Grief is, and remains, the most complex emotion I've ever dealt with. It rarely appears when you expect it to.

On 7 June 2014, my darling mum took her last breath and said goodbye to the world. In the six years since, I've worked hard to live my life around the undeniably huge, gaping hole left in it. Growing up in your 20s without your mum is really hard, and it's sometimes impossible to ignore all the fragments and splintered bits of life she's left behind. But I've tried, and for the most part I have managed to shape something of a successful life without her in it. I just really wish she was in it.

When she first passed away, I didn't really "grieve". I was 21. I had so much going on. I'd had to postpone my dissertation and several other final year degree submissions, so I threw myself into getting those done and getting my 2:1 (which I did). Then I moved to London, started trying to get a job, drank a lot, partied a lot... in honesty, there just wasn't really the time to grieve back then.

I'd spent the weeks after her passing in semi-isolation at home with my family, working and writing every day – in many senses a parallel setup to how we've lived in lockdown. But I lacked the self care and initiative to make sure I made time to grieve. Flowers arrived at our doorstep; cards came in the post; we were truly surrounded by fuss and flapping and worry. It would've been the perfect time to grieve, but I just didn't.

Grief has, instead, trickled in at totally random points of the last almost-seven years. I've broken down on the top deck of buses on the way home from work, for seemingly no reason. I've collapsed into unexplainable tears while shopping for Christmas cards. I've gone through periods of drinking too much, too regularly – only now connecting these with unresolved feelings of anger around my loss. There have been times where I've eaten next to nothing for weeks on end – rationing my meals as if I was rationing my emotions. Even now, an advert or a photo of a daughter and a mother can trigger me.

And weirdly, now: coronavirus.

I don't really know when it started, I just knew I felt a bit shit. It was back in the early days of daily press conferences, clapping on Thursdays, wine on Fridays, and making overcomplicated drawn out meals on Saturdays. There wasn't much to do, and I finally had more space to feel.

I was really struggling.

It was the kind of raw, consuming grief you expect to feel in the early days of a loss. The type where you start to have vivid dreams about them again; where another day without them feels utterly pointless.

But with it came so many questions: what would she think of this situation? Would she be coping ok? And the pointless scenarios in my head: what if she was alive and had the cancer now, and couldn't have her treatment? What if she died now and I couldn't have been there to say goodbye to her?

The biggest question of all: is it selfish of me to feel this way when people actually are losing loved ones, right now, this minute, this day?

I don't really know the answer still. But what I do now is it's not weird that I've felt this way. For 14 long months now, I've been aware of how many people in the country have died each day. How many families lost their mum, dad, brother, sister. The more I think about it, the less weird it is that so much talk of death would have caused me to start grieving again.

I've got strategies that help me deal with it. Sometimes that's flicking through photo albums of her, or talking to Ram about some of the funny memories I have, or listening to her favourite songs. Other times it's lying in the bath until I'm pruney letting my thoughts whirr around my head, or getting dressed up just to mooch around the house so I feel a bit more "me". Often it's actually just letting myself feel what I'm feeling. A skill it's taken me just short of seven years to master.

Nothing ever prepares you for the moment of your life you never think will happen: the day you have to see your parent's body, not breathing, and say goodbye for the last time. It's the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But I know now how lucky I was to get that opportunity.

Whenever I feel frustrated about all the restrictions on my life right now, I take myself back to that hospice and give myself a big dose of perspective.

If "being bored" is really the biggest problem the pandemic brings to my life, I'm incredibly lucky.