Losing a parent young

I was 27 when my dad died. He was 64. I believed, the way you believe in gravity, that we had so much more time.

Losing a parent young is a particular grief. Your friends still have theirs, and mostly complain about them. Every milestone ahead of you, the wedding, the first flat, the babies, quietly re-files itself under "without him." You reach for your phone to ask their advice and end up asking a search engine instead.

And the world treats it as ordinary, because parents die, don't they. Eventually. Except yours wasn't supposed to be the early one, and nobody around you knows what to do with that.

These pieces are for the ones grieving decades ahead of schedule. The friends who don't get it yet. The maths you do against the time you thought you had. The belongings, the grandchildren they won't meet, and the complicated parents whose loss is complicated too.

• When your friends don't get itThey came to the funeral, then went quiet. They change the subject, rush your sadness, vanish. Why friends fail grievers, which failures are fixable, and how to grieve inside an empathy gap.
• The grandchildren they'll never meetThe baby arrives and the grief arrives with it: the grandparent who would have been besotted, missing from the delivery ward onward. On parenting a child your parent never met.
• Grieving a complicated parentWhen the parent who died was also the parent who hurt you: grieving estrangement, addiction, absence or harm, and the tangled mourning for what was, what wasn't, and what now never will be.
• Losing a parent in your 20s, when friends still have theirsLosing a mum or dad in your 20s or 30s means grieving decades early, surrounded by friends who still complain about theirs. The out-of-sync grief nobody your age understands yet.
• Losing your dad youngThe walk down the aisle, the call you can't make, the jacket in the wardrobe: what losing a father young takes, and what daughters and sons carry forward of their dads.
• Losing your mum youngThe person who remembered everything, the phone call after good news, the love that fussed: what losing a mother young takes, and how the motherless carry her forward.
• Losing your second parentWhen the second parent dies, you lose them, the family's centre, and the version of yourself that was somebody's child. On double grief, adult orphanhood, and the home that ends.
• Weddings, graduations, babies: milestones without themEvery milestone after a loss arrives twice: as the joy it is and the absence it contains. How grievers walk graduations, weddings, births and promotions with someone missing from the audience.
• Needing their advice and googling insteadThe boiler breaks, the baby won't sleep, the contract needs reading, and the person you'd ask is gone. On losing your parent's advice line, and how their guidance keeps arriving anyway.
• Sorting a parent's belongingsThe wardrobe, the drawers, the garage, the house: sorting a dead parent's belongings is grief with bin bags. The pacing, the keep-decisions, the sibling politics, and the things worth saving first.
• The time you thought you hadYou believed there were decades left: the trips deferred, the questions unasked, the someday that never came. On grieving the future you'd already half-lived in, and what its loss teaches.
• Watching their friends grow oldTheir best friend just retired. The neighbours are in their 80s now. Every year their generation lives is a year your parent didn't get, and watching it is a slow, strange grief with a hidden gift inside.