Earlier today, sometime during the afternoon, I happened to glance at my watch. It was precisely 15h05, the time at which Mike took his final breath. Today is 8th August 2026, and Mike died on another 8th of the month – 8th April 2017.
Mike died at 15h05 on 8th April 2017. I think I will always know this “true fact”. There aren’t many objective truths in life, but this is one of them.
I hadn’t been consciously thinking about Mike, or the date or the time. I simply happened to glance at my wrist at precisely that moment and, of course, immediately began doing the maths. Some years ago I listened to a podcast and learned that this kind of bemusing mind activity is called “Grief Maths”.
So today it is nine years and four months since Mike died. One hundred and twelve months. Four hundred and eighty-seven weeks, exactly. 3,409 days. It was easy to work out the years and months. Less easy to work out the rest, but curiosity got the better of me. So there you have it.
I have written about Grief Maths before, about the peculiar calculations that seem to go along with a close-in death: dates, ages, anniversaries, how old someone would be now, the point at which I become older than them, how long they have been dead, how long relative to our relationship they have been dead, how long we had together and how long we didn’t. It’s mind boggling, truly.
What’s interesting to me now is not just the time elapsed, but when it is that the units of measurement change.
In the earliest days after someone dies, I counted in days, sometimes even hours. Thirty eight hours. Three days. Ten days. Twenty four. Then, somewhere along the way, I shifted into weeks, then into months, and eventually into years. I don’t know when each shift happens, and I am sure that the shifts in the units vary according to the death. But there comes a time, on some ordinary day of the week, or a given date in the month, when I stop being quite so “in the know”. There will have been a Saturday, for Mike, and a Sunday for Julia, an 8th of a month for Mike, a 30th of a month for Julia, where the knowing didn’t slap me in the face. Even though I’d still be able to calculate time gone with great accuracy. But at some point the smaller measurements fall away and the larger ones take over.
My dad died on 3rd May this year. Just three months and five days ago. I know that without even having to work it out. Those three months feel very close and palpable still. My brother James died on 23rd December 2025, and now I have to do some finger manipulation to calculate how long he’s been dead: it’s been seven months and sixteen days. I didn’t see James as much as I saw my dad, and we could easily go seven months and sixteen days without seeing one another. But by golly I missed him while I was on holiday. Walking in Pembrokeshire and in the Cambrian hills, doing lots of swims off wild, secluded beaches in Ireland, sensing just how much he would love those wide open spaces. Less about time and more about context for James, it seems.
With the earlier losses, the counting has become much looser. Edward has been dead for more than ten and a half years now. Don for nearly eleven. Mike for more than nine, and soon it will be ten. Julia for just over seven. I know the years, of course, and the dates remain fixed, but I no longer schlep a heavy awareness of days, weeks or months around with me.
Maybe there are simply too many dead people now to count, and to account for.
The grief maths becomes increasingly complicated when there is more grief, because the dates begin to pile up on top of one another: birthdays, deathdays, diagnoses, hospital admissions, terrifying scares, funerals. Last conversations, last holidays, the last time I saw someone, the last ordinary day before I knew it was a last. Different clocks are running at the same time. Eventually it all becomes a bit of a mush. I just cannot keep everybody alive in me through constant arithmetic. Maths was never my forte.
And yet there are some calculations I cannot seem to resist.
Mike and I were together for twenty-nine and a half years. Six months short of thirty years. This October, on the day on which I have planned for my memoir, Still Fire Inside, to come out, it will be 39 years since he and I had our first date. 21st October 1987. I was only twenty. I’ll be sixty next birthday. Why we didn’t get 40, or even 30 years together will always tug at my heart, even as I am grateful for every hour and day we had together.
Julia lived for fifteen years and three months, to the day. And there is one terrifying piece of grief maths that is waiting for me, not too far into the future.
One day Julia will have been dead for as long as she was alive.
I find it almost unbearable to contemplate, but of course I have contemplated it, because that is what my grief maths brain does. It will happen on 30th September 2034. If I am still alive then, I will cross that most strange of thresholds where the amount of time Julia has been dead will equal the entire length of her life, and after that the years without her will outnumber the years she was alive.
What do we do with these kinds of calculations? What purpose do they serve? I don’t really know.
Perhaps that is the point of grief maths: the mind trying to make sense of something that is fundamentally senseless. Time is one of the few things we can measure when it comes to death, even though the experience of grief, and the ache of absence, can never be measured.
We can calculate exactly how many days it has been since Dad died, how many weeks since Mike died, how many months since James died, and exactly how long Julia lived. We can measure the distance between two dates down to the day, the hour, even the minute, and yet there is no useful unit for how somebody can feel simultaneously long gone and impossibly close. There is no equation for how my dad can have died three months ago and I can still momentarily expect him to be somewhere in the world, or how Julia can have been dead for seven years and still be, in some essential way, my fifteen-year-old baby duck.
Perhaps numbers offer something solid because death does not. A date gives us a marker, a point in time around which everything rearranged itself. This was the moment after which the world was no longer the same.
As the years pass, I no longer know if someone has been dead for three hundred weeks or four hundred. I no longer need to know.
But some dates and some times of day are engraved more deeply than that. They live less in my head than in my body, my flesh, my heart.
Mike, I sensed back into that original 15h05 today: where I was, lying with you in your hospice bed; who I was then; how I was; how I felt in every cell of my body on that Saturday, 8th April 2017, as you breathed out for the last time at precisely 15h05.
It’s been nine years and four months, one hundred and twelve months, four hundred and eighty-seven weeks, 3,409 days.
I have missed you on every single one of them.
I love you still and always.
Image courtesy of ChatGPT
