On anticipating the loss of loved ones and the ground beneath our feet.
“When you lose your parents, you suddenly realise it wasn’t gravity that was keeping you on the ground all this time.” – The Sandman
My loved ones are nearing the end of their lives, and I find myself already standing in the shadow of loss. This is not yet elegy, but anticipation – the unsettling awareness that when they go, I will lose not only them but also the identity I held in their gaze.
I wrestle with the questions grief poses even before it arrives: Is it a blessing or a curse to lose loved ones suddenly, rather than through a long decline? What does it mean to perform duties with a dry face while grief waits its turn? And how might writing, when the time comes, become the ground beneath my feet when gravity gives way?
These may echo with some of you. Stop reading any further if the topic of loss is something you’d rather avoid.
There are moments in life when borrowed wisdom no longer suffices. You can read about grief, study rituals of mourning, or even listen to others recount their losses. But none of it quite prepares you for the moment when the ground beneath your own feet begins to shift.
I find myself there now. Nothing has yet happened, and yet I already sense the tremors. It is not just the anticipation of absence, but the realisation that when they are gone, a part of me will vanish too. For all my years, I have been their son – the centre of their world in ways no one else can replicate. To lose them will be to lose not only their presence, but also the identity I held in their gaze.
I know what will be expected of me when the time comes. There will be duties to perform, rituals to uphold, and responsibilities to carry out. I will need to keep a straight face, a dry eye, and a steady hand. That is as it should be. Grief will have to wait. Later – much later – it will claim its rightful place. And when it does, I suspect I will meet it in solitude, through the ritual I know best: the act of writing.
There is also the lingering question of how the end comes. Is it a blessing or a curse to lose loved ones suddenly, even in old age, rather than through a long decline? Sudden loss spares us the drawn-out erosion of dignity, the daily heartbreak of watching someone fade. Memory stays intact – you remember them whole. But the shock is brutal, leaving no time to prepare or say goodbye. The slow path, by contrast, offers time to adjust, to speak, to close old loops. Yet it also demands a heavy price: the weariness of a grief lived in advance, the hollowing-out of the self, long before the body gives way. Neither is gentle. Each is its own form of ache – the sharp rupture of absence, or the weary erosion of presence.
And then there is the sequence of loss. For a few of us do both parents leave together; one goes first, the other follows. Sometimes the gap is cruelly short – weeks or months apart – and the two griefs blur into one overwhelming season. It feels like falling through two trapdoors in quick succession, the ground giving way again before you have even found footing. At other times, the losses are separated by years. Then the first grief, raw and bewildering, slowly softens into memory. By the time the second comes, the landscape is familiar, but no less painful: not shock this time, but finality. The first loss unsettles your identity; the second seals it. With the last parent’s passing, you are no longer anyone’s child at all.
This is not morbidity. It is honesty. To speak of grief before it arrives is not to summon it prematurely (or manifest it), but to acknowledge what so many feel in silence: that mourning begins before the final breath, that the fear of becoming unmoored is as real as the loss itself. Naming this anticipation may not diminish the pain, but it does ease the loneliness of carrying it unspoken.
And here literature steps in to offer words where mine falter. In Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, a character reflects: “When you lose your parents, you suddenly realise it wasn’t gravity that was keeping you on the ground all this time.” Those words struck me like an arrow. Because it is true. What holds us steady is not physics, but presence – the anchoring love of those who saw us first, before the world ever did.
When that gravity is cut loose, I know I will fall. But I also trust that, in time, new ground will form beneath me. Memory, writing, and the indelible traces of my parents in my own being will give me a different kind of weight. Not the same as theirs, never a replacement, but enough to keep me standing.
Until then, I remain here – naming the fear, waiting for the fall, and trusting that even in grief, words will find a way to steady me.