The ebb & flow of missing loved ones!

Today is Father’s Day in Australia and I miss my dad more than I can explain.

Grief is strange like that. Some days it’s sharp and suffocating, other days it softens and lets me breathe. 

Sometimes I see a dad and daughter out together and it makes me smile, sometimes it makes me cry. Sometimes it does both at once and it’s fucking confusing.

I think a lot of people don’t know how to hold space for grief. 

They’ll say things like, “Your dad wouldn’t want you to be sad. He’d want you to move on.” & sure, I’ve moved forward. 

I haven’t stopped living my life. 

I’ve just changed the way I live it. 

But moving forward doesn’t mean the sadness vanishes. 

It doesn’t mean I don’t miss his voice, his hugs, the way he always took life on the chin no matter what he was facing.

What people don’t always get is that grief is not a one direction only street. 

It’s messy, it’s unpredictable and it’s full of contradictions. 

You can feel joy and ache in the very same breath.

You can be grateful and gutted at the same time.

Both are real. Both are valid.

I think of my dad as strong willed, a workhorse and someone who carried an unconditional love that’s hard to put into words.

He wasn’t a man who wore his spirituality on his sleeve, but the force was strong in him and he shared it with me.

We’d have conversations about spirit, astral travel, the fragility of life and about how easily the human thread can snap. 

Most people probably never knew that side of him. I treasure it a lot and I still call on his wisdom when life feels too much. 

That bond doesn’t go away just because his body did.

Sometimes grief carries gratitude too. 

Dad had vascular dementia and early onset Alzheimer’s, but he died before it reached the stage where he no longer recognised us. 

As hard as that disease was in the early stages for everyone, I am grateful he was spared the cruelest parts. 

I think about what it would have been like to walk into a room and have him look at me with no recognition. That would have broken me. 

But more than that, it would have broken him and I wouldn’t have wanted that for him.

Memory is such a fragile thing. 

We rely on it for identity, for connection, for knowing who we are and who we love. 

Watching dementia touch him reminded me that our time is precious and the little things matter. 

The coffee dates, the chats, even the silences. 

That’s the fabric of relationship and when those moments are suddenly cut short, you realise how much you’d give to sit in them again, even just once more.

So yes, I still cry. I still feel the ache of missing him. But I also smile when I think about our coffee dates or hear him in my head telling me to keep going.

I can be both heartbroken and thankful at the same time.

If you’re grieving someone, whether it’s a dad or anyone who was that person for you, I hope you give yourself permission to feel all of it. 

The joy, the rage, the numbness, the relief, the longing. 

Don’t let anyone tell you how it should look. There’s no tidy formula. 

Grief is as individual as love and it deserves compassion, not comparison.

It’s easy to believe you’re “not doing it right” because someone else seems to have moved on faster, or because a friend tells you it’s time to be happy again. 

Ignore that noise. 

What grief asks for most is patience, compassion and space. 

One day you might laugh at a memory. 

The next, the exact same memory might split you open. 

Both are okay. 

Both belong.

So on this Father’s Day, I’ll raise a quiet toast to my dad. 

I’ll smile, I’ll probably cry and I’ll keep carrying him with me in all the ways he still shows up.

That’s grief.

That’s love. 

They’re the same damn thing.