She knew.

For everyone who is grieving something.

This piece talks openly about death, dying, and grief. Please take care of yourself as you read.

When my niece, at 38 years old, told me she was enacting her right to refuse medication, I knew what that meant.

Soon, she would die.

I was lying next to her on her sticky hospital bed, surrounded by a colourful blanket knitted by women she would never meet, painted dragons she would soon be asked to remove from the wall (health and safety somehow minded the decor), and the fresh flowers her mum would bring in daily, to remind her that home was waiting for her when she got better.

She was not going to get better.

I paused a moment, then propped myself up on an elbow and said OK… but she couldn’t hang around here after she was dead, trying to make everyone feel better or trying to look after us. She needed to allow the people she was going to leave behind, to grieve.

She was going to have to complete her journey to who knows where, fully, before she could come back and say hi - and under no circumstances was she to come back and haunt a certain someone who’s behaviour was hurting my children. All things considered, while she may find it just, it would be an immense waste of her talents. Because I had a mission for her.

She was, in fact, to learn all she could learn about what comes next, then she was to come tell me EVERYTHING. Only not in dreams because I can’t remember my dreams and besides, I like my sleep too much. I was quite sure if there was a way, she’d find it, and I’d be waiting.

I lay back down.

Through the nasal tube pumps and monitor beeps I heard a soft chuckle.

“I expect everyone else will try to change my mind, to fight, to keep going, but you’re planning an afterlife collaboration… You’re letting me go”

And I was.

Not because I wanted her to die, but because part of loving someone, for me, means truly accepting the decisions they make in life - and in death - trusting they know best what is right for them.

She hadn’t got to this point on a whim. It had already been 2 years of legal battle to prove she was mentally competent, that she had tried all recommended routes, proving that she was terminally ill, getting documents drawn up confirm no-one was going to end up in court over her death…

She knew.

Dying was the next actually assured thing that was going to happen. It was just a matter of how long.

Her body was backing up, shutting down, becoming more and more raw, sending confused, excruciating messages… and all the medication in the world was simply making her already painful death, slower. She could not be offered the reality of feeling, or being, healthier - and hope of it had died long before she would.

In the following short months and final, awful weeks, when she was able, we revisited this conversation. Apart from delaying departure for the haunting of people who had behaved appallingly, we mostly agreed. She would be my other-world-ally.

There were times I felt maybe I helped, like being able to talk easily about death when she wanted to, and comfortably letting it drop when she’d had enough. When she was scared I held her, and I listened, and let silences and being scared be OK, and filled with love.

Sometimes when I was running on empty (due to much-less-important-but-profoundly-painful things happening in my own life), I felt a version of her scaredness in me, too.

In these times I felt my steady anchor come loose. I didn’t know what to say or how to be and in the bigness of my emotions I struggled to trust anyone could hold me without being crushed. I hid away from people, from feelings, from anything that I didn’t think would be pretty much the same tomorrow as it was today. I sat in woodlands, I let my blurry vision follow ants and shrews and birds and I let my heart be hollow and aching and numb and full all at the same time and I reminded myself the world keeps turning no matter what, trying comfort some part of me from the pain that was coming from so many different directions.

She knew.

In these times we defaulted to the neuro-spicy language of love; memes.

She ordered me a Tibetan singing bowl, to help my heart.

I cried, shattered by the role reversal.

Holding someone and helping them believe they are brave enough to die, without knowing what that really means… was hard.

Walking the line of supporting someone to do something they want-don’t-want, supporting them completely, while my heart was breaking at their decision, was hard.

Explicitly agreeing to be the person that held her to her decision if she faltered at the eleventh hour, the one who pinky promised to remind her there was a physical point of terrible return, agreeing to tell her she couldn’t change her mind - no matter what I wanted, no matter how she was in pain… redirecting medical staff who right up til so close to the end kept asking, kept asking, kept asking “are you sure?” (the worst thing to ask someone who had used their final strength to make the biggest of all decisions) and yet who were only prepared to invest in her “life”, NOT ease her death… was hard.

But what was hard for me was nothing close to what was hard for her.

Grief is a funny, incomparable thing.

I can’t hold mine up to the pain of her Big Love, the one who held her til the end. Or that of her parents who, after sitting sigil for what must have felt like forever, went home to try and get some rest, only to be called by Big Love, telling them their daughter was dead.

I held the hand of my father as he died, almost three decades ago and I have come to understand there is no “bigger”, or “more” grief… there are simply different flavours of it.

The flavours of grief seem to match the flavour of the love in depth, quality and complexity, in entanglement with the mundane, in presence.

From a year ago today, my grieving for my niece comes to visit when moments, flavoured with our love, appear on the calendar. Not the obvious moments so much, like Christmas or birthdays (it’s as if my heart sees these coming and has a support structure built in advance) but in the sweet times I don’t know to expect.

Picking out a corsage for my son’s date to his graduation ball.

The possibility of colour from the too-expensive-to-fail wildflower meadow “experiment”.

Moments when I feel the honest love of friends who are really Good, Whole, Nourishing People who appear to actually love me just as I am - even though I find that hard and scary to believe…

Mostly, I miss her in the days I spend learning how to be as brave in life, as she was in death.

So it seems she got a message through to me, after all.

She knew.