a little, and I’ll get better at carrying it. But regardless, it’s here forever. My soulmate, the father of my daughter, the most wonderful man I ever met, the thing I was meant to do, will never come back and there’s nothing I can do to make that any better. Life now is about finding joy where I can, raising my daughter, and trying to learn to live with a massive hole right through the centre of me.

I sometimes wish there was a physical manifestation of grief. My best friend – who lost her beloved dad 6 months ago – and I were talking about this yesterday, how we wished it was still customary to show that you’re in mourning through your clothes. Because I feel like the world has moved on somehow and I’m still stuck here in this… bog of grief, wading through the mud, calling out for help through the dank air.

Only the help I’m calling for can’t come. Because the person I’m calling to isn’t here any more.

I feel exhausted by it, exhausted from thinking about it, exhausted from holding in the screaming, exhausted from trying to make everything neat and nice and organised, exhausted from living a life that holds so little contentment, no matter how hard I try. Joy I can find – joy in my daughter, in my friends, in books and art and nature. But contentment eludes me completely. Contentment is his hand in mine, his arm around me, his breathing slow and steady next to me in bed. And that’s lost to me forever.

This is disjointed and messy and has no conclusion, no neat point to come to, nowhere I can draw a line under it and move on. And in that way it’s like grief. It just… goes on.

And it sucks.

The side effects of grief.

Until I lost Mike I don’t think I quite realised what an all-encompassing physical and mental experience grief is. People talk about being “hit by grief” and that’s such a good analogy because it’s exactly how it feels – like you’ve punched in the gut, kicked and beaten until the wind is knocked out of you and you’re left bruised and battered, immobilised. Certainly in the immediate aftermath, I found my whole body ached – it was hard to move, I was often in physical pain, I was oversensitive to touch.

But there’s longer-lasting physical and mental effects too. And that’s what I wasn’t expecting. I anticipated the emotional aftermath – the sadness, the triggers, the anxiety, the anguish, the depression – but I had no idea that I would be so impacted in other ways, too.

Here are some of the impacts that I’ve noticed.

My hair and skin have gone haywire. As someone who has spent her entire adult life with untameable curly hair it has been pretty shocking to find that my hair has just… stopped being curly. Now I have to try and tempt a curl into it, with curl activators and mousses and leave in conditioners. And my skin – generally clear and smooth – has become incredibly blemish-prone, rough-textured, dull and somehow both dry and oily at the same time. I feel I’ve aged ten years in six months.

I have zero memory. Mike would be laughing at this one as my memory was already notoriously bad (I once forgot an entire holiday we had been on and it took 20 minutes and Mike reminding me of a very traumatic rollercoaster experience for me to remember it) but since he died it has got even worse. I have to write everything down or I forget it. And often I then forget to look at the things I’ve written down. I hate this because it’s making work even harder, and resulting in me being a flaky friend which makes me feel really shit.

I’m so, SO tired. I don’t mean, like, can’t-be-bothered or fancy-a-lie-in tired. I mean the kind of tired where I need a nap most days, where if I don’t get into bed and fall asleep for a couple of hours I can’t function, where my brain goes fuzzy and I can’t think about anything other than getting some sleep.

But I can’t fall asleep. I’m regularly awake until 2, 3am. It is horrendous.

I’m more sensitive to temperature. I’ve always loved sleeping in a cold room with the thinnest duvet possible. But now I find myself turning on my portable radiator and adding extra blankets because I’m shivering even in double-digits.

I get migraines. I’ve never really had migraines before, besides a couple when I was pregnant and a few after that. But now I’d say I get on average one a week,. Thankfully they’re usually overnight so I just wake up feeling groggy with a headache, but they’re horrible nonetheless.

I get faint spells. I’ve very rarely felt faint in my life, but since Mike died I’ve had quite a few occasions where I’ve had to sit down with my head between my knees and two instances where I absolutely was convinced I was about to faint and had to call for Jonny and Heather. One of them I ended up on the floor and I absolutely could not get up, and the second everything went black and my ears rang for ages afterwards. It was horrible.

I would love to hear about your own experiences with the “side effects” of grief – the one thing I’ve learned is that you’re never alone in grief and someone else has always experienced the same thing. It is a weird dichotomy of a thing, grief – both incredibly lonely but also comfortingly unifying.

And really fucking bad for the complexion.

Letter to Mike – April 2021 – six months on.

