Dear Yuri,
A few weeks ago I would look out of my window and see my daughters playing in the garden and long for the day we could be reunited with our family. In my darkest moments I pushed away thoughts of how this day might never come, but on better days the thought of being reunited with my parents and brother gave me hope of better times.
But that reunion never came, and never will. One morning Mum phoned to tell me that Dad had taken his own life. I am haunted by the scream that left my body that morning. I couldn’t make any sense of his suicide at the time, and still can’t. I doubt I ever will.
Several hours and 200 miles later my family was together again, but in the worst imaginable circumstances. Reunited, my mum, brother and I cried for Dad and the terrible realisation that our family jigsaw would forever be incomplete.
We spent four weeks at my parents’ house. Four exhausting weeks of grieving, questioning, longing to understand, trying to answer my young daughters’ questions. We held Dad’s funeral, and scattered his ashes on the beach, then watched as the tide came in and carried the flowers we’d laid there out to sea. Many evenings I watched the sun setting over the bay, crying as if I might never stop. Crying for me and my family left behind, and for my dad and the unimaginable pain he kept hidden so deep inside.
Now, back home, I look out of my window at night when I can’t sleep and see only an unnavigable galaxy of grief, guilt, regret and pain. I cry for the life, the future and the hope that coronavirus has taken from me, in a way I would never have imagined.