Ben says that grief doesn’t only have to be for death, that you can grieve something you’ve never had, grieve the negative space of it. Accepting that has helped me to add my mother, my teenage years, to these ghosts I live with – as much a part of me as all my best points. Each a part of what made me. I didn’t lose my mother to death: I lost her to difference. To a difference in the way we perceived the world, to a difference in what mattered, in where we would find our happiness.
