Time in My Hands
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
We do not all face the loss of a loved one in the same way. There is no right way — only your way.
Many are the times throughout the day when I think back to the years I have spent here, the time since losing my daughter. In that time I have also loved and lost my parents, my grandmother, friends. I think about the person I have been, the life I have lived, the years I have spent raising my son. I think about my heart, how it ran away from everything, yet still somehow sat in the middle of it all. For me, running away was the way I chose — thinking that if I left everything behind, if I forgot, I would be free of it.
Then, a decade and a half later, I stopped. And it was all still there — not forgotten, not gone. I bring this up not to say my way was wrong, but perhaps to admit that it was what I needed at the time. My beginning looked like an ending. It just took its own time.
I ran away from that small town, the valley I still call wonderful, and crossed the globe to Kyoto. A new world, another life — or so I thought. Recently I opened my old journals from those years, and saw in my own handwriting that I hadn’t forgotten at all. So many pages are letters and proses written to Tima. Even in the middle of all that running, I was still carrying her with me.
“Grief has its own time frame. It has its own itinerary with you. It has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Some cultures have spoken of “acceptable” periods of mourning, measured in months or years. Maybe you’ve felt those rules quietly pressing in from the outside. But the truth is there is no such thing as an “acceptable period” for grief. There is only your time — the time in which you try to live, the time in which you stumble and fall into the dark night of the soul. It is also the time in which you carry your grief — as it changes shape, as it shows up in unexpected ways and unwelcome hours, sometimes in every waking moment.
“Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that… I lived through the following spring…with that kind knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious.”
— Haruki Murakami
Grief is not an enemy, nor a shadow we must banish. It is, at its core, love with nowhere to go. We carry it because we have loved deeply, and there is no undoing that. I love Murakami’s books, and I remember reading Kafka on the Shore while walking the same streets as its protagonist — running away while running away. Yet even then, I was holding something inside me that was changing shape, slowly, inevitably.
Time passes. Memories hide, then return. They shift and take new forms. The chapters of our lives unfold differently after loss, even if we don’t notice it while it’s happening.
When I think about the days with my daughter, I often go first to the simple things: our walks down the canal path in Crosskeys, the slow mornings, Tima and her best friend Eira side by side. Evenings where I was held by friends — not just the “good” moments, but the hard ones too. All of it has shaped me, and in turn, shaped my grief.
Those memories carry their own senses now — damp earth, spring soil, woodsmoke, cawl boiling in the pot, and her smile, which somehow feels like it has its own pulse and heartbeat.
In Christian theology, they speak of Chronos and Kairos — two modes of time, the mundane and the sacred. This is how time flows for me now. There are the everyday hours, and there are the timeless moments I carry, where she is still here, where love and memory live outside the clock.
Days of future past
Some days feel frozen. I’ll open my journal and just sit there, pen in hand, looking at the blank page. Some days, I can fill it without even meaning to — whole pages just appear, words tumbling out as if they’ve been waiting at the door. Other days, no matter how long I sit, nothing comes. The silence isn’t because I’ve forgotten her, or because I have nothing left to say. It’s just the kind of day where the ink stays still.
For a long time, I’d feel guilty on those days. I thought I should always be making room for her in words — writing to her, talking to her, talking to all of them. But recently I’ve realised something: even in those wordless stretches, she’s still there. The truth is, not every day we had together was an adventure, a long conversation, or a big memory. There were plenty of quiet, ordinary days, and they were ours too. These unwritten days now are no different. She’s still right there in them.
Then there are the other days — the ones where a memory is so sharp, it’s like I’ve stepped right into it. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the night, waking up with her name in my head, the details so vivid I have to write them down before they slip away. The way the air smelled that day. The sound of her voice when she was excited. The exact weight of her leaning against my side. In those moments, there’s no “then” and “now” — only here, and us.
