Time has been playing tricks on me.

I look back on this day year last year, 19 March 2024, when my world was shaken to its core as the final thread of my parental security blanket unravelled, a blanket that for more than 50 years had cloaked me in a surety of safety that I’m struggling to reweave, and I wonder at how quickly time has passed.

Then I stop.

And think.

And say to myself that it seems I’ve lived 12 years since, and not 12 months.

Time has been playing tricks on me, indeed.

A friend commented recently on how much of what I’ve written of late has been focused on ageing, on growing old.

Am I feeling my age?

Inside I feel like I am 32.

I’ve been doing the math and working out what I was doing that year and nothing in particular comes to mind. I don’t remember it as a period of unbridled happiness or joyful abandonment. That said, I’ve never bought into the relentless pursuit of happiness. To be reasonably happy is more my goal.

My inner clock is stuck on 32 while my outward self marks the passing of time. I’ve no idea why 32. But that’s the number.

It’s what neuroscientists call our subjective age. They reckon that we peg our subjective age, that age we feel inside, at 20% less than our actual age.

Mine’s a little more.

It’s the natural order of things.

We’re born. We age. We die.

There’s nothing complicated about it. Death, like taxes (in some parts of the world), is inevitable.

We all navigate grief in different ways: engage, embrace, submerge, postpone, compartmentalise. Each of us will experience it differently. There is no right or wrong.

Grief is unique.

David Kessler, writing on the difference between mourning and grief, says:

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

I wrote a while back about a condolence card I received and about how worlds change. Kessler recounts a practice from Australia that resonated with me:

I was touring in Australia when I met a researcher who told me about the work she was doing to study the way of life in the northern indigenous villages of Australia. One of the villagers told her that the night someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else into their yard. The next day, when the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside, they see that everything has changed since their loved one died—not just for them but for everyone. That’s how these communities witness, and mirror, grief. They are showing in a tangible way that someone’s death matters. The loss is made visible.

It’s no struggle on my part to keep mam alive. I delight in messages from her friends recounting how she’s looking out at them from her mass card, still talking to them. Her name regularly pops up in conversation, remembered.

No, it doesn’t seem like 12 months since she died on the feast of St Joseph; it seems more like 12 years; and then again, it seems like only yesterday she was here.

Time is playing tricks on me.

In his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, the inimitable John O’Donohue writes:

The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence. This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there. Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness. When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny.