No Space Between — A Poem for Those We’ve Loved and Lost

A reflection on grief, healing, and remembering loved ones through nature and poetry

Grief has a way of folding time and silencing light. When we lose someone we love, we often search for them in places we can no longer reach – in gravestones, photographs, and shadows of what was. After my mother passed away, I carried that ache like a second skin. It clung to every thought, every moment. I couldn’t escape it. Nor, in truth, did I want to. That pain felt like proof she had existed.

And yet, I was tired. Tired of carrying sorrow as the only evidence of love.

It was during a quiet walk with my dog through the Hertfordshire countryside – a place I’ve always found grounding – that something quietly shifted. I turned down a small winding path I’d never noticed before. The trees opened above me, and sunlight poured through the branches like liquid gold. A gentle breeze brushed my skin, and for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t consumed by thoughts of my mother.

It wasn’t that I had forgotten her. It was that the ache was gone. Not replaced by absence, but by presence.

In that moment, I felt her everywhere. In the rustle of the leaves, in the softness of the air, in the very rhythm of the earth beneath my feet. She hadn’t left. She had simply changed form. What I had once seen as separation, I now saw as return – a weaving back into the world itself. There was no space between us. There never had been.

That moment birthed No Space Between, a poem I wrote as both a dedication to my mother and a quiet offering to anyone navigating grief. It’s a reminder – to myself and others – that love doesn't end. It transforms. This piece is a meditation on healing, presence, and the sacred connection that continues even after death.

If you’re here because you’re grieving, or searching for something to read at a funeral or memorial, or simply needing words that honour the inexpressible, I hope this poem finds you the way peace found me that day in the woods.

Nature taught me something that day. We don’t depart – we return. To the earth. To one another. To the stillness where love lives on.

I hope No Space Between brings you comfort, wherever you are.

No Space Between

A poem by Nicholas Thackray

I found you not in stone or grave,
But where the silent birches wave,
Where sunlight spills through emerald skies,
And winds still speak in lullabies.

You left the world, or so I thought,
But loss is not the end we’re taught.
You rose in root and branch and breeze,
A whispered soul in dancing trees.

The river knows the sound of you,
In every drop, a memory true.
Each petal holds a breath you gave,
Each dawn breaks softly on your wave.

I feel you in the mossy ground,
Where peace and pulse are tightly wound.
Not gone, just scattered, not apart,
But woven deep into the heart.

I thought the woods were just escape,
But now I see your secret shape.
Each winding path, each quiet bend,
Was where your spirit learned to mend.

The sky is not some faraway,
The ground not just where bodies lay.
You are the hush in every tree,
No space at all between you and me.

We don’t depart, we just return
To where the star and river burn,
The wild, the still, the sweet, the true,
Where I find home, and I find you.

If this poem speaks to you, or you feel it may bring comfort to someone else, please feel free to share it. Whether you include it in a memorial service, a funeral reading, or keep it close during quiet moments of remembrance, it was written with one hope in mind – that love endures, and that none of us are ever truly apart.