I thought I knew what grief was but now realise I had no idea

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.

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 cliched advice – “stay strong”, “ride grief’s waves”, “time will heal” – but it’s not as bad as the many comparisons to people’s own experiences of death: their elderly parents, someone they saw on the news, the family dog.

I shouldn’t complain. They’ve made the effort to reach out and string some words together. They’re trying, and that’s more than I can say for others in my circle.

Radio silence has become commonplace. Some attended the funeral and then stopped making contact, as if they’d done their part. Others took the time to visit but failed to ask a single question, thinking it would upset me further. Most refuse to say my dad’s name and avert eye contact when I bring him up or struggle to control my tears.

I can’t place blame, though. These reactions are only a byproduct of our Western culture. We want to believe that we’re immortal, that bad things don’t happen to good people, and that we can avert tragedy.

We want to believe that ageing is a requisite to life, when it’s actually a luxury.

More importantly, I can’t place blame because I did the same thing to my friend who also lost her dad in her mid-20s.

I attended the funeral, made her food and messaged weekly, but then life took over and I stopped trying. I wanted to believe others were providing enough support, but honestly, I was just protecting myself from the unbearable weight of her pain and pretending it would never happen to me. Then it did.

Young people don’t know how to talk about grief.

Like many other young Australians who grew up with a fair amount of privilege – and by privilege I refer to our low mortality rates, high life expectancy and accessible public health system – my initial frame of reference for grief was the death of my grandad when I was a teenager.

While the sadness was piercing, he was in his 80s, had cancer, and endured pain for years. The natural order of his death made sense, and societal narratives prepared me to process it.

But losing a parent when you are young is not uncommon. Each year in Australia, about one in 20 children will experience the death of a parent before the age of 18. Grappling with such a life-changing loss significantly impacts our mental state, and without proper care, creates serious implications for our health, wellbeing and productivity.

The landmark Lancet Psychiatry Commission report recently found mental ill-health accounts for at least 45 per cent of the overall burden of disease in people aged 10 to 24, but only 2 per cent of global health budgets are devoted to targeted care. Even in wealthy countries, including Australia, less than half of the need is addressed.

I’m proud to be part of a younger generation that talks openly about mental health, prioritises wellbeing and isn’t afraid to ask for what we need most. I need my generation to bring grief into that fold.

I know I don’t speak for everyone, and that grief is complicated, but it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the young person grieving to self-advocate.

We’re scared, lost and tired – we need our friends, relatives, colleagues and governing bodies to step up for us. We need you to sit with us and create space as we try to make sense of our loss, no matter how uncomfortable or awkward you feel, because the burden is crushing.

We need you to ask us questions, to remember our loved one and openly say their name, because we can’t imagine a world without them.

We need you to take the initiative to check in, and to be OK with cancelled plans or patchy communication, because we are still learning to brave our new normal.

We need you to ditch the assumption that we don’t want to talk or that you’re upsetting us by mentioning our grief, because we can’t keep feeling so isolated.

And we need adults and broader systems to model this behaviour and start a healthy dialogue around death because, ultimately, grief will affect us all.

Ruby Kraner-Tucci is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.