I'm absolutely not an expert on grief. I'm incredibly lucky to have only lost one person that close to me. I realized this when some people, on hearing about Dad, would give me the run down on the list of people they had lost, probably in a desire to connect and to let me know I wasn't the only one. The awful stories are of those who lost a sum of people in a short time span - one girlfriend had lost her best mate at 21, followed by both her parents. Of course, grief is common to all of us. Yet whilst there might be common timelines or coping strategies, everyone has to navigate it in their own way.

After the bone shattering, heart clenching, paralysing pain of the first few weeks, I am beginning to understand all the well meaning advice people had given that didn't really help at the time. The worst of it does pass, or at least change so that you can live with it.

It seems to me, from my limited experience, that a choice must be made.

You can choose to make the grief and loss your entire identity, or make it simply part of who you are. I overheard my daughter in law, who lost her Dad to cancer when she was 18, saying that at first grief is like an all encompassing circle - your entire life is within it. Then it becomes only one of the circles, or that all the various aspects of your life begin to expand past this circle.

Mum and I were talking about how it's been hard to listen to his music. When he died I listened to it constantly and then I couldn't at all without my heart siezing. I missed him in the silence between every note. Then, listening the other day, I realized that he was with me in the notes. I chose to smile. I chose to make his music about love, not loss. How precious! I thought. Here he is, in the room! How incredible that I had a Dad who loved music so much, that shared it with us. How amazing that even in the last weeks of his earth time we sat and listened to music together.

So now, I choose to listen. And I find that whilst some songs make my eyes water and my heart turn on on itself, most of the time I'm just enveloped in a big auditory hug of Dad-ness.