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.

Your twenties are all about change. It’s the period when life’s hamster wheel really picks up the pace. Jobs, happy hours, schmoozing, partners, dinners, picking out new sofas, starting your savings, go go go go.

Since graduation day (four years ago), my life too has been stuck on accelerate. The personal, professional and mental have all developed beyond recognition. Which I guess is expected from a 25-year-old, but is frankly a bit WTF from someone who spent the first part of this life stage watching her mum die.

Amongst all the adulting and bravery I’ve summoned to face dark day after dark day in my twenties, being a motherless daughter is the one that’s taken the most courage. And the one I’ve admittedly still not mastered.

A short list of cancer/poorly parent things that require personal strength: attending chemotherapy sessions, dispensing tablets at prescribed times, pretending you’re not crying when you cut their hair off, pretending you’re not crying when she wears her new wig for the first time. Turning a blind eye to frequent bouts of sickness (and other, scarier bodily functions), and an even blinder one to what’s on the bed sheets you have to wash. Pretending not to hear howling cries of pain in the night. Putting on a brave face at university. Plucking up the nerve to ask your tutor for an extension on your dissertation, because you think your mum might die before you hand it in.

Most of these were almost a breeze – handled by a daughter’s love and an instinctive, aggressive ‘fight or flight’ instinct. I wouldn’t even classify most of these things as ‘courageous’. Because they’re just things, that happen no matter what, and have to be dealt with.

But it’s the bit afterwards that really gets you. The bit when the mourning is over, the mail-order flowers have wilted too, there’s no ‘just in case you need it lasagne’ left in the freezer, the fuss and flurry of cards and support has started to tail off.

Prematurely losing your mother leaves you with a big hole. And it never really goes away, so missing them never really goes. Sure – I’ve found ways to build my life around the hole. I’ve had good jobs, even better trips, and I’ve met the love of my life.

But doing all of these things without your mum’s guidance requires a new kind of courage – fight or flight simply won’t do. It’s a bit like impulsively auditioning for Britain’s Got Talentcompletely alone, with no unfaltering encouragement in the crowd or safety net backstage when it inevitably goes tits up.

The big things hurt a lot: the graduation without her there, the birthdays and Christmases, the thought of your future wedding and the missing spot at your table.

But the little things are the ones that demand bravery every day. When something big happens at work, and you can’t tell her. When your boyfriend tells you he loves you and you know she’s never going to meet him. When you’re not sure if your new jeans would survive the tumble drier. When you’re off sick and you need chicken soup and dry toast on tap. When you see someone you know texting their mum, or worse when you see anyone in the street actually with their mum.

I think it’s clear: navigating the complicated, messy, emotional terrain of grief is tough. Living with nothing but a legacy to learn from is tough.

But it’s also bloody brave. There’s remarkable strength in getting out of bed every day and tackling life face on, on your own. There’s strength in mastering your own spaghetti bolognese that’s almost as good as hers was. There’s strength in every laugh that once would have been tears. There’s strength in letting her memory mould you, not destroy you.

Take it from me: you’re doing great, and we’re doing great.

Move forward, but don’t expect yourself to move on. Sometimes the spark is still as knocked out of me as it was on the first day she was gone.

But I’ve finally learned: that is okay.

(Originally published on Dear Damsels)

As I well know, grief is a long and difficult journey - and one full of questions. There's no right or wrong way to grieve, all we know is that we must do it in order to progress. There's no manual, there's no guidance, you just let your emotions come and do as you do. The results? Every single emotion imaginable coming sporadically - mostly uninvited and unexpected - across a period of time that cannot be determined either. It's exhausting, I tell you. I'm currently in a moving forward phase, but even that is proving difficult - every time I think I'm making progress, grief rears its ugly head to remind me that my life without mum is never going to be the same again. That said, I came across this storyboard the other day by the very talented Natasha Kline and it really spoke to me in a positive way: