[ ] Something has troubled me since my son Eden died last year at four years old from cancer. Long before he was ever sick, I carried a strange certainty that we wouldn’t have him for long. I can’t explain where it came from. [ ]
Now that he’s gone, I think about those things constantly. Part of me worries I somehow manifested it by thinking it. Another part of me feels strangely that I was sensing something that was already written.
Do you think it is possible for us to sense the shape of a tragedy before it happens, or do we only see these patterns afterwards because grief is trying to make meaning from the unbearable?

Dear Isabel,

I’m sitting by the lake on a beautiful Sunday, silver water, white swans, and what looks like a hundred goslings waddling around on the bank. The whole place is teeming with life and post-Paschal renewal. I’m thinking of the questions I read this morning, some of them lovely, funny, mad things that had me chuckling away, but your question keeps coming into my mind, requiring a response – a question of grief, the hardest and easiest to answer.

On this splendid day, the known world offers all the magnificence and wonder one might need, but of course this is only part of the picture. Isabel, I understand your troubled thoughts. When Arthur was young, I sometimes looked at him and felt a premonitory unease, a sense that he would, in some way, be special, which he indeed was. As you intimated in your letter, there is an unknown world, an invisible world, where other truths dwell, unprovable, irrational, nonsensical. These manifest as whispered intuitions and inexplicable feelings, strange as love, that some of us find impossible to ignore. After Arthur died, I felt, as you do, a sense of culpability, “Did I somehow manifest this outcome? Did I make this happen?” This is the dark, destructive side of grief to which we are all so vulnerable in its early stages, monstrous grief that wants to kill us because, on some level, in the grip of it all, we ourselves are weary and wish to die. Even now, ten years on, those thoughts sometimes find their way back in, but I know in my rational mind that it is not true – and we must reject these feelings in whatever way we can. It is not our fault. We must remember our departed loved ones with full and functioning hearts, not ones made narrow by self-recrimination. This is, of course, easier said than done, but do it we must.

In time, Isabel, grief brings its own munificence. I hear this over and over again on The Red Hand Files. People obliterated, rearranged, and ultimately restored anew. But until then, be gentle with yourself, mourn well, reject morbid introspection, attend to the world, both visible and invisible. Remember that you are a mother who brought her precious child into the world, love yourself for that alone, and prepare for the impossible darlingness of things, a lake of goslings in the afternoon sun – irrational, nonsensical – which even in this moment brings a tear of recognition.

Love, Nick