It’s been five months since my dad passed away.

Let me correct myself: It’s been five months since my dad died. I have to use that word – died – because my brain still refuses to believe it.

Credit: Dionne Gain

His death was sudden and unexpected, and the aftermath has been brutal.

I expected the physical symptoms to come quickly: they did, and most have lingered. There’s the exhaustion so intense you can feel it in your bones and brain fog so disarming it makes work unmanageable. Then there’s the stress-induced reflux, restless sleep, uncontrollable sobbing and appetite loss.

The emotional impacts are just as rife. Every day, my mind struggles to make sense of this new version of life I’m forced to live, one where I can’t go to Dad for advice, celebrate milestones with him, or eat his famous lasagna.

One where I have to relearn who I am without a father. It’s isolating, to say the very least.

But there’s a side effect of grief I wasn’t prepared for, a secondary and compounding loss that has just as easily consumed me – the impact on my relationships.

“I’m sorry it’s still so hard,” a friend texted me, a few weeks after Dad’s death.

“I trust you’re coping well,” read an email from a cousin.

“You have to go through it alone,” a colleague said over coffee.

Such statements go hand-in-hand with the unsolicited and........

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