The book I'm writing now is about a little boy who loses his mum. There's more to the story than that, because as with all of my writing I want people to really think about life and look at it from lots of different angles. But for now that's all I'm going to say, without giving anything away. But for all of my stories, I like to do my research. I also - however - like to approach it like a director does, telling their actors to find an experience in their life that is similar to what their character is going through, so it gives them them the understanding they need to play their role. No actor in the world could possibly ever go through every experience of every single character they play. No one human being could experience being dirt poor, being held as a slave, kidnapped or super rich, in just one lifetime. So to me, that approach makes total sense, and as a writer that's something I definitely try to do. On a personal level, I have some experience of grief, but it's not necessarily in a way you think about more 'traditional' grief (if grief is ever 'traditional'). Whilst I haven't experienced the physical loss of a parent as a child, I have experienced the grief that lies behind an absent parent. Because whilst both of my parents are still alive, until recently I didn't have either parent in my life. Let's just say life was pretty interesting growing up, and I never really had a great relationship with my mum, and I didn't see my dad. I think I spent a lot of years trying to make things right with my mum, but actually when she stopped speaking to me a few years ago, I made the conscious decision to not chase someone who was bringing so much hurt into my life. Growing up, I didn't see my dad from the age of nine. So my 'grief' I guess was knowing I had a parent in my life, but that they weren't there. I guess a better way of explaining it would be to say that when your parents die, you've lost someone important in your life who is no longer in your life because they can't be. But when a parent is alive, they are no longer in your life because they choose not to be. And that in itself is a form of grief, because as a child you spend years trying to understand why a parent would do that. When I became a parent myself, I struggled to understand it even more - because I'd fight tooth and nail to be in my children's lives, and can't imagine ever just 'leaving' (or being ok with that). Because of my relationship (or lack of relationship) with my mum, I've also thought about how I would grieve her death too. How would I feel? What would I feel? And if I felt nothing, because she's never really been there for me when I needed her, would I then feel guilty about that? The closest I have come to losing someone like a parent is my Great Uncle Bob, who died when I was 18 years old. At the time, I hadn't seen my dad since I was nine (we've recently got back in touch after a very long gap, which has been surreal in itself). But because of my tricky relationship with my mum, and my absent dad, my Uncle Bob's house was always my 'happy place'. My Uncle Bob was this huge, strapping 6 foot 3' Canadian who never really spoke about his feelings, but who I knew underneath all of this big, tough exterior, was a man with a really big heart. Then there was my Auntie Daph, who was this fun, crazy, gorgeous lady who used to throw the odd swear word into a conversation just to shock us and make us laugh, and who used to wander around her house singing 'Diamonds are a girl's best friend' from the Marilyn Monroe movie, Some Like It Hot. I always knew my Uncle Bob had a big heart because of how he was with me. He and my aunt never had kids, and being the age I was, I never would have asked (or found out) why. But I always got the sense they would have loved kids (they would have been amazing parents too). So I guess in a sense, me and my Uncle Bob were like surrogates to each other. He was the closest thing I had to a dad growing up. And I guess I was the closest thing he had to a daughter. Everyone who knows me knows what a soppy idiot I am (and hopefully always will be, because I refuse to let life make me cynical). But because of that, I know that if I had have had a dad in my life, I would have been a huge daddy's girl. Which is fine, because that's what girls should be. Because whilst every parent is important in their own way, I do believe that the parent of the opposite sex teaches their child about future relationships. Anyway, by the time my Great Uncle Bob died, this big strapping man who I loved like a father was lying in a hospital bed ravaged by cancer. I remember being shocked at how quickly the illness had shrunk his whole being and how tiny he looked compared to how he was before the cancer. But what I remember most about the last time I saw him, was what he said to me. We'd visited the hospital a lot in the last few days leading up to his death, and for a lot of it, he was pretty much out of it on morphine, which he'd been given to reduce his pain. On our last visit, we'd stayed a couple of hours. And for much of that time, his head had been somewhere else. I wasn't even sure he was aware we were there. But after I left his room to use the toilet, I came back into the room and all of a sudden - with a real pin-sharp consciousness - he'd turned to me and said, 'it's my little girl'. And it's funny. That simple little phrase still manages to make me cry, because those words meant more to me than anything else and were a reflection of the deeper connection we both had - the thing that kind of replaced what we were both missing in our lives (him a daughter, me a dad). Grief - like life - is complicated. Behind every death is a whole myriad of emotions, and even if two people experienced the same love from a parent, those two people will still experience their grief in their own way. Dependent a little on the person they are, and how they show their emotions. So how do you write about something you haven't experienced? You dig deep into your emotions and you find a different level of the same experience. Something that's not quite what your character is going through, but something 'else' that gives you an understanding of it.
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