Watch the video: youtu.be/ZexKqqfKO9o

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to people who are grieving loved ones and then writing music to honour the person they’ve lost. These pieces are called elegies and this week I’m releasing a new one. In a way it’s the same as the others: it’s a tribute to someone no longer with us and it’s both mournful and full of love — there’s no grief without love. But it’s also different to the others, because it’s personal.

I wrote it for my friend Donna, who died unexpectedly a couple of years ago, in her mid-30s, ostensibly in the prime of her life. Losing her really shocked me: she wasn’t unwell, as far as we knew, and she just seemed to suddenly, shockingly, be absent. She was someone I had known since I was 11 and I had kept in touch with her throughout my life. She came to my stag do and my wedding, we had commiserated over failed romances many times, we’d got drunk together (also many times), we’d had teenage flirtations with one another, we’d acted as wingman for one another, we’d been the singletons together at weddings of friends, we’d had a car accident together, we’d been on a holidays together. She was hilarious, easily one of the funniest people I know, and she could also be mighty and fierce: a friend who was bullied in our school told me how Donna had spotted the bullies having a go and she got so angry with them that she literally scared them off. She had a steel inside her that I really admired.

But one of the things that I’ve realised through my conversations with bereaved people is that someone’s death touches different people in different ways, and so although the grief I feel is shared with all her family and friends, and it is also my own grief and it is unique. And that is true for every grief. Every relationship or friendship is unique, so every grief is unique. And, accordingly, the ways we mourn have to be unique too.

I grieve by playing the piano, so when Donna died, playing the piano was the obvious thing to do. I noticed that her initials, DEH, suggested the chord sequence D major, E major, B minor (H is the German name for B) and once I’d spotted that, the piece came together very quickly, like an outpouring, and I cried a bit and I moved a bit through my grief. But my piece is exactly that—it’s mine—it cannot contain every way that Donna touched the people she knew, it’s nothing more than a facet of her, my facet.

As I was putting together the photos for a video to accompany the release I became aware just how partial my view of her was: as I scrolled through her photos I realised just how much of her life that I missed out on, all the wonderful friendships she made that I wasn’t involved in, all the people she touched, all the crazy hilarious things she did that I missed out on. There’s a lovely photo of her sliding down the stairs as a child laughing her head off, for example, or photos of her hand in trunk with an elephant. And it’s wonderful that all those things happened, and it also makes me really sad. We can’t get those missed moments back, and it reminds us that so much potential is lost when a person dies too soon. And that’s what grief is: it’s coming to terms with the fact that the world is different now that the person we love is no longer in it. So, this is my tribute to Donna, who my friends and I called Doon. I really miss you.