His Mystery

I sit here a year after my father’s passing
and time has done that strange thing it does...
it has moved, and it has not moved at all.

The world has continued in its quiet insistence.
Days have unfolded, seasons have turned,
and yet there are also moments
where it feels as though everything pauses
around this absence.
Not just the loss of him,
but the loss of what never came.

The shock of that moment
where time stopped unexpectedly.
The conversations that didn’t happen.
The softening that perhaps could have deepened
but didn’t fully have the chance to.
The moments that lived only as possibility,
now sealed into a kind of finality
that cannot be revisited.
A particular kind of grief...
not only for what was,
but for what remains just out of reach.

Yet still...
there are these fragments of tenderness
that return without warning.
Memories bubbling up from the depths...
catching me off guard with their warmth.
The sweet-peas left on my doorstep,
their fragrance ever bound
to my love of him,
and him of me.

This man who called me his mystery.

And even now,
I can feel the shape of that in me...
how it held both distance and closeness at once.
Something of me that he couldn’t quite grasp,
and yet something he recognised enough
to name with a kind of quiet reverence
and humor alike.

Heartbreaking... and beautiful both at once.

Because in a way, it feels true.
Not just of how he saw me,
but of life itself.
This whole thing...
so intimate, so immediate,
and yet never fully knowable.

He saw me without realising just how much.

And perhaps that’s where grief and love
touch something deeper than either alone.
Grief doesn’t only ache because something was lost,
it aches because something was loved.

Even in the difficulty.
Even in the places where connection faltered
or could not find its way through...
love was there.
Not always expressed cleanly.
Not always received in the way it longed to be.
But present... nonetheless.

And now, a year on,
it becomes clearer in a different way.

Grief moves, shifts,
loosens its tightest grip.
It doesn’t disappear,
but it changes texture.

What remains
is not the sharpness of what was missing,
but the quiet knowing that beneath everything,
love never left.
Not then. Not now.

Grief may have been the doorway,
but it’s not the inheritance…
Love is.

For all that was complicated,
for all the shared history,
for all that could not be resolved in time,
for all the ways me and him could not fully meet...
still, somehow...
love endured.

That’s the most honest thing
grief reveals in the end.
That which was real
was never undone
by what was difficult.

That even now,
in the absence of form,
in the silence where his voice once was...
there is something here that has not been lost.
Something that cannot be lost.
And it doesn’t ask to be understood.

Only felt.

-

To you papa, from your mystery…

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Thank you for walking alongside me ~ Imogen