It's been just over a year since I got the call.
I remember where I was, my wife and I were doing a road trip to celebrate my 30th birthday and we were on the M5 on the way up from Cornwall heading towards the Lake District for our next stay, we were about 10 minutes out from Gloucester Services. I remember the pause before the words came out. I remember knowing, before she said it, that it was the answer I didn't want.
Pancreas & Liver, definitely cancer.
That call doesn't leave you. It plants itself somewhere behind your ribs and stays there, quietly, while life carries on around it. You go to meetings, you go for walks on the weekend, you jump on a sales call, you hold your daughters all times of the day & night. And it sits there, waiting for the days it knows it can come back up e.g. anniversaries, birthdays, the specific slant of light on a Sunday in April.
Sunday just gone was one of those days.
I didn't run the London Marathon. I don't run anymore at all. But it was everywhere… LinkedIn posts about people raising tens of thousands for cancer charities, TikToks of strangers crossing the finish line in tears with their mum's photo on their vest, a feed full of grief turned into miles.
And I sat there scrolling, holding a coffee, and felt something I haven't been able to name all week.
Guilt, maybe…or something next to it? Idk.
Because the honest question underneath all of it is: should I be doing more?
Should I be running for her? Raising money in her name? Building something… a fund, a campaign, a foundation, that turns what happened to her into something that helps someone else's mum? People do that. Good people. People who lose someone and channel it into action, into miles, into millions raised.
And here I am, a year on, not running or raising.
The reasonable answer is that I'm still in survival mode. Twin daughters, a business to scale, a new thing I'm building, an MBA in progress, a wife I want to actually be present for. There's no slack in the system right now. Training for a marathon physically, emotionally, time-wise isn't something I can credibly take on without something else breaking.
That's the reasonable answer, and I think it's even true.
But it doesn't fully land. Because there's a quieter voice underneath it that says: that's just what people in survival mode tell themselves. The marathon runners I watched yesterday have kids too, have jobs, have things breaking. They did it anyway…
So which is it? Am I being honest about my capacity, or am I hiding behind it & making it a permanent personality?
I don't know.
The takeaway:
I think part of grief, the part nobody really tells you about, is that it doesn't just hurt. It indicts. It sits there asking what you're doing with the time she didn't get and there's no clean answer to that question, because any answer feels like either too much performance or not enough action.
I'm not running this year. I might not run next year either. I might never run a marathon for her. What I am doing is building a life that I think she'd be proud of by raising her granddaughters, building something of my own, trying not to waste the years I've still got. Whether that's enough, I genuinely don't know.
Maybe the point isn't to resolve it. Maybe the point is to keep the question open, and let it shape the decisions that actually are in front of me, rather than the heroic ones that aren't.
A year on, that's the most honest thing I can say.
See you next week.
— Antonio.