After a tumultuous 2025, seemingly spent on sniper’s alley, losing loved family members and friends with an alarming regularity, you might have thought I’d have spent a fair amount of time over the Christmas period reflecting on loss and grief. I didn’t make any plans to do so, perhaps just assuming the festive feelings would prompt me into some kind of remembrance. They didn’t. In fact, on Christmas Day, I even forgot to raise a glass to absent family and friends. I felt a sliver of guilt when I later realised, but it soon passed. While I still feel the losses in so many ways, maybe I had sub-consciously done my grieving. Into the New year, I wondered why 2025 had been so awful. I think I may have worked it out now.
A main factor is that so many family members and friends are ageing and of course ageing brings an awful lot of unwanted baggage as the body begins to slow down and gradually fall apart. I feel it myself and I am not unaware of my own mortality. What I would say is that in the case of most of the people we lost last year, they died before their time, as we say. Several had not reached pension age, a couple were nowhere near it, a few had just retired and would have expected a longer life.
Another factor is that I am part of a larger community than I imagined. While surviving family members are in short supply, my friendship groups – and I am talking real friends and not those so-called ‘friends’ acquired on social media – went wider than I realised. Over the years, friends of friends became friends, acquaintances became friends, my social connections had actually expanded. When I met up with friends who were dying, I found myself getting closer to their friends, some of whom I knew, albeit vaguely, and I know that the support we gave each other as our friends slipped away has morphed into more than just us being passing strangers.
It was the late Queen Elizabeth II who used the phrase, “Grief is the price we pay for love” after the 9/11 mass murders in 2001 and it still holds true today. I do not need to dissect the words: they are self-explanatory and perhaps with time, the great healer, I will begin to look back at those I have lost and think of myself lucky for having been part of their world, as much as feeling unlucky now at having lost them. At the moment, my good fortune is still under the shadow of loss. But I am hopeful that will change.
None of last year’s funerals felt as though I was solely there for the purpose of providing support to the bereaved, although I have done that on occasions, even the funerals of people I had never met. I had close connections with all of those who died. This time, I had no other motive, although if my presence somehow helped give comfort, all well and good. I’m a great believer that sharing loss with others can be cathartic for all parties.
There is a danger of wandering off on some kind of metaphorical death march, as others around you, or those you know of, get sick and even die and this has already happened in the first weeks of 2026, the “God, it’s all happening again, is there no end to it?” routine. In terms of death, there is of course no end to it, but I was guilty of conflating two different scenarios, the bleakness of so many deaths in 2025 and my imagination running away with itself in 2026. I think I get it now.
There was nothing unusual, nor pre-ordained about last year’s sniper’s alley. There was no Grim Reaper directing events, just a sad coincidence that so many people I knew and loved and maybe just liked died in such a short space of time, a coincidence with a touch of mortality added.
I am hoping that the shadow of loss will lift this year and while I shall never forget my dear family and friends, my memory will shift in order to prioritise the happier times. That, in my experience, is what always happens.
And since I forgot at Christmas, I’m going to now raise an imaginary glass now to absent friends. I miss having you around but soon I shall celebrate what we had. I hope and believe that’s true.
