My First Loss

When we speak of our firsts, it’s often with a positive nature.

Your first words as a child.

Your first job as a teenager.

Your first car that you scuffed on its first outing.

Your first kiss, of which timelines can differ.

But no one talks about what it's like to suffer your first loss.

The first time you lose someone so close to you.

It's no shock as to why we don’t. It's hard, it’s painful, and again, something we all experience at different times to one another.

But there is something extra painful in that first loss of someone who helped shape who we are today.

Something we can never be prepared for.

For me, this was my Grandad, who passed away last year. I was twenty-three years old holding the hand of a man I grew up to believe to be invincible as he lay in his hospital bed knowing what was to come in the next few days.

I would not wish the reality of that week on anyone.

My whole world had stopped, paused and become confined to that hospital room, where nine of us sat with him, with each other, with my Gran.

But I never wanted the world outside of it to start spinning again.

How can it, I thought.

How can it possibly, when he’d no longer be a part of it.

No longer sat on the edge of his sofa, watching the sport at full volume, while the rest of us tried to have a conversation behind him.

No longer juggling a black sack in one hand, and a glass of whisky in the other, first thing on Christmas Day.

No longer there to say, “Bethany, when you finally write a book, I’m going to be the first one to read it.”

All I could do was sit there, so present with him in his final moments, but so far detached from what came after those moments for me.

In the midst of it all, I found myself almost wishing that I’d experienced a loss like this earlier on in life, just so I could face it more equipped.

I didn't know how to grieve. Not really.

I thought I did. I'd seen it in films, read it in books, watched other people around me go through it. But none of that prepared me for the reality of waking up in a world where someone who had always existed suddenly didn't.

Even now, when I'm writing this, I still envision him sat on the sofa with my Gran, both taking it in turns to fall asleep at whatever film they’ve chosen to watch today.

There is something strange about experiencing your first loss when you’re already an adult. When you’re supposed to be emotionally equipped, self-aware, and grounded. When people assume you know how to process things by now.

Even in myself, I had that feeling that I should know how to process it by now.

I felt like a child in a grown body, waiting for someone to tell me what to do with all of these feelings.

Grief, I learned, isn't one thing.

It doesn't arrive neatly.

It doesn't follow stages or timelines, or logic.

It looks different on everyone, and sometimes doesn't even look like anything at all.

Sometimes it’s silence.

Sometimes it's guilt for laughing.

Sometimes it’s hearing his voice in a room he’ll never walk into again.

Being unprepared didn't make it hurt more, but it made it lonelier. I didn't know how to ask for help, or what kind of help I even needed. I didn't know how to speak about him without feeling like I was breaking some invisible rule. I didn't know how to act around those who were grieving just as much as I was, in fear that I was doing it wrong.

But maybe this is what I have come to learn about firsts.

That they don't always mark the beginning of something new.

Sometimes they mark the moment something becomes a part of you forever.

My first loss didn’t teach me how to let go; it taught me how to carry.

And somehow, in all the ways that matter, he is still here.

In the stories I tell.

In the voice in my head that tells me to keep writing.

In the books he always said he’d be the first to read.

In this very website.

And maybe that’s how I live with my first loss, by letting him be a part of everything that comes after.