It's hard to be original about grief

It's very hard to be original about grief; it's a time to be got through, that is all. Today, I find it hard to believe that I lost my beloved stepfather two weeks ago. After the phone call, the immediate minutes, hours, days passed in a blur. I veered between wailing and relief for the first week. He was 85 years old and had been spiralling further into severe (vascular) dementia, but we did not know he was so poorly, we thought we had him for a good while longer. He died peacefully in his sleep, but his passing was a shock, especially for my mother. He will be spared the indignity of not knowing who he is, not knowing who we are, and so will we. But he has left a huge gap, he was a wonderful man, the kindest man I knew. I was lucky to have him for my stepdad for thirty-eight years. A few weeks ago, I had underlined and tweeted a quote from Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room: 'In every departure, deep down and tiny, like a black seed, there is the fear of death.' I could not have known then I would not see my stepdad again.

The day before he died, he was sitting up in bed eating trifle and reading one of his many Greenland books. When, a few days later, my brother and I accompanied my mother to register the death, the registrar asked us what my stepfather's father's occupation had been, we answered, the governor of western Greenland. The registrar half-smiled as she typed and said, I've never heard that one before. We smiled too and the sun shone and we glimpsed a time when the ache of not having him will have given way to gorgeous memories. Meanwhile, we wait.