My darling Mikey,

Six months. That’s how long it’s been since we lost you. An arbitrary measure of time, but it feels significant. Half a year. It felt like I should mark it, somehow, but I sat down to write and the words wouldn’t come out. But I knew they would if I wrote to you instead. They always do.

It’s been a long six months. A hard fought battle. I have changed so much. Sometimes I wonder what you’d think of me if you were still here. Weirdly, I think I like myself better, maybe. I’m stronger. More grateful for things, more appreciative of what I have. Less anxious. Calmer. More forgiving. A much, much better mum.

I think I’d be a better wife, too, and sometimes I feel really guilty that you had to put up with Ems Version 1 all that time. Version 2 would have made you happier, I think. And prouder. But that could never have happened, because losing you is what has changed me so much. And that’s a weird double-edged sword I don’t quite know what to do with.

I keep going back to what Becca said in those days immediately after your death. The best way to honour Mike is for his death to be the making of you. I think it has been, in many ways. I mean, I certainly haven’t done it alone – I’ve done it thanks to the love and support from our family, from Jonny and Heather, from Becca, Vez, Hannah and Fiona, from Rachel, Rachel and Laura. From our beautiful friends. My wonderful colleagues. Our “internet people”. My new widow friends. I’ve been propped up. And God knows, I still have a long way to go.

But I’ve done six months of it. Six whole months of something that seemed an utter impossibility. I couldn’t imagine living without you when you were here. Sometimes it used to pop into my head and I would metaphorically put my fingers in my ears and la-la-la-I’m-not-listening, because the idea of being without you was so abhorrent. And it is abhorrent, don’t get me wrong. I miss you so much I sometimes can’t breathe with it, and I’m so aware that most of the time I get through the day thanks to a combination of avoidance and denial. The past six months have been agonising, and heart-breaking, and if I stop and think about you being gone for too long I feel like I can’t possibly go on.

And yet I do.

And maybe, weirdly, that’s something to celebrate. Not six months of being without you. But six months of going on. Six months of parenting our daughter, of doing my job, of appreciating the sea and the sunset and fresh air and a good cup of coffee, just like you would want me to. Six months of the kind of care from our loved ones that most bereaved people can only dream of. Six months of – I hope – honouring you in every way I can.

So maybe this milestone – six months – half a year – doesn’t have to only be a sad one.

Because grief, it turns out, is not all black. It’s not an unrelenting, unremitting howl of despair. Sometimes it is. Often, even.

But sometimes it’s gratitude for you having existed. It’s seeing your smile on our daughter’s face. It’s hearing her talk about you, about the time you went to the beach and found a snail. It’s hearing a story about you from Jonny that I haven’t heard before, or a video of you singing coming up in the memory function on my phone, or remembering one of our inside jokes, or realising that I’ve gone through something really hard and done it on my own and knowing how proud you would be of me. It’s still being in love with you, and still getting so much pleasure and wonder and enjoyment from that.

Because loving you and being loved by you is one of the greatest joys of my life. And that doesn’t stop just because you haven’t been here for six months of it.

While I’m worth
My room on this Earth
I will be with you
While the Chief
Puts sunshine on Leith
I’ll thank Him
For His work
And your birth,
And my birth…

Sunshine on Leith, The Proclaimers

So here’s to six months, Mikey. To six months of making it, to six months of honouring you, of living for you and with your love in my heart. To six more months of being in love with you.

Six months ago I loved you with my whole heart. Today, I still do. And I always will.

I love you, My Mikey.

Your Ems 💖

Reaching the peak.

Everybody’s life has a peak. A moment where they’re happier than they’re ever going to be again. I guess if you’re lucky, it’s pretty near the end of your life – maybe seeing your child get married, the birth of a grandchild, an amazing holiday post-retirement, or just a simple, quiet moment of love and companionship with your spouse. Who knows. I guess most people don’t know when that peak happens, because most people, I’d wager, work on the assumption that it’s yet to come.

I know I did. Before I met Mike I knew there was more out there for me. I felt the hope, and I lived for that hope. And when I met him, that feeling of things clicking into place – that’s what it was. Here was my hope. Here was the thing that was going to bring me that future happiness. The best was yet to come, but now I knew for sure that it was coming, and I knew whose hands it was in.

It was the same when I was ill after having Lyla. I was unhappy – desperately so – but I knew, deep down, that better days were coming. That there was a joy still undiscovered, a day when I would be blissfully content with my lot.

