There are different kinds of loss, and I don't mean this as a ranking. I mean it as an observation: they are different in their texture, in what they take from you, in what you find yourself trying to hold onto in their wake.
The loss of a child is one thing. The loss of a friend is another. The loss of a parent, a sibling, the losses that come in the middle of a life that is already carrying something. They are not the same. They sit differently. They ask different things.
What I have been trying to understand, since losing more than one person who knew me before everything changed, is this: when you lose the people who were there, you lose something specific. You lose the corroboration. The confirmation that it happened. That the years were real. That you are not constructing a world out of nothing.
Witnesses
Peter knew the before. Not all of it, but enough. He knew the valley before the valley became what it is to me now. He knew the people, the houses, the particular social geometry of that community in the years before. When I talked to him about it, I didn't have to explain the context. He already lived in it. He could add things, correct things, give me a version of those years from an angle I didn't have myself.
When he died, in 2015, I lost a version of those years.
Not the memory itself, not the fact of it. But the living confirmation of it. The person who could say: yes. I was there too. I remember. It happened the way you think it happened. You are not making this up.
Steph knew the before in a different way. She held a different angle, a different set of moments, a different texture of the same years. She is gone more recently, and the loss of her is still new enough that I am still working out what I have lost along with her.
The Arithmetic
When you are young, you assume there will always be more people. More friends, more time, more chances to say the things that need saying and ask the questions that haven't been asked yet. This is not naivety exactly. It is just that the arithmetic isn't visible when you're inside it.
At some point the arithmetic becomes visible. You look around at the people who hold the before, who carry the context of your life, and you see that the number is smaller than it was. The witnesses are fewer. The corroboration is thinner.
This is not a reason for panic. It is simply a fact that asks you to pay attention differently.
What Eira Holds
There is one more name, and she is different from the others because she is not gone. She is twenty-three and she is still here, and she holds a specific piece of the before that nobody else holds.
Eira was there. She was five and a half, and she was there, and she saw the things that five-and-a-half-year-olds see, which are not the same things adults see. She saw the texture of ordinary days from the height of a child who was loved by the same person I was trying to love well. She carries that. She has carried it for seventeen years without anyone asking her to and without her knowing, perhaps, exactly what she was carrying.
When I found her again, at twenty-two, what struck me first was not how much she had changed but how much she still held. The before was still in her. Not as a burden, not as a wound, but as part of the material she was made of. She knew who Tima was because she had known her with her own hands, in real time, in the specific way that children know each other.
That is not replaceable. That is not something I can find anywhere else.
Why We Write
The reason I write, to the extent that I can articulate it, is not for an audience. Or it is not only for an audience. It is because writing is how I hold out, in the absence of the people who held it with me.
When I write about those years, the valley, the house, the specific weight of a small person on your chest in the evening when the summer light was still coming through the curtains at nine o'clock, I am not only making a record. I am doing the thing that cofio means in Welsh: I am calling them back. I am refusing to let the before become a place that exists only in my own unconfirmed memory.
Stories are how we survive the loss of witnesses. They are how the before stays real, stays three-dimensional, stays something that happened to actual people in an actual valley with an actual river running through it.
Peter and Steph held the before for the years they were here. Eira holds it still. And in writing it down, I do what I can to make sure the before holds itself.