I lost my mum to cancer when I was seven. My parents were already divorced and I was living with my mother in Cambridgeshire. When she died, I moved up to Scotland to my dad’s, leaving behind a whole world. But I never properly grieved.
Before Mum died, I remember my childhood idyllically. It was a rural upbringing filled with dogs, the outdoors, protection and love. I had many enthusiastic interests, from pirate ships and trains, to Lego and the guitar. I was popular at school and quite daring once I got over my initial shyness.
My mother never talked to us about her illness – indeed she was somewhat in denial of death. So, the morning after she died, when I was told the news, I was wholly unprepared. I remember bawling my eyes out uncontrollably before wanting to go to school – probably the only way of clinging on to something resembling normality. That day I acted like nothing had happened.
For the rest of my childhood, no one really talked to me about her death or how I was coping, and her name was seldom mentioned. In fact, I experienced what seemed like an entire culture – in family, at school and in the community – that didn’t know how to talk about death; didn’t express feelings about it and didn’t know what to do with a bereaved child. The prevalent British attitude was to soldier on with a stiff upper-lip, death swept under the carpet. And so my grief became suppressed alongside her memory. But the agony I felt from losing her stayed deep within me, dangerously coiled like a spring that was then built over with layer upon layer of obscuring protection.
I wasn’t even aware that I hadn’t grieved. I just thought sadness was a part of me, a bottomless well that would always be there. Up in Scotland, I struggled to fit in. As I grew up, I never found an identity or a direction in life and I was unable to form romantic relationships. I had some sort of hidden internal breaks to any commitment in life, which left me rudderless and adrift.
At 31, I finally admitted that something was wrong and arranged to see a therapist, ostensibly about my lack of direction in life. A few hours before the appointment, I caught my reflection in a mirror and it suddenly dawned on me after 25 years that I missed my mum terribly. Then came a flood of intense waves of grief as strong as if my mum had died the night before. Yet, this confusing knot of emotions had formed over the past two decades. All at once, I processed her illness, mourned her death, lamented my lost potential, and cried for my A-level results day along with every other big moment she had missed.
This was the start of two years spent finding my way through a labyrinth of emotional turmoil. As a composer, I turned to music to cope with and process the experience. My mum loved classical music, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. After I had been jumping around the house for months, pretending to play along to Born in the USA, she got me a real guitar for my seventh birthday – the last present she ever gave me. I forgot about that guitar for years, but eventually came back to the instrument as a teenager and started writing songs.
Looking back, my music had always somehow expressed my inner sorrow, even if it was unknowingly. But as I got closer and closer to the tipping point, it had become ever more introspective, circling in on grief. I had hidden my grief behind the idea that art was for art’s sake only. Dropping that pretence and giving myself permission to grieve unashamedly through music was what ultimately freed me from my sadness. Music became my place to grieve. It allowed me to define the amorphous raw feelings I was yet to find words for. It gave them full expression, let me work through them. It also brought up much suppressed happiness and lost joyful memories. Through this, I rediscovered the sheer pleasure of playing music that I had once felt when strumming along to Bruce Springsteen. At last I could reconnect with my mum and move forward with my life. Music showed me that long before I could put it into words.