And it happened. Not long before the first lockdown, early 2020. Covid was on the horizon but we had no way of knowing what it would become. And everything else in my life was wonderful. A job I enjoyed. Colleagues I adored. Our best friends moving to live nearer us, to give us the local mutual support network we had been missing. Great relationships with my family. Lovely friends. A beautiful little girl who I was finally able to properly enjoy without the haze of post-natal depression looming over me. And, best of all, my Mikey. My amazing husband. We were happier than ever – recovered from those early days of parenting, reconnected, in sync, laughing all the time, and so, so in love.

In February 2020 we went to London. Our proper first trip away without Lyla. I was so anxious about leaving her, especially because Covid was becoming more of a thing, but Mike persuaded me we should do it anyway and that she would be fine (she was, of course). We walked the Southbank again. We ate delicious food and drank great beer. We saw Waitress, a musical that meant so much to us both, front row centre, performed by the composer Sara Bareilles. We both wept the whole way through. It was magical. I realised that we were getting our lives back, that the tough baby days were over and parenting was now something we both loved and treasured, and that complemented our lives and made us complete. I was blissfully happy. So was Mike.

Now, fast forward. Just over a year later.

It’s not that my life is over. I still enjoy my job. I still adore my colleagues. Jonny and Heather have been more of a support network for me than any of us could ever have imagined, and I could not be more grateful to have them. The rest of my family and friends, too – they have stepped up so amazingly, loved me so well, and I am so incredibly blessed to have them all. And of course, Lyla. My beautiful girl. Better and better every day, the light of my life, the centre of my world, the absolute joy of my heart.

But no Mikey. Never again.

And quite aside from the gut-wrenching pain of his absence, it changes all those other things, too. I don’t know if my career will ever be the same again now that I have to do it with grief brain and while balancing solo parenting. My friendships are fundamentally changed because I’m not the same person I was, I have less to give and more that I need and the imbalance weighs heavy on me. Jonny and Heather don’t get the support from me that they deserve – instead they have to support me, be there for me, prop me up. And, worst of all, Lyla doesn’t have her Daddy, and her life will always be poorer for that.

I can try and mitigate for a lot of that. I can do my best to focus at work, to be there for my family and friends in the way they have been for me, to do my absolute best to spend the rest of my life trying to repay Jonny and Heather for the unfathomable kindness they’ve shown me, and to love Lyla twice as hard, twice as fiercely, twice as well, to try and make up for her Daddy not being here. But it won’t ever be the same again. I won’t ever be as happy again.

That’s not to say I think I’m doomed to a life of misery. I don’t think that. I know I will feel joy again. I already do. Tonight, watching Lyla and Cora run around the kitchen singing “into the unKNOWN… into the unKNOOOOO-OOOOOWNnnn… into the UNKNOOO-OOOO-OOOO-OOOWN!” at the top of their lungs – that was joy. When Lyla leant across the dinner table and took my hand and said “you are my best Mummy in ye world” and puckered up for a kiss – that was joy. Sitting on the veranda watching the sunset with Heather, watching a great episode of TV, getting a lovely message from a friend – all moments of joy. And it’s also not to say that I don’t think I’ll ever love again. I hope I will. I have a lot of love to give, and one day, when I’m ready, I hope to find someone who deserves that and who loves me in the same way.

But even so. Even so, I know that my life won’t ever be the same kind of happy again.

Because firstly, my daughter doesn’t have her Daddy. That will always be a source of pain. Secondly, my beautiful in-laws no longer have their son, their brother, their uncle. My family don’t have their son-in-law, their brother-in-law, their honorary cousin who they loved so much. My friends no longer have their lovely pal, their brother in arms, their brilliant mate. These things will never not hurt. And thirdly because Mike – the best person I have ever known, my soulmate, my great love, the father of my child – will never be in the world again. And I will never, ever, EVER not be sad about that. My life will always be touched by this immense and uncontainable grief, no matter how much joy and happiness I find elsewhere.

So where does that leave me? Does that mean my life has peaked?

Honestly, I think it does. It has. And when I first came to that realisation it felt terribly sad and hopeless. It still does, in many ways. But in other ways, it’s almost a relief. That hope is no longer there to strive for. There is no end goal, no moment in the future where I will experience perfect bliss. Literally all I can do now is try my hardest to make the most of the time I have left. To understand that life is for living, not striving. Noticing those moments of joy and grabbing onto them tightly with both hands. To really know why it’s so important to live in the present and appreciate it for everything it is.

