“It doesn’t get any better,” said the former golfer David Feherty said of grief. “It just gets farther away.” He should know grief better than most, losing his 29 year old son Shey to a drug overdose in 2017. I can’t work out for the life of me if he’s right because grief is actually a highly complex issue and it impacts people differently. But the quote does make me think and that has to be a good thing.
With the exception of my stepmother, I am now the senior member of my family, having long lost both parents, as well as my stepfather. The death that caused me the most grief was that of my father, with whom I enjoyed an often distant (physical) and complex relationship. I never cried following his death but I needed and underwent therapy, not just as a direct result of loss, it turned out, but of everything that went before. Yes, it’s complicated. I cried once when my mother died, which was over 25 years ago, and never since and that may have been due to shock when I called her brother, my only uncle, who came across as utterly dismissive and wholly uncaring. My stepfather’s passing was unquestionably a blessing, a deliverance from the blight of Parkinson’s and dementia which in effect had taken him away from me many years before he died. No tears there. Why not?
I am not an expert but I wonder if the bereavements I have been through have been in the natural order of things. Your older relatives are more likely to die before you do and while you may want them to live forever, you know in your heart it won’t happen. Maybe when they die, perhaps your grief is assuaged by some kind of religious superstition whereby they will somehow survive their own deaths and one day you will all meet up in some kind of heaven. If that works for the bereaved, if that brings a form of comfort and eases the pain, then who am I to argue? But are some forms of grief worse than others?
The answer has to be it depends. Loss is loss and, as we said at the start, if affects everyone differently. I tend to think that the loss of, say, a partner or a child just has to be worse than the loss of a parent or grandparent. The loss of a partner, likely the love of your life, strikes me as even worse than the loss of someone older, especially if the older person has suffered, but the reaction is not uniform.
I do not think of my late parents every day, nor carry their loss around in any significant way. It appears from social media – hardly a great barometer of grief, I know – that others do. My loss, unlike David Feherty’s, did get better and it has got farther away. And I have already explained the reasons why I do not feel my particular grief was as bad as that suffered by others. Again, that may be explained by our uniqueness.
2025 has, so far, been a terrible year in terms of loss. Two close friends, one my age and one younger, have died and both have affected me more than I might have expected. Even though my lifelong best friend lived on the other side of the Atlantic and I had not seen for perhaps decades, it feels like a huge loss, not least because the things we talked about, even via email. Miles could not separate us in terms of friendship and now, two months on, I think of something I should tell him and I quickly remember I can’t. That’s loss, though. Grief is what we feel after loss. It’s not the same thing. Loss is my overwhelming feeling. The grief I feel – and there is some – is almost indefinable.
Feherty’s quote, that grief doesn’t get better, it just gets farther away is 100% true for him because it’s his truth and I have mine. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? This was not a life we chose, it’s one that came about by the accident of our birth, a life with no purpose beyond procreation. And, on that basis, the scientific evidence-based basis, it’s probably best to enjoy this, the only life will ever get.
With a life that is neither preordained or planned, it’s going to be a bit of a mess, a mixture of the good and bad and the happy and sad and the bad and sad is where grief comes into it. And there’s no fairness, either. The good don’t all die young and the bad don’t all get to live deep into old age.
With loss, it’s important to grieve how you want for as long as you want. And it’s important to remember that you never begin a new life, you just pick up the pieces of the one you already have and run with it. When it happens, your grief is yours, nobody else’s and no one can tell you how you should feel.
It was the late Queen Elizabeth II who said this: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” I couldn’t have put it better. *
* The quote was actually written by Dr. Colin Murray Parkes, a British psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of grief studies, but Liz did say it after 9/11.
