I am writing this piece for my book because I have come to understand, late and slowly, that I have spent my life without the one skill a person needs to meet loss. I never learned to grieve. Not as a child, not as a young man, not in the years that followed, not even in the years when the losses began to accumulate with a weight that should have forced the skill into me. The skill never arrived, because no one I loved had it to give me, and no one I loved seemed to know it was missing.
I want to write the mistakes down, because this book is built on the idea that the mistakes are the teachers. And the mistake I am describing now is the one that sits underneath all the others. It is the mistake that made the other mistakes necessary. I could not stay with the question of my own losses, because I did not know what staying with them looked like. I had never seen it done.
My paternal grandfather died when I was eleven.
I remember watching my father at the funeral, or around the funeral, in the days that surrounded it. I was watching for something. I did not know what I was watching for, but I was watching. I was looking at him the way a child looks at a parent when something enormous has happened and the child wants to know how to respond to it. Children do not invent their responses to death. They copy them. They look to the nearest adult and they take the cue, and whatever that adult does becomes, for the child, what death means and what death asks of a person.
My father barely blinked. That is the phrase I keep returning to, because it is precise. He did not cry. He did not sit down. He did not talk about it. He did not go quiet in the way people go quiet when something has landed. He carried on. Whatever had happened inside him, if anything had happened inside him, was not visible from where I was standing. And I was standing very close, looking very hard.
I did not know at the time that I was receiving an instruction. But I was. The instruction was: this is what we do. We do not blink. We do not break the rhythm of the day. The man who has died, your grandfather, my father, we do not speak about him. We do not gather around his absence and turn it over in our hands. We let it pass through the house without addressing it, and then we continue.
I took the instruction. I had no way not to take it. There was nothing else on offer.
My father killed himself when I was twenty-one.
I want to write that sentence plainly, because every time I have tried to write around it, the writing around it has done a kind of damage that the plain sentence does not do. He killed himself. I was twenty-one. It is the central fact of a particular period of my life and I have spent a great deal of time not looking at it directly, because I did not know how to look at it, because no one had shown me how to look at these things when I was eleven, and no new instruction had arrived in the intervening decade.
What I did instead was something I now recognise as the substitute people use when the real thing is unavailable. I moved. I kept the rhythm. I did not break the day. I did what my father had done at his own father's funeral, which was the only template I had, and which, as I write this now, I realise was probably the template he had been given by his own father, and so on backwards through a line of men who did not blink when their fathers died.
Within the same year, my second mother, the woman who had stepped in and parented me when my own mother could not in ways I will not describe here, also died. And because I did not know how to grieve my father, I certainly did not know how to grieve her, and I grieved neither of them. I continued.
And in the middle of that same year, I got together with a girl from my high school, and six months later she left me, and that loss, which would have been ordinary in any other context, arrived on top of the other two and had nowhere to go. The three losses stacked on each other without any of them being processed, because the process did not exist for me. I did not own the tools. I had never been given them.
I was twenty-one, and I had lost a father, a second mother, and a first love, and I had continued.
I want to list the others now, because the list itself is part of the point.
My maternal grandfather died when I was around thirty. My paternal grandmother died when I was around forty. My step maternal grandmother died when I was around thirty-two. My father's brother died around 2021. My aunt, his wife, died around 2019. An ex-girlfriend of mine was murdered in 1999, a year after we had stopped dating. Another ex-girlfriend died of cancer two years ago, and I only learned about it last week.
I lost my first job at fifteen. I lost a business I had helped build in 2019, which went bankrupt. I lost a friendship in 2023 over a business partnership that went wrong, after more than twelve years. I lost a long friendship in 2025 because we could not agree about what was happening in Gaza, after nearly two decades of working side by side. I lost another friend in 2023 over something I would struggle now to describe as anything other than stupid. I lost my riding partner of fifteen years that same year. I lost my best friend around 2012, not to death but to my own actions, which I will not soften by describing them as a mistake, because they were a choice.
My marriage ended in 2014, after six or seven years.
