Grief can be more complicated than we often make it out to be. In the wake of my father’s death, several people have reminded me of this point, and they’ve been right – in a way that I know a little too well, because of other experiences with grieving over the past decade.

In 2022 I learned of a tragedy: my childhood friend Dave Harkness, less than a year older than me, had just passed away. Dave and I had been very close friends around grades four and five and six. He was the one who introduced me to “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose music has been there for me at multiple times in my life. He and I drifted apart in our teenage years; once Facebook emerged in our adulthood we spoke occasionally there, but not deeply, not reconnecting. The only such interaction I remember was one on Facebook where he chided me, rightly I think, for an inappropriate political post. (I was crowing at Michael Ignatieff‘s ignominious prime ministerial defeat and humiliation behind Jack Layton in the 2011 election, which I thought was deserved – but that event meant that Dave and others in Canada would have to live under Stephen Harper, which I did not.)

But suddenly with Dave gone, things felt very different. Now the memories of good times with Dave now came flooding back: the jokes we shared in school, the comic characters we drew, the tabletop role-playing games we played – and designed. I posted a memorial to Dave on Facebook and connected with his best teenage friend – a man I’d never known at the time, even though we were in high school. But now, with Dave gone, the old friend and I met up in our old hometown to share very different memories of a friend we had both once cherished. I appreciated the rediscovered memories of what once was, in a way I wish I’d been able to do while Dave was still around.

My grandfather Claude Vipond died six years before that, and I wrote about it at the time. One thing I didn’t really say at the time was that it was time for him to go, for he had lost much of his ability to interact with the outside world; the man I’d seen in his last years was a shadow of his former self. So while it was certainly sad to see him go, and I cried at the time, I could still honour his memory and bid him farewell.

But then, at an ayahuasca retreat just before Dave’s death, something else happened. The retreat’s organizer had introduced us to a practice called shamanic or holotropic breathwork, which involved breathing deeply and rapidly for a prolonged period. While I was doing it I didn’t feel much effect, and wondered if I had done it wrong. But the moment I stopped, emotions flooded me. The song on the sound system proclaimed: “Know you are loved, rest in peace.” And my mind suddenly raced back to Claude – and my love for him.

What came pouring back then were memories of the good times my grandfather and I had shared in my childhood – his humour, his larger-than-life presence. The memories then were more vivid than they’d been at the time of Claude’s death. When he had died, what was fresh in my mind were sadder, more recent memories; those clouded, even overshadowed, the good memories of what had been before. But with an induced alternate state of consciousness, suddenly the good memories came back fresh – as they had when Dave died. Here, I wept anew – for the loss that, I now realized, I had already experienced years before his death, a loss of the person he once had been.

These moments come back to me, in turn, as I think about my own father’s recent death. With him, as with Claude, it was time to go – and he knew it. His hospitalized, addled, hurting last months were painful for all of us, including him. It was particularly onerous for my mother, who had to spend most of her time in some sort of caregiving. I had held up the hope, modestly realistic in the circumstances, that he would recover to the reasonably comfortable state he’d been in a few months prior, where he could enjoy more years in assisted living and have the spirited conversations he’d once known. But the week he went, he’d been told he was no shape to do that; at best he’d end up in a nursing home, and his condition was worsening even from that. When he was diagnosed with pneumonia in what would become his last days, he refused treatment for it – just as Claude had done for the illness that eventually took him – and gave up the ghost because he knew it wasn’t worth it.

All that means that, while it has been painful to lose my father, it didn’t hit me extremely hard – right away. In his last months I made a new connection with the man I had loved, but the man I remembered had been gone for significantly longer. In the moment of his death there was some relief for all of us – perhaps especially him. The grief hit me harder this week as I started to write some more blog posts about B.R. Ambedkar, whom he admired: I don’t know what he would make of the things I have to say in those posts, and I cried to realize I never will. I expect there will be moments in the years to come when his loss hits me harder still – and I have no idea when that will be.

This isn’t to say grief is always delayed. Sometimes it happens right away just as you’d expect. My beloved aunt Alison Vipond died suddenly two summers ago – far too early, in her late 60s. That was simply a tragedy. I hadn’t had a chance to see her in the years leading up to it – not since COVID – and was looking forward to more. The memorial service afterwards brought the family together with pictures and other mementoes of her life, and all I could think was “She should be here” – that Alison, just as she was before her death, would have loved such a shared event, with her infectious joy and famously goofy laugh lightening up the room for everyone as it always had before. Unlike my father and grandfather, it was not in any way time for her to go; and unlike with Dave, there had been no drifitng apart, just what I had had every reason to believe was a temporary separation. In 2019 she and my uncle had dropped me off at Billy Bishop Airport with a casual till-next-time, one that I had no idea would be the last time I’d ever see her. That loss still just stings.

I miss all of these loved ones, all their losses are painful to me. But they hit in very different ways, and at different times – some of which, I am sure, are still to come.