In the last seven days, I have experienced directly and indirectly three kinds of loss. In each case I have had cause to grieve. I reflected in an earlier essay written for my old friend Matt King that ‘Grief fucks men over’, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Last Tuesday one of my best friends lost her boyfriend Tom. He dropped dead in his kitchen between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Tom was thirty six years old. Born in the same hospital the same time as my sister’s son Nick. Tom on the 8th and Nick on the 18th in 1974.

Today at Tom’s funeral, a service and burial, the winter weather turned on its miserable worst. Cold, wet, windy and with the recent rain, the Lilydale clay quickly turned to sticky and slippery mud that attached to shoes and the cuffs of trousers. Funerals these days for me, have the innate, awful ability for me to grieve for the living who are suffering the loss, and remind me of my own losses. Perhaps this is why as I age, each funeral seems to cause me to grieve more deeply and sadly than previously. Today I was reminded that the foggy sky was similar to the day I buried my Mother in 1998. The cold muddy clay ground under foot reminded me of Joyce Newman’s burial at Bairnsdale. Funerals with burials are either held in stinking hot furnaces without shade or cold, wet and bitter conditions, either climatic extreme reminding you in the most brutal way possible that you are still alive.

On Sunday I had finished the most important relationship of my life. A relationship on and off that had been my life for five years. It ended in a flood of emotional tears, regret and indelible sadness. It was my first relationship and I botched it up in so many different ways that the list is too long to start. I had changed so much in our time together that I had long forgotten who I once was. I had turned into this crooked version of my self. Resenting how different I had to be to make the relationship work. Resenting that after taking so long to say ‘yes’ to living together when I did say ‘yes’ the response I received was ‘Now hang on just a minute’. Rather than just throwing my hands up in the air and saying ‘this is what you wanted’ I created an alternate reality to live in. I lived in the world of lies.

If I had my time over again, I would have listened more, spoke less, and acknowledged earlier that there was a distinct gap between what we both wanted and what we both could have. The compromise, and my own failings lead to me to conclude that the relationship was harming both of us. I’m sure the end of us is hurting my ex-partner more than me. That said, in my grieving for this relationship, I hardly recognise the man I’ve become. I’m so far away from the person I was five years ago that I’m not comfortable in my own skin. Regrettably I cannot undo the hurt, I cannot speed up the grieving for the relationship that has ended. All I can do is learn the lessons and try not to make them again.

The last loss is the father – the patriarch of a man that was once my friend but now I am his enemy. Paul and his brother David, have lost their father to cancer. I would have liked to send my condolences, but nearly ten years after our falling out, we have not made our peace. Paul’s father was a huge driving influence in Paul’s life and despite the slow torturous death, I realise it will not have prepared Paul for the grieving process.

In seven days my best friend Jane, my old friend, now estranged Paul, and me and my ex have experienced the grief associated with loss. That dull empty ache which is always there in the bottom of your stomach, suddenly seems much larger, and constantly aching again. The only thing that fixes this is the one thing we can’t speed up. The only thing that fixes this bottomless pit of grief is time.