If I were given a pound for each time I typed out an introduction to this article only to then delete it because it didn’t ‘adequately capture the feelings I was trying to express’, then I would be able to pay off my student loans before I had even graduated. This speechlessness, though, characterises the raw weight that comes with anticipatory grief the best. Grief, in all of its sobering forms, is one of the most isolating – and yet human – feelings one can experience. When this is placed against the backdrop of trying to survive university, it is amplified, and even more so in the intense atmosphere of Oxford.
“Dad’s poorly.”
Just like that, I was ripped from the chatter and laughter that surrounded me, my mum, and my aunt in the restaurant we were sitting in that January evening – and was plunged into a deafening, cold, static. On the Westgate rooftop, in mere moments, my family’s life had been permanently altered.
“We’ve known since January, your Dad wanted you to finish your exams before we told you.”
And then, another layer to it all. The beginning of Week One, Hilary Term 2025, and they had all known since New Year’s. They had decided collectively to keep it from me, just so I could focus on Collections. I’ve never known something so simultaneously selfish and unselfish before, and I don’t believe anything will ever exceed it. It only made everything fly past even faster for me, when just two days after that, I got the phone call from my parents that it was terminal cancer. Within just two more months, we learned that four tumors had grown in his brain since his kidney cancer was first diagnosed. My Hilary term and vac slipped through my fingers, and I was left wondering if I would ever see him again. This feeling became especially poignant as I sat in the back of my aunt’s car, rushing home, as we believed he was already on his deathbed.
The dress I had hurriedly picked out for his funeral sat in the suitcase next to me, as we casually talked about what I wanted for dinner when we arrived home, pretending that everything was okay. Fortunately, he recovered this time, but I had never expected that my own feelings would be mirrored by my Dad as I left home for the start of Trinity term.
“I hope I see her again.”
We have always been too similar for our own good.
Growing up, I would hear the phrase “you’re just like your father” a lot. This would be in arguments, in jest, in passing, so it became natural to have a large part of my identity be shaped by the relationship I have with my Dad. It would be a common occurrence to walk home from school, and see him sat on the settee, swearing at the live broadcast of the House of Commons, and it was equally as common to hear of the many Mancunian politicians that have him blocked on social media because of his fueled comments toward them.
In my later teen years, I reflected on the many friendships I had cultivated and sometimes lost because of this inherited short-temper, and inability to think before I spoke. At first, I resented my Dad for this, largely because I resented my own shortcomings and could empathise with this problem we shared so deeply. I never thought there would come a time where I would miss the constant barrage of curses and insults directed toward the people who couldn’t hear him. But now I sit here, my mother translating his garbled speech through the tumour in his mouth that silences him, making the deaf ears my own.
I also remember the times where I would lay on my dad when I was upset. When I was sick, he would be the ‘comfort parent’. While my mum is more of the type to try and fix a problem, he was the type to comfort someone through it. Part of my identity was thus formed from having the idea in my mind that my dad would always be there for me to go and seek comfort from, to go and lay on, and watch Top Gear together when I was ill. By the time I left home for Oxford at the end of the Hilary vac, though, I could not even hug my Dad goodbye for fear of disrupting the feeding tube inserted into his stomach. He was no longer a ‘comfort parent’, instead, a source of great discomfort. I hated and still hate seeing him so unwell.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”
It’s one of the hardest thoughts to confront, especially when the person that it is about is still very much there. Everything about this waking nightmare is still here: the smell of blood still lingers in the back of my nostrils, the memory of bright lights in the hospitals still leave my photosensitive eyes near-weeping at the glare of the sun, and every time my mum doesn’t answer a call, I worry that something has happened to my dad.
I am told time, and time again that I don’t have to be strong but, if not me, then who? My younger brother, who is a year away from sitting A-Levels? My mother, who has known and loved my dad since she was younger than I am now? If I cannot uplift the people around me, in the way I know my dad would if he could, what does that say about the supposed similarities between us? I would feel like I failed him. I already feel like I have done, by prioritising my life, even when that is what he said he wanted me to do.
“Oxford is the best place for you,” my mum said. In some sense, this is true. There are not enough suitable words in the English language that I could string together in any meaningful way that would acceptably express how thankful I am to the friends I have made here for their care and kindness. The same feelings of thankfulness come to mind when considering the tutors that have been truly kind, patient, and understanding when I haven’t been able to work as I usually would. There is nowhere else that I could go where this many people are trying to make things less isolating for me.
Despite all of this, do I think Oxford is the best place for me, really? No.
The best place for me is in the crook of my Dad’s arm, with some mindless garbage blaring on the TV. It is a place that isn’t available to me anymore, and it is a place I’m not sure if I will ever see or feel again.
“What is there to take from any of this?”
One of the seemingly most common feelings, as my aunt told me, that people experience with the grief of losing a parent, or another close relative, is that they are being abandoned. I feel like this emotional ‘trope’ skipped over me as I came to what was ultimately an even crueler realisation. We, who experience this kind of grief so young, are not victims of abandonment. We are victims of theft.
This kind of theft is even more heinous because you are given just enough notice to fully understand what you’re about to lose. However, there is hardly ever enough notice given to allow you to reconcile with the spoils of your love that no longer has anywhere to go.
The reason I decided to take up this article is that, through my experience of having a terminally ill parent, one of the most comforting feelings has been that I’m not alone. From the moment I started speaking out, people I would have never expected to be suffering in similar ways to me began sharing their own experiences with grief, and it really made me sit back and put things into perspective.There is a beautiful analogy, ‘I am a mosaic of everyone I have ever loved’. Grief is the one emotion that brings this out of people the best. Those tiles closest to our hearts crack during times like these, but the pure sunlight – the radiating warmth of others breaks through that vast expanse of inner noise – bounces from these tiles. These reflect a vast kaleidoscope of overwhelming emotions that can, at times, be truly beautiful when you allow yourself to just feel.