We hear of grief on paper and screens, where its depicted often by tears and the farewell to a person's body, and of course their soul. But it’s the loss of something, something that is deep rooted and interlocked in our human and even fellow animals' minds that truly invites grief into our lives.

 

I couldn’t describe grief like a child who has lost their mother; in the same way, I couldn’t describe it the way a woman who has lost her husband, and yet I can describe it as well as visualise its unforgiving presence in great detail. At the age of 9 your emotions, ideas and awareness is tinted by the rose-coloured lenses of childhood and naivety; however, I feel as though with grief it is a pain that inserts itself like a parasite on a whale, that grows and matures with you.

 

My mum losing her mother has got to be the most painful thought a daughter could imagine. The idea of experiencing a world without a mother's guidance is a world I can only picture as desolate and cold, a place of loneliness and disorientation. I only remember moments of her death, and perhaps that was because of my age, or perhaps in my grief as a child, I blocked out the moments of pain, so that I could grow without the agony of grief's presence. Watching my mum grieve, however, was more obvious to me than grieving myself; sometimes I saw her cry and still do when we share memories about her. Sometimes I watch her with my aunt, and I see the elephant between them that hasn’t separated or disconnected them, but rather bonded them on a level I dread to experience one day with my brothers. On her anniversary, I watch them bend over my nannie's flower garden, fresh lilies and painted butterfly ornaments added each year, talking to her with their backs turned from where I'm standing with my cousins, who are seemingly distracted by our tradition of lighting sparklers in her memory. They stand approximately 10 meters from us, and yet their emotions seem so heavy that they feel miles away. It is not grief that connects to us when we lose a soul; it is the fragments of their identity that permeate through our cells and become one with us. When we move, talk and explore through our life, it is not grief that joins us as our companion, it is the memories of them that follow us on our path.