Nine Years, One Day, and What Remains

Nine 

April 14, 2026 

Nine years. 

I've been sitting with that number the past one month. Nine. It doesn't feel shorter than eight, or six, or three. Grief doesn't shrink with time, it just changes shape. Some years it arrives as a wave, sudden and breathtaking. Other years, it sits quietly beside me like an old companion who no longer needs to announce itself. 

This year, it arrived differently. 

This year, April 14 holds something it has never held before. 

For nine years, this date has belonged entirely to loss. The day the machines went quiet. The day Good Friday became a different kind of sacred. The day I walked out of a hospital and back into a world that looked exactly the same but would never be the same again. 

I have always written to you on this day, Nathaniel. Not for anyone else. Not as a coach, not as an author, not as someone who has figured anything out. Just as your mum. 

And I don't know how to write to you this year without telling you what happened today. 

Your story is now in the world. 

I spent nine years wondering what to do with everything you left behind - the lessons, the pain, the slow and terrifying unravelling of the person I thought I was, and the even slower rebuilding of someone I'm still learning to know. 

I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to survive. And then, somewhere along the way, I realised that surviving wasn't enough. That you didn't leave me here just to hold your memory in private. That there was something you taught me; about presence, about authenticity, about what it means to stop living for the life others expect and start living the one that is truly yours, that belonged to more than just me. 

So I wrote it down. 

I wrote about your arrival, your challenges, how everything was just beginning to get better when that fateful afternoon changed everything. 

I wrote about the five unreal days in ICU, where I was told repeatedly that you would not make it, yet miraculously you held on. Until Good Friday, 14th April 2017. You breathed your last after the sermon. 

About the weight of a word "resilience", how hollow it sounds when you're standing in the ruins of your own life, wondering how anyone could look at devastation and call it strength. 

I wrote about what it cost me to stop pretending I was okay. And what it gave me when I finally did. 

Choosing April 14 as the day this book would launch was not a marketing decision. 

It was an act of devotion. 

Because how could I send your story into the world on any other day? 

And yet — I won't pretend I haven't been afraid. There is something terrifying about sharing what was private for so long. About strangers holding a piece of you, of us. About being seen in the places that still hurt. 

But I think that's also the point. 

You taught me that the life I was living — carefully managed, armoured, performing — was keeping me from the one I was meant to live. You taught me this not with words, but by leaving. By showing me, in the starkest possible way, that none of it was guaranteed. None of it. 

Nine years ago, I would not have believed I could write those words. 

I would not have believed I could speak your name without breaking. I would not have believed that grief could carry anything other than weight. 

But here I am. 

Still breaking on some days. Still hearing your laughter. Still catching myself, mid-sentence, wanting to tell you something. 

And still here. Still learning. Still becoming someone who tries, every day, to live in a way that honours what you left behind. 

This year, I am not just marking the day you left. I am marking the day your legacy was given a form that will outlast both of us.  That feels like something you would quietly approve of. 

Not with fanfare. You were never one for fanfare.  But with that small, certain nod you had. The one that meant: yes, Mum. That's right. 

To those who have lost someone: I see you today. 

To those who are searching for something real in the midst of a life that looks fine from the outside: this was written for you. 

And to Nathaniel — always, always, always: this is for you.