On Love, Loss, and the Quiet Work of Endurance

Every two weeks I release a new Slow Burn post, and at the end of every publication I feel a sense of time and space to work on the next one. Yet more often than not, the two weeks roll around quickly, and I find myself with 24–48 hours to bring my attention back to the project.

I feel quite raw today, and I don’t think I can fully place it on one thing. I do know that I’m experiencing a particularly challenging transition period. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post about transitions, I feel I’ve been almost constantly transitioning over the last decade. The moments where I thought I was on the right track, with a sense of forward motion, have often shifted back to challenge. I try not to blame myself for it, for somehow keeping myself here through negative thought patterns or looping behaviours, but even that self-analysis can become another weight to carry.

Surely, rather than feeling as though we are in transition (which somehow carries a negative connotation), we ought to recognise that this is actually what life is, and instead learn to be utterly present in all of its transitory glory.

This week also marks two years since the passing of our daughter. She was twelve. In the interest of our wider family, I won’t disclose the details here, only that it was unexpected. Our family is slowly, and I think will always be, learning what it means to live within that absence. This week, as the anniversary approaches, I realised that both my partner and I are scheduled to work on the same day, Friday, the 7th of November. We’re not in a position not to work, and yet it feels so strange to do so. But even if we were to stay home, what would we do with the day? With the memories? With the grief? Is it better to work, to move, to stay in motion? Or to stop and let it wash through? I don’t know. At times like these, when both people in a partnership need lifting up, who lifts the other?

These quiet days of transition can feel endless. The weather hangs low in Glasgow, the light fades early, and even small tasks seem to take more energy than they should. We try to keep showing up for each other, though it’s often ungraceful. Sometimes we argue, sometimes we’re both too flat to speak, and sometimes we just move around each other in silence: two people doing their best to keep the world turning.

Then, of course, there are moments of tenderness within that, even if it’s just my mind reminding me that we are both human, and that it’s perfectly okay not to be at our best. This is, after all, the stuff of life, what every human being must endure. Living together day after day, year after year, means being privy to it all. It invites acceptance into our lives, especially on the in-between days that pass with less enthusiasm, and kindles an endurance that, I’ve come to realise, most closely resembles love.

I’ve been thinking again about the name of this series, Slow Burn, and how fitting it feels right now. Certainly at the moment life doesn’t feel as though it’s burning bright, and I’m trying to take comfort — through these articles and through my daily painting practice, in the way it embodies a low-burning thing, hidden under the surface, keeping just enough warmth to see me through. Maybe that’s what this season asks of us: not to spark or shine, but simply to keep the embers alive, to stay close, and to trust that the light will grow again when it’s ready.

Grief, like art, reshapes time and our experience of it. Some days it feels close enough to touch; other days it drifts quietly into the background, almost invisible but never gone. And maybe that’s what living creatively really means, finding ways to hold what remains unseen. To keep returning to the studio, to the page, and to each other.

In the end, amidst this passing year in grief, I decided to take the day off work, if not to lie down and cry, then to take a day to remember what is most important in life. To spend time speaking with friends and family, to realign emotionally, physically, or in whichever way my body will need that day. If grief can give us anything, it’s a moment to take stock, and without knowing exactly what to do with a day like tomorrow, at least we can find some presence in it, to let it pass a little more peacefully.

Perhaps that’s what we all need, in love, in art, to be with it imperfectly, holding space for one another through the long burn of ordinary days. And in that, beneath the weight of everything, that’s where the quiet warmth lives: in the simple, enduring act of staying.