And in between those two extremes is the constant pull — wanting to hold on, yet knowing time keeps moving. Some days, it feels like I’m gripping a rope that’s slowly sliding through my hands. I want to keep every fibre of it, every knot, every fray, but I also know I can’t live only in what’s already happened. Time doesn’t stop for grief. The days pass, the seasons change, my son grows taller, my own hair grows greyer. Holding on doesn’t mean freezing in place — it means finding a way to walk forward without letting go.
It’s a strange kind of balance: one hand in the past, one hand in the present, and my heart stretched between them.
Symbol and story
Stories have always been a way for me to hold memory — to give it a shape when I can’t find the words on my own. Myths and symbols don’t tell my story exactly, but they echo it in ways that feel familiar, and in that echo, I find a place to rest.
One of the cultural cornerstones I’ve carried with me is The Mabinogion. These old Welsh tales are tangled with magic, loss, transformation, and the strange ways fate weaves through life. They were part of the world I shared with Tima — not as distant relics, but as living stories we could revisit together. They reminded me that love, grief, and change are threads running through all human stories, not just mine.
Closer to home is the story of the Risca Cuckoo — the nickname for those of us from my hometown. The tale is simple, and more than a little foolish on the surface: the people of ancient Risca, eager to keep the warmth of spring, tried to trap the cuckoo in a fence so the summer wouldn’t end. Of course, the bird simply flew away each time. Eventually, a passerby pointed out the folly, calling them the real cuckoos. It’s an old, wandering story — versions of it exist in other towns — but for me it’s tied to Twmbarlwm, to walks where the outline of that mountain is stitched against the sky. It’s a reminder that sometimes we work so hard to hold onto something that was never meant to stay.
Further north, in Snowdonia, there’s the legend of Dinas Emrys — where a Celtic king’s castle walls kept falling each night. Merlin revealed the cause: two dragons slept beneath the mountain, one red, one white, locked in a battle. When they were awakened, the white dragon fled, and the red dragon returned to its lair. The red dragon still stands on the Welsh flag — a symbol of resilience, of returning home after the fight.
These stories, whether from the hills above my home or from centuries-old texts, offer more than entertainment. They hold symbols that feel personal: the cuckoo that can’t be caged, the dragon that survives the battle, the timeless wanderers of The Mabinogion. They speak to the way grief works — elusive, fierce, cyclical — and the ways we keep walking forward even when the seasons change.
Practical ways to weave folklore into your own remembering:
Identify your personal symbols. Maybe it’s an animal, a place, or an object that keeps showing up in your memories. For me, the cuckoo, the dragon, and the ancient hillforts of South Wales have become part of my internal map.
Write your days as if they were stories. Even the quiet moments can be framed in the language of myth. The walk to the shop. The way the rain hit the roof. The meal cooked on a winter’s night. These can become small legends in their own right.
Read or listen to the old tales. Whether it’s the Mabinogion, local legends, or folklore from your own heritage, these stories can give shape to what feels formless. Sometimes hearing how people have carried loss in other times and places offers perspective — and a kind of quiet company.
Folklore doesn’t replace our own stories, but it can sit alongside them — a reminder that love, loss, and longing have always been here, and we are not walking alone.
Carrying Time Differently
Time will keep moving, whether we’re ready or not. I used to think I had to catch up to it — to somehow “get back” to where everyone else seemed to be. But grief taught me something different: the goal isn’t to catch up, it’s to walk alongside time. Some days that means keeping pace. Other days it means letting time drift ahead while I pause in a place that matters, knowing I can rejoin it later.
The memories I carry — the ones that feel like they happened yesterday, and the ones softened by years — aren’t weights holding me back. They’re companions on the road. The canal paths, the stories, the songs, the quiet days at home — all of them walk with me now.
If you’re reading this and holding your own mix of love and longing, I hope you know there’s no single way to move through it. You can step forward without leaving anything behind.
Maybe for you, the next step is small — a short walk in a place that holds meaning, starting a story you’ll add to over time, lighting a candle at the end of the day. These acts don’t have to be big to matter. They’re ways of making space for what you’ve lost and what you still carry, side by side.
We can’t turn back the clock. But we can walk with it, finding our own rhythm — one that leaves room for both the everyday hours and the timeless moments we keep in our hearts.
