When people mention, “She’s mourning her father”, they tend to sympathize for a few fleeting minutes. However, people forget about it like a speck of dust after a while, whereas that feeling of sorrow attaches itself to us for a lifetime.

Leaving the room after someone offers their condolences only highlights the rift between how you feel and how you’re expected to feel. “Your dad is in a better place”. The irony of that sentence: it is meant to reassure and calm you in your bereavement, yet whenever I hear those words repeated, I am left with three questions:

“Why am I unable to feel placid after hearing those words?”

“Why am I constantly feeling hollow?”

“Why is he in a better place, while I am in a place where I feel lost and alone?”

Nobody tells you how insufferable it is when your routine slowly changes after losing someone who was present in your everyday life — going from regularly buying toys at the toy shop, trailing behind him to meetings and events, and watching him play games on his laptop, to never stepping foot in those shops, never attending those events, and never touching his laptop again.

Suddenly, none of those activities pique my interest. Extravagant places seem tedious. The games he constantly played for hours now bring no entertainment.

Perhaps it was his presence that lit me up. His bearing allowed me to express true emotions: joy, laughter, and security. His presence was the adhesive holding my world together; now that it has been forcibly torn away, it stripped away the very parts of me that knew how to feel whole.