depression

Yesterday, it snowed for the first time this winter. Stepping outside, I’d forgotten the depth of the cold — how it settles in the chest, a fist closing around the heart. No one wants to read a letter about depression in November, but the dark nights draw in regardless.

It’s been two years since I lost my mam and, though the sharpest edges of grief have softened, its heaviness hasn’t lifted. This time of year brings a tightening dread. My body remembers what my mind resists, which manifests in fractured sleep and the subconscious pull back into old coping mechanisms. I search for an escape route (an ejector seat, a cheat code, anything) to hold back memories from the week I spent with her, and away from her, while she was dying.

These letters, which I began writing during my counselling training, were inspired by Kübler-Ross's The Five Stages of Grief (1969). Now I’m qualified, I can see how misleading an expected list of responses can be. The Five Stages suggest a tidy progression from one emotional state to another. But in my experience, grief is a blizzard: harsh and unpredictable.

My thoughts move through dense fog, circling. They cling to social missteps and humiliations that I can’t see to release, often ones that unfolded in the months before my mam died, and in the strange, suspended time after. My mind tends to latch on and repeat. It’s a familial trait, and my mam carried it too. Writing helps loosen the grip of the doom-loop. Lifting weights in the gym also helps — the reassurance of repetition, of something solid to push against. When I’m at my worst, I put Lily Allen’s Ruminating on repeat.

I reassure clients that grief is multifaceted, deeply personal. There is no correct timeline. Theories like Tonkin’s Growing Around Grief (1996) offer me greater comfort: the understanding that grief doesn’t disappear but becomes less all-consuming as life expands around it. Klass, Silverman and Nickman’s Continuing Bonds (1996) framework offers ways of thinking about bereavement that allow an ongoing connection with the dead through rituals, remembrance, and the persistence of love in forms that shift but never evaporate.

But I’m a hypocrite because there’s part of me that believes I should be more together two years on. I speak carelessly, skip meals, drink more than I should, lose patience, and stay in bed. When I sense I’m heading towards familiar disarray, I try to take accountability and forgive myself for the patterns I fall back into. Each time, I learn (and sometimes at a cost) what it is to keep going — less resilient, and moving into the season’s unforgiving chill all the same.

Still, there are opportunities for grief to enter on cue. Over the weekend, my partner and I attend a light festival in a neighbouring city. She is wearing my coat, unprepared for the cold this far north. We join the queue for the cathedral, and my mind traces its well-worn circuit even as she holds my hand. Inside, a peace descends. Projections climb decorative arches, shifting and blooming in spheres of ephemeral light. I think of my mam, knowing she would’ve loved it. I feel close to her here.

As we leave, we both light a candle and brace for icy rain.

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Thank you for reading grief letters. This substack is free, but if you enjoy my writing and you’d like to buy me a coffee, you can do so via ko-fi. If you are grieving and need support, you’ll find links to resources here.