And on the ninth of January 2025, my daughter and I left Johannesburg on the same day, in different directions. She flew to New Zealand to live with her mother. I flew to Dubai. She was fifteen. She is seventeen now. She turned seventeen on the third of March, and I miss her more every month, not less, which is the opposite of what grief is supposed to do according to every story I have ever been told about it.
I am listing these because the list is the first honest thing I have done with them.
For most of my life I have related to these losses the way my father related to the death of his father. I have carried on. I have kept the rhythm of the day. I have not gathered them around me and turned them over in my hands. I have allowed them to pass through the house of my life without being addressed, because I did not know any other way to do it, and because the way I did know, which was to not address them, had worked well enough to keep me moving.
What I am discovering, now, at this particular point in my life, is that moving is not the same as living, and carrying on is not the same as being okay. The losses did not go anywhere. They did not dissolve because I did not look at them. They accumulated in a part of me I had stopped visiting, and the part of me that had stopped visiting was getting larger every year, and eventually the part of me that had not stopped visiting was smaller than the part that had.
The thing that finally made this visible to me was my daughter. Not her absence in itself, though the absence is the thing I feel most days. What made it visible was that the absence of my daughter was the first loss I could not outrun. Every other loss, I had managed to place somewhere behind me. I had kept walking, and the losses had receded, not because they had been processed but because I had moved further from them in time and in space. My daughter's absence does not recede. It grows. She is not behind me. She is in New Zealand, which is a real place I cannot walk away from by walking forward. Every day, she is still seventeen and still not here, and every day the gap between us is a day longer than it was yesterday, and there is no direction I can walk that reduces it.
So for the first time in my life, I am facing a loss that will not let me do what I have always done. It is making me notice, finally, that carrying on was never grieving. Carrying on was the absence of grieving dressed up as strength.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to claim more than I have earned.
I have not figured out how to grieve. I am writing this piece from the middle of the not knowing, not from the other side of it. I cannot tell you what proper grief looks like because I have not done it yet. I can only tell you that I have recognised, very recently, that I do not know how, and that the recognition itself is a thing I had been avoiding, because as long as I did not recognise it, I did not have to do anything about it.
I can tell you what I think I am starting to understand. I think proper grief, whatever it turns out to be, is not a performance and not a timeline. It is not the crying I did not see my father do. It is not a set of stages to be worked through in the right order. I think it is, at bottom, the willingness to stop carrying on long enough to let the loss actually register. To let it enter the room. To let it change the rhythm of the day instead of being folded into the rhythm and hidden inside it.
I think it is the question I have been teaching clients to stay with, finally being asked by me about my own life. What is this loss asking of me. What does this person, who is no longer here or no longer in my life, deserve from me in the form of attention. What would it mean to address them, one by one, rather than allowing them to remain a general weight I walk around with and do not examine.
I do not yet know the answers. I am learning that I do not have to know the answers. The mistake, in my own life as in the lives of my clients, has always been to reach for the answer before the question has been properly asked. The question I am asking now is the one this book has taught me to ask, and the one I am only now directing at myself. I have found my version of it. I am sitting with it.
I will not tell you what it is. That is deliberate. The whole methodology of this book turns on each person finding the question their own life is asking. If I name mine, you will hold it up to yours, and that comparison will quietly do the work that ought to be done by your own attention. So I am going to keep my question. And I am going to invite you to find yours.
I cannot tell you what it will take, because I am at the beginning of the asking. But I can tell you that I am asking, and that the asking itself, after a lifetime of not asking, is the first thing that has felt like it might be the beginning of something real.
A note to the reader.
I have put this piece in the book because the book is about staying with questions, and because I do not want to pretend I have been staying with mine. The methodology I teach was built, in part, out of the years I spent not applying it to myself. The mistakes in the Author's Note are coaching mistakes. This one is the life mistake underneath them. I could not teach people to stay with their own questions, not well, not fully, while refusing to stay with mine.
If you have read this far and something in it has recognised itself in you — if you are carrying losses that you have not addressed because no one ever taught you how — I want to say only this. You are not required to know how to grieve in order to begin. You are required only to stop carrying on long enough to notice that you have not. That noticing, which sounds small, is not small. It is the door.
I am standing at mine. I do not yet know what is behind it. I am going to find out.