It is not always the case that you gain perspective on life by way of listening to a football head coach, but yesterday it happened. I was watching a YouTube interview which featured Liverpool head coach Arne Slot, alongside club suits Richard Hughes and Billy Hogan. As a Liverpudlian by birth, with extensive familial links to Merseyside … oh wait a minute: let’s try again … as a Bristolian by birth with no familial links to Merseyside, I was enjoying the conversation when the subject changed to the tragic death of Diogo Jota, killed in a road crash last summer. Slot was talking about the impact Jota’s passing had on the club and while he said it had affected people considerably, the situation was “so much harder for his wife and children“.
As a dear friend put it, 2025 was like walking down Sniper’s Alley. Between us, my partner and I lost eight members of our family and friends. Some close, some slightly more distant, all leaving us sad and bereft. However, at the very heart of it I’d like to think we maintained perspective, that in each case there were people closer to the person who died than us. It is very hard to explain this without appearing crass and insensitive. What I am saying, in effect, is that when I lost a dear friend, someone else had lost a son and a father. I am not trying to reduce this to a pecking order of grief but losing a husband or a wife must surely cut deeper than losing a dear friend.
Incredibly, it was just over a year when I lost my best friend, Nick, who many years ago fulfilled his dream of moving to live in Canada. As soon as he emigrated, I missed him, knowing that I would probably never see him again. We stayed in touch by email and I swear I could hear his voice in the words he wrote. I had a recurring dream after he left that he had not quite emigrated and we continued to socialise. He would be leaving soon. After he died, unbelievably to me just over a year ago, that dream stopped. The emptiness I have felt since his death has not been filled. Yet for his mother, who has now lost three of her four sons, it must be far worse. For his Canadian family, including stepchildren, it must be devastating, given how his stepdaughter referred to him as “the father I never had“.
Four other friends died, too, and each in their own way as left a hole in the world. I spoke to, messaged and saw them, sometimes frequently. With three of them, the more sick they became, the closer we became. Their deaths did not come quickly, I knew death was coming, I had time to prepare for their deaths, yet I hadn’t considered the effects of loss, the sheer emptiness it brings.
With Nick, we would exchange regular messages about all the things we talked about when he was alive and well and living in England. Only geography separated us. I would think of something and knew he would be interested and would respond in kind. On the night he died, I was at a Toto concert in Birmingham and I emailed him all about it. The next morning I got a message to say he had died. Well over 50 years of friendship gone, just like that. Neither of us remotely religious, we both accepted death as final, not for us the (false) comfort of eternal life. He didn’t even have a funeral, which I respected totally. If he had, I would have been sorely tempted to attend.
The loss was terrible, the emptiness that loss brings far worse. And I feel it with everyone else we lost last year. Where there once was something now there is nothing. That throwaway joke, the anecdote, the quirky fact, that day out at the football, the gig: all in the past, blown away like a leaf on a windy day.
We often use the word closure when it comes to loss, but what does it really mean? Acceptance that someone is actually dead and isn’t coming back – and coming to terms with it? Something like that? And time, isn’t that the ultimate healer? I think it is, at least for me, but I know, just by looking at social media pages that some folk find it much harder to accept death and move on, as they write that they still miss their loved ones every day. Time has been a healer since the passing of my parents, along with others I lost along the way. Last year’s sheer litany of death and tragedy felt almost overwhelming at times. And now, the first anniversaries have started to arrive.
“How can it be a year since Nick died?” I wondered last Monday morning. A year is quite a long time, isn’t it? I suppose it is. A year ago, my partner and I had a short break in Cornwall. Now that feels like it was a year ago, yet it was a few weeks after Nick’s passing. Cornwall is a nice memory, his passing, many thousands of miles away, still feels slightly raw and, again, the emptiness doesn’t feel any different. Maybe in a couple of years? Let’s hope so.
I approach the anniversaries with mixed emotions. Upset at losing people I loved, relieved, in certain cases, that they were no longer suffering. Indeed, some deaths felt like a blessing, a deliverance. My own sense of loss overtaken by a desire not to see people suffer.
Hopefully, those empty spaces will be filled in due course. There is no logic in forever mourning someone who will never come back. Maybe then, the actual celebration of life, the good fortune I enjoyed in being a part of their lives will rise to the fore.
Perspective is, for me, essential, in order to avoid lapsing into self-pity and more importantly to remember that someone is suffering more than I am. I suppose the fact that I still feel this way is a good thing and it is what makes us human. And that emptiness should only remind me of what I once had and how lucky I was to have it.
