Losing my dads
Grieving one father is brutal, messy, complicated; grieving two in the space of three months threw Laura Barnett into an emotional landscape nothing could have prepared her for
To lose one father is a tragedy. To lose two within three months is… well, I’m still trying to figure that one out. Because this is what happened to me last year. On May 13 2024, my stepfather Peter Bild died in hospital in south London from complications relating to a major operation. Eleven weeks later, on August 2, my biological father Ian Barnett died suddenly from a cardiac arrest while asleep in my home in Kent: he was pet-sitting for us while my mum, husband, four-year-old son and I took a much-needed, mid-grief holiday in Spain.
Until then, my worst experience of grief had been at the loss of my two grandmothers – my paternal grandma Eunice, and Peter’s mother, my stepgrandmother Anita – and my uncle Bill, my mum’s brother. I had cried for the loss of each of them, naturally, in ways both general and specific, but these deaths – the deaths of my two fathers – felt different, both from these other losses, and from each other.
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