One day I will stop writing about grief for The Oxford Blue.

For those not familiar with my extensive oeuvre (three articles, column not included), I wrote an article in Michaelmas on grieving during term-time. I saw the commission on Instagram and a summer’s worth of sorrow snuck up on me. My grandfather passed away shortly before my Prelims coursework opened – the due date was also his funeral. Really, this should have prepared me. But in Hilary, when my grandmother died, it hit twice as hard, and twice as quickly. 

I wrote a terribly self-indulgent short story; I wrote a poem about how the guy I was seeing didn’t even ask if I was okay; I wrote a series of essays so bad they destroyed my tutor’s faith in me.

Everything became about grief, again. Or maybe everything has always been about grief, and it took my grandparents dying for me to realise it. My Shakespeare essays focused on dead children, my commentary on Troilus and Criseyde was almost entirely focused on the fact that Troilus was always going to die. He was dead from the beginning. I wrote on illness and misery and the moments just before death. 

I felt so utterly enveloped by it. Nothing holds you quite like loss does.

It was only recently that I started to actively read about grief, rather than stumbling upon it. I started with The Iliad – read Emily Wilson’s introduction and put it straight back down. Then, onto e.e cumming’s If there are any heavens, the same poem that inspired my Michaelmas article. That just made me think about the fact that my dad had lost both his parents in less than a year, and I cried so hard I thought I’d throw up. And then I read Birthday Letters.

The conversation on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s relationship is extensive and complex and I think can basically be summed up by the fact that they were both flawed people and he should have had her buried in America. (I also do fundamentally believe he was right to burn her last journal; can you imagine your mother’s final, private moments being read for entertainment?)

My sympathetic view of him largely came from Birthday Letters. It’s a devastatingly beautiful collection. The Blue Flannel Suit is particularly striking. I think that’s the only way to describe it – it struck me. 

In a Finsta story post from August 2023, before I’d ever been touched by death, I had singled out the last stanza:

That blue suit,

A mad, execution uniform,

Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled.

Unable to fathom what stilled you

As I looked at you, as I am stilled

Permanently now, permanently

Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

My grandmother had a closed casket, but I remember standing beside it as the celebrant invited us up to say goodbye. I remember how my sister cried, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t say goodbye – didn’t want to. As I’m writing this, there are tears rising to my eyes in the middle of Costa. I’m still there. I’m still paused by the casket, holding my sister’s hand. I am permanently bending so briefly at her coffin. 

In the moment, it didn’t feel like it was happening to me. I kept thinking, this is happening to some other girl. It’s only a story, it’s only a dream. This cannot possibly be happening to me. 

But it did – it is. The continuous present tense – she has been dead nearly three months now, and I’m still there, sat in the library as my phone blows up with calls, clutching my stuffed platypus as I sit on my bed to call him. Still stood in that room, by that coffin.

I’ve yet to find any other piece of writing that captures the feeling quite so well. I’ll pause in the middle of a sentence; we’ll be talking about death in a class; Radiohead will play – and I’m back there. Crying on the train home, or biting my lip bloody in the service, plastering a smile on my face at the wake. 

Thinking I want to go home and meaning neither the place I was raised, nor the room that is my own. Grief creates new spaces, little pockets of grief which I keep falling into. It really fucking sucks that the only way out is through. What even is on the other side? What will get me back to where I was? Who I was? What remains when all my grief is gone?

I keep reminding myself, it’s just love, that’s all it is. Just love. 

I’ll go home and watch Season One of Fleabag. Think about how I’ve been to Sylvia Plath’s grave, but not my grandmother’s. Pick up a book and make it about myself – it’s a great practise in solipsism. After all, it’s only a story. 

Look back

At the book of the printed words.

You are ten years dead. It is only a story.

Your story. My story.