I am still missing you. I am still coming to terms with the loss. And it’s not going away. I am still in the mindset whereby I want to contact you when I find something interesting or amusing, like I have always done, and I still have to remind myself you are no longer here.
I miss your wise counsel, I miss disagreeing with you, I miss your wit, I miss your courage in adversity, I miss everything about you. I wish you were still here.
As you are seven people, I miss you in different ways. Some of you I saw far too infrequently, mainly due to geography and expense, but I suppose if I had rearranged my priorities and begged, stolen and borrowed the fares I could have seen you more frequently.
For those of you who died of terrible diseases, as some of you did, I miss my visits to see you even when you were dying. I valued my visits and I hope you valued them, too. And those who always found ‘better’ things to do than go to see you when life for you was at its bleakest and hope was running out, I hope they can live with themselves. I mean that sincerely and genuinely because it is heartbreaking to see someone whose life is coming to end and so it is much easier to send messages via social network platforms. I wanted to be in the room. I did what I felt I had to do.
Some of you died suddenly, unexpectedly and a number of you did not have a funeral. I have some kind of closure, but it’s not complete.
It’s been the sheer number of deaths I have struggled to deal with in 2025. Normally, I am capable of compartmentalising death, but the cumulative effects have been harder to understand. Six of you died prematurely, one criminally so. Only one of you had reached what I would call ‘a good age’ and you, I am afraid, are the one I miss least and frankly don’t mourn at all.
While I loved being with you when you were dying, I hated your suffering and the powerlessness I felt when I was in the room. In one case, I got close to saying goodbye because you died soon after my last visit. You always hoped for a cure, but in your heart you knew your number was up.
The deaths of all of you had no effect on my lack of faith. On the contrary, you were mostly thoroughly good, decent people, real positive assets to humanity. It is not good enough for some to suggest they died too young because God wanted them to join him up in heaven. What for? Did he have some jobs that needed doing that no one else who had died could do for him? No. Your deaths were as random the accident of your births. Marvin Gaye sang: “It seems the good die young”, but bad people die young, too. You did not die because of some misconceived plan. It was bad luck and bad genes.
All of you left your individual legacies for all the good things you did in life. I close my eyes, see your faces, hear your voices and think about all the good things you left behind, whether that’s a legion of loving family and friends or those who benefitted from your acts of sheer humanity in your lives. The stepchildren who saw you as the only father-figure they ever had, those who love the brilliance of your art, your charitable giving, just being a doer in life and not just being a talker, your kindness and generosity even if it was not always reciprocated and sometimes was taken advantage of, your stoicism and wisdom.
I am so glad I knew you and still, in some indefinable way, know you. Your legacy cannot outshine your presence but it is the next best thing.
Finally, the strangest things can happen. I was driving through a part of Bristol I only occasionally frequent this morning and I passed by the top of your road. I was listening to the radio as usual and the DJ Nick Grimshaw played one of your favourite songs, I Wish by Stevie Wonder. ‘How spooky was that?’ I thought, before remembering that actually it was total coincidence that my SatNav had taken me this way and not some kind of divine intervention. Still, I thought of you and remembered what a great man you were and how much we all miss you, particularly your loving family and your very best friends.
It has been hard to deal with the cumulative effect of deaths in 2025, The sheer number of them has been hard to process. I am hoping that time will be the healer, as it so often is. But in the here and now the pulse may have stopped but some part of your heart has carried on beating. I am still missing you.