And weirdly, I see now that that’s how Mike lived his life. He said about his mum’s death once, “The worst thing I could have ever imagined happening happened to me, so I don’t worry about everything else so much now.” At the time I thought he meant that nothing as sad as that could ever happen to him so in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter. But now I wonder if it was more that he knew what I know now. He knew that he would never again experience that feeling of being sure things were going to keep getting better. And knowing that allowed him to stop always looking toward the future and instead just… be. Stay in the present. Know that things won’t ever be that good again, but they can still be good. And most of all, to know that you never know when those good things might be snatched away, so you damn well better be sure to appreciate them while you’ve got them.

Mike and fatherhood.

I went in to check on Lyla before bed this evening. I don’t always – sometimes I just look at the monitor, watch for her breathing, and that’s enough – but tonight I wanted to see her. She opened her eyes, sleepy, unfocused, and said “Mummy…” – a slow, beaming smile spreading across her face – “…I lost my dummy but it was under Nemo.” Then closed her eyes again, turned over and fell back to sleep. I stroked her cheek and whispered “I love you, Lyla. I love you very much.” And then I left her room and fell onto my bed and sobbed.

I sobbed for Mike. Not because I miss him (although I do). Not because I am so sad that Lyla doesn’t haver her Daddy any more (although I am). But because I am so, so sad for him, that he doesn’t get to be here to see our beautiful little girl, to stroke her cheek and tell her that he loves her very much. Because he did. God, he did.

Let me tell you about how Mike was as a dad.

He loved it when I was pregnant. Loved it. His “love language” as they say was very firmly in the care-giving camp. He loved to look after me. And being pregnant was a prime time for it. He tucked me into bed at 8pm every night and cooked me whatever I could stomach that evening and rubbed cream into my belly and brought me breakfast in bed every morning. I remember one evening lying in bed with him watching a cooking documentary – a Nadiya Hussain, I think, or a Mary Berry – and I said “ooh, I could murder a slice of lemon drizzle” and he sat bolt upright in bed and said, excitedly, “Is that a craving? Do I need to do a midnight Tesco’s run?!” (It wasn’t, and he didn’t, and honestly you’ve never seen a man more crestfallen to not have to go to the supermarket in his pyjamas.)

He just loved all of it. I had an anterior placenta with Lyla which meant I often couldn’t feel her movements, so we had quite a lot of anxious periods of me lying on my side, drinking (disgusting) ice cold full fat Coke, trying to get her to move. We discovered that if he sang to her, that often would get her moving. So he would put his face close to my stomach and sing “Hey Bubble, woah Bubble…” to the tune of Craig McClachlan’s smash hit (!) Mona. He loved her even then.

And then she was born. And oh my goodness, you never saw a man so in love. I have so many photos and videos of him looking at her like she’s the most incredible thing he’s ever seen in his life (which she was). After she was born, I was in surgery for another 2.5 hours or so, so he was alone with Lyla that whole time. I asked him what he did with her and he said “I didn’t really know what to do, so I just… looked at her.” And from that moment on the two of them were hooked on each other. He just blossomed with love for her. Everyone could see it. He was doing the thing he was made to do.

She was a Daddy’s girl through and through. I have an amazing video of the three of us in the kitchen, her about 11 months, and me saying “Lyla, say Mummy…” and her replying “Daddy!” “Can you say Mummy?” “I say Daddy!” Nobody made her laugh harder than he did, swinging her around in shopping bags, turning her upside down, pretending to have lost her when she was right in front of him. Even as a baby when she was refluxy and fractious and screaming, he would take her out into the garden and walk her around each of the plants one by one, talking to her calmly about them and she would start cooing and giggling.

He was the most wonderful dad. He loved every minute of it, and it breaks my heart that he did all those hard parts – the night feeds, the endless nappies, the tantrums, the sleep refusal – and he doesn’t get to do this amazing bit. He doesn’t get to see the kind, thoughtful, chatty little girl she’s becoming. He doesn’t get to see things like tonight, where she found a water chestnut in her stir fry and asked what it was, and then when Cora said she wanted one too, she quietly and of her own accord found another one, fished it out and handed it to her saying “here you go Cowa, you can haff this one”. It’s not fair. He deserved to have all of that because he was the most amazing Daddy, filled to the brim with love for his little girl.

I try so hard to channel him when I’m with her. To be more fun, to be silly and whimsical and adventurous the way he was. I’m a poor imitation and always will be, but I do try so hard. But while I can try to make it up to her, there’s nothing I can do to make it up to him. And that’s what I’m crying for tonight. For what he’s missing out on. And how unfair it is.