Where Grief Meets Purpose

I remember the first time death introduced itself to me. I was barely six years old standing in my parents living room watching adults move around me like ghosts themselves. My three-month-old sister lay in a small white casket looking as though she might wake up at any moment. But I already understood she wouldn’t.

“Don’t touch her” someone whispered, but I already had feeling the unnatural coolness of her tiny hand. That was my first lesson in how death changes things transforming the familiar into something else entirely.

By the time I turned twelve, I had become intimately familiar with the rhythms of mourning. My best friend Joel said he was just going for a bath but when he didn’t emerge for some time his girlfriend went to check on him and found him there. He left no note just a quiet bathroom a devastated girlfriend and a newborn baby girl less than a month old. The worst part was that we had spent most of the last week with him and saw nothing coming. His girlfriend kept asking if we’d noticed anything wrong, her eyes hollow as she cradled their daughter. We hadn’t seen any signs. Or perhaps we had and didn’t recognise what we were seeing. That guilt wove itself into my understanding of grief the questions that remain when someone chooses to leave, the way it fractures not just present relationships but future ones that will never have the chance to develop.

My parents slipped away differently gradually replaced by versions of themselves that drugs had hollowed out. They existed physically but became increasingly absent in all the ways that mattered. Some nights, I’d watch my mother nod off mid-sentence and think about how you can lose people whilst they’re still breathing. These moments haunted me deeply because that’s exactly how my baby sister died. She simply stopped breathing. The coroner called it Sudden Infant Death Syndrome an “unknown cause of death”. How cruel and unfair those words seemed, as if giving it a name somehow made the senselessness acceptable.

“You’re too young to carry all this” my grandmother would say stroking my hair whilst I sat at her kitchen table. She and my grandfather were the constants the ones who never turned their backs, who showed me what unconditional love looked like in practice, not just in words.

When pneumonia took my Papa when I was fifteen a complication after he went into hospital with just a broken hip I somehow found the courage to read a speech at his funeral. Standing at the podium, I felt his spirit holding me up, giving me strength when mine had run out. The celebration of his life was beautiful, a fitting tribute to the remarkable man he was. My mother couldn’t attend by then, she was living in a nursing home after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2008. As for my father, I have no recollection of him at the funeral. I stood beside my grandmother as she received condolences occasionally squeezing her hand when her composure threatened to break.

“You shouldn’t have to be this strong” a distant relative told me. But I already was.

By twenty-five, I had lost my Granny too. A few weeks before she died I sat with her in the hospital ward her mind deeply confused as I tried to encourage her to eat but without much success.

As I sat there, my thoughts ran wild and all I wanted was to reach out to her for help.

“I’m scared” I admitted in the darkness. “Of being alone. Of being the only one left who remembers.”

After leaving the hospital that night, I returned to my cousin’s place, where I was staying at the time. I was meant to help care for my grandmother when she was discharged, but it didn’t end up that way. By then I was in such a mess mentally and physically drowning out any kind of feeling by smoking pot. Life became worse and worse. I ended up homeless. My Granny died. My family turned their backs on me. They had been there for me a lot but I never did anything so terrible that I felt I deserved to be cut out of their lives especially when they were the only family I had.

For a long time, I struggled to come to terms with the fact that my family never got me the psychological help I needed to move forwards. I should have been given the tools to live successfully to learn strategies to understand what was normal. Instead all I knew was what I had been taught in the first six years of my life. They say those are the most crucial years for development. My entire thought structure needed to be rebuilt.

On top of all this I had the difficult experience of coming out as a gay man. Now, I live with so many things I would call detriments.

By thirty, I had lost two uncles, an aunt and four more people connected to our extended family. Each death came with its own complications family feuds over meagre possessions arguments about funeral readings the awkward silence when someone mentioned setting up a memorial fund but no one had money to contribute.

I became the one people called when death visited. Not because I had answers but because I didn’t flinch. I knew how to sit in the hospital room during those final hours. I knew which funeral homes would work with limited budgets. I knew that sometimes, grief is so vast that all you can do is bear witness to it.

At twenty-seven my good mate Chris called me at 3 AM.

“My mum” he said his voice breaking. “Can you come?”

I made my way over to his place to find him sitting on the front steps unable to go back inside where his mother’s body lay. The paramedics had pronounced her dead and left. That’s when he realised he couldn’t afford the cost of transporting her body or covering the funeral expenses.

“I don’t know what to do” he whispered. “I don’t have any money.”

“I know” I said sitting beside him. “I’ve been there.”

We spent the night making calls to government services, churches and community groups. By morning we had cobbled together enough help to give his mother a simple but dignified farewell.

As I helped him clean out his flat later that week, he asked me, “How do you know all this? How to navigate… this?”

I paused holding a box of his mother’s clothing. “Experience” I said finally. “More than anyone should have.”

That night on my way home I realised something had shifted in me. The accumulation of loss my infant sister, my suicidal friend, my parents lost to addiction, my grandparents all the others had shaped me into someone who could move through the landscape of grief without becoming lost in it.

Everything I knew about death and mourning came from living it from standing in the wreckage and finding paths forwards. Not from textbooks or theories, but from the raw reality of arranging funerals with empty pockets, of cleaning out homes still filled with the presence of those now gone, of knowing exactly how grief sits in the body because I’d carried it in mine for as long as I could remember.

Now at thirty, I understand that this is my journey perhaps even my purpose. To work with people through dying and grief from a place of authentic knowing. To be the person who doesn’t offer empty platitudes because I’ve heard them all and know how hollow they ring. To create space for others to mourn in whatever messy complicated way they need to without judgement because grief follows no predictable course.

I carry all these losses within me my sister, my friend, my parents, my grandparents all the others. But they have shaped me into someone who can hold space for others walking similar paths. Someone who understands that sometimes you can’t afford the funeral they deserved that sometimes you’re too overwhelmed to be present that grief takes forms we never anticipated.

My journey through loss has become a map I can offer to others finding their way through their own darkness. Not to lead them out of it no one can do that but to walk beside them to bear witness and to whisper the truth that saved me:

You will survive this even when you don’t want to and someday that survival might become your greatest gift to give.