The world forgot her name. I didn’t.

She was twenty-four when she died, not some small child, not a person whose life you can neatly explain away with soft words. She was a full person, messy and loud and brilliant in ways that made my chest ache. Her name was Kahlia. It sat in my mouth like a prayer and like a curse. I said it quietly at first, then louder, then as if saying it would make it so she might walk back through the door.

In April 2024 I learned two things I had never expected. One, death is not the hardest thing. Two, the silence after it is a different kind of violence. People do not always mean harm when they stop saying your child’s name. They mean to be kind, they mean to give you space, they mean to protect you from pain. But protection looks an awful lot like forgetting. The first time someone said, “I didn’t want to bring her up because I didn’t want to upset you,” I wanted to throw the kettle at them. I wanted to scream that the only thing that would upset me more than hearing her name, was the idea that the world could let her evaporate to avoid awkwardness.

Grief is not a tidy thing. It is not a calendar you can cancel after a month. It is a list of small betrayals: the dentist appointment text with her name on it; the Netflix profile that still shows her avatar, ready, waiting for her to click play; the birthday notification that lands like a physical thud on a quiet morning. It is calling the bank and hearing a polite voice on the other end, asking questions that assume she is alive, that assume I will answer differently. It is seeing her toothbrush in the holder, the tiny ridge where she always stood when she brushed, the way the light fell on the tiles that morning when I last made coffee in a house that now felt both too full and too empty.

We talk about the funeral, we shuffle through candles and songs and the awful print of program covers, and then there is the rest. That is where a lot of people quietly step back, as if grief is a contagion you could catch from listening. They hand you nice phrases, they send a meal once, and then the world makes room for the next story. They shrink your daughter down to the moment she died. They forget the rest. The rest is the dangerous thing, because the rest is the life.

How long do I live without her? That question circles me like a dog, persistent and hungry. Is there a date when the wound is supposed to be smaller, when people start to trust my laugh again without flinching? Is there a year marker where the pain becomes respectable? I do not know. There are firsts - the first birthday without her, the first Christmas, the first time her brother walked into his room and made her bed. There are seconds and thirds, a lifetime of moments that were supposed to be ordinary. The firsts feel like cliffs, they are mapped and feared. The seconds and thirds are the slow erosion, the small things that keep taking pieces of you until the shape of you is unrecognisable.

The year after, there was admin. Someone did not warn me that grief comes with paperwork, that you will become an expert in forms and boxes and the precise phrasing that means “deceased” on official documents. There are phone calls to hospitals and to colleges, there are passwords to change and memberships to cancel, there are emails from services offering deals and discounts that used to be small annoyances and now feel like mockery. There is the surreal, bureaucratic insistence that life must go on according to systems that do not account for the way your insides have been rearranged.

I had to tell story after story about her the way you might give a child a lesson. Please fill this form. Please sign this. Please confirm. At the same time, community and kindness come from unexpected places. The postman who leaves parcels on the stoop without a word. The friend who brings soup and stays for twenty minutes and then leaves before the conversation turns to territory they do not know how to traverse. These tiny acts became lifelines and also reminders that people are trying, even when they get it wrong.

Sometimes in private I am incandescent with rage. There is a line in me that says I will burn the world down before I let people forget her. I mean that. I say it not as a joke but as a promise. Forgetting is violence. Remembering is resistance. To say her name is to refuse the tidy erasure that grief so often faces. I want to shout her name from rooftops, carve it into park benches, plaster it on the side of buses. I want everyone to have to meet the fact of her life, to be inconvenienced by memory. If remembering her makes anyone uncomfortable, good, then maybe they will think about why they would rather be comfortable than kind.

Writing the book was also an act of rage and stubbornness. I did not write because I wanted to be brave, although people say that now when they are kind. I wrote because I was frightened. I wrote because I was terrified the world would spin and forget. I copied fragments of her laugh into the margins. I wrote down the way she made coffee, how she rolled her eyes at bad songs, the exact words she used when she called me “mumma” across a crowded room. I wrote to anchor her, to tether memory to ink so that someone else might pick up the thread if I could not hold it forever.

There were days when the simplest gestures saved me. A friend who remembered, a text message that was just a name and a heart. Those small acts of naming are powerful. They are stitches. They are permission to keep loving in full sight. And the opposite was devastating: the friend who stopped answering, the subscription that kept sending as if nothing had happened, the person who avoided the door because they could not manage the sorrow. The avoidance felt like abandonment.

I have learned that grief is a social illness as much as it is a private one. It is something that lives in the cracks between people and in the stories they tell. If we are not careful, grief becomes private property, something you are ashamed to speak about. We tidy it into polite silences and smiley face emojis and then wonder why suicide remains a hushed thing. When we do that, we do two harms at once: we erase the person who is gone, and we isolate the people left behind. We leave them to do the dangerous work of keeping memory alive on their own, like single parents raising ghosts.

So, I talk. I say her name in cafes and in queues and inside rooms where strangers might be listening. I introduce myself as “Kahlia’s mum” because, for now, it is true, and I will not let it be erased. It is not that I want pity. I want presence. I want people to be willing to say the hard thing, to sit with the discomfort a little longer than it takes to utter a polite phrase and move on.

This is a love letter as much as it is a protest. I am not interested in tidy lessons; I do not want platitudes. I want truth. I want to tell anyone who will listen that my daughter laughed with her whole body, that she made terrible coffee, that she once danced on a ferry until her hair smelled of sea and diesel and happiness. I want to say the exact way she looked rewatching the same old movies, how she laughed with her whole body, the way she would volunteer at anything that had free cake. These are the things that make her alive to me. These are the facts that cancel out the silence.

People ask what they can do. The simplest thing is to say the name. Say it like you mean it. Call the person whose grief you want to acknowledge and say their child’s name. Ask about the small things. Don’t avoid the question because you are afraid of opening a wound. Wounds need air, they need tending. They do not heal by smothering. Bring food sometimes but bring your memory more often. Tell a story. Share a photograph. Insist on presence.

There are moments, in the middle of all this, where the world still offers me the impossible sweetness of remembering her. A song slams into me on the radio, and I can hear her singing in the passenger seat, loud and ecstatic. I smell a perfume that was accidentally hers and I breathe it as if inhaling could bring her back. Those moments are both mercy and cruelty. They are proof that she was here, and a reminder that she is not.

This book is for her. It is a hoard of memories, a catalogue of the small, human things that stitched her together. It is also for anyone who has found themselves standing in a kitchen with a cup of tea, wondering what the plan is now. There is no plan, there is only the days, the small acts of bravery, the stubborn refusal to let memory go quiet.

For Kahlia, always.