We Shouldn't Work. And Yet.

I share my experience, not advice. If you’re navigating grief or trauma, please reach out to a professional or a charity like SANDS or SIMBA who can properly support you.

I want to tell you about the night we didn’t speak.

Not a row. Not a falling out. Just two people sitting in the same room, in the same grief, in completely different worlds.

Francesca had died and neither of us knew how to be in the same space as each other without it being unbearable. Not because we didn’t love each other. Because we did, and that made it worse. You grieve differently when someone else is grieving too and you can see it on their face and there is absolutely nothing either of you can do.

He went quiet. Really quiet. The kind of quiet that has weight to it.

I went the other way. I talked and wrote and talked some more. I started a blog. I needed the words to go somewhere because if they stayed inside me I genuinely don’t know what would have happened.

I used to think this meant one of us was doing it right.

Eight years on, I know we were both doing it right. And both doing it wrong. And somehow, we were doing it together, even when it felt like we were doing it alone.

We have been together for almost 18 years. We should not work on paper. I genuinely believe this.

I’m an iPhone. He’s a Samsung. This is not a small thing in our house.

I make a decision before I’ve finished the sentence. He thinks it through from every angle before he says a single word, I once watched him consider a restaurant menu for six full minutes. Six. I’d ordered, eaten, and mentally moved on to dessert by then.

I am, and I say this with complete self-awareness, borderline feral with admin. He is the reason we have life insurance. He has spreadsheets for our finances. Multiple spreadsheets. There may be a spreadsheet for the spreadsheets. I have genuinely never looked and I think we both prefer it that way.

I built a social media company. He doesn’t do social media. At all. He once asked me, completely sincerely, why anyone would post a photo of their dinner online. I had no answer that didn’t make me sound slightly unhinged.

And then our daughter died.