In the park near our house my partner and I have a bench. We paid to have it put there last year after our twin boys Fred and John died.
John was just 18 hours into this world when he died and two days later Fred was unhooked from the machines keeping him alive and, like his brother, we held him to our bare chests until his heart stopped beating.
They were too small and too new to be left alone in a cemetery so we had them cremated and brought them home in small plastic boxes.
A few months later we arranged for the bench as an alternative to the finality of a headstone.
On the bench is a plaque. It took a long time deciding what should be written onto it. We didn't want it to be morbid or make people feel uncomfortable in a park renowned for its beauty and treasured for its tranquility.
I said firmly "no references to death" and so on the plaque are their names and the day they were born.
If you didn't know you might just as well assume the bench is a parent's celebration of their twin boys.
And in time it may be. But at this stage, a little over a year on, the ambiguity is for others.
For me our bench is a place of grinding and inescapable sadness.
Until my boys died I had conceived grief as a sense of loss. Of having something and then no longer having something.
Now I know it differently. Grief is about the future.
A mourning not for times shared that can be remembered at whim but the ones you can never call on, the ones that will never happen.
Before our twins were born their mother and I would lie in our bed and cast our lives far into the future and catch glimpses of us looking on as our three children laughed and played and spent time being each other's best friends.
We knew we had done just about the best thing any parent could do. In giving them each other we had given them all they needed and so, if the worst were to ever happen to us, that would be okay.
I imagined them, and still do, running rings around fussy old men in the neighbourhood, breaking windows with their cricket ball, stealing fruit off some biddy's plum tree, building huts in secret places in the park and falling out of trees they had dared each other to climb.
I picture them dragging each other home covered in dirt, stubbed toes and skinned knees when the sun went down and breathlessly telling me all at once all the things they did that day as they gulped down tall glasses of water.
Now, when I see my eldest son playing alone I am overcome with the crushing burden that this life, this future possibility of the bonded friendship of brothers, will never be true for him.
It is not easy to admit to being so deeply hurt by the death of two children who lived such short lives. Because, here is another thing I didn't realise about grief - it's a hierarchy
And while it is sad that our babies were born under horrific circumstances at 26 weeks and lived for just a handful of hours, there are parents who have lost children at full term or after years of life and their suffering, their grief, must be exponentially greater.
Without being told you know they have far more right to grief than you and that it is probably best not to make a song and dance about what you're going through.
Admitting your pain to yourself and others can therefore only come after you have positively solved a parental equation for a variety of deathly variables.
Twins at two days just beats single baby at four days, years of watching a child unsuccessfully battle cancer definitely trumps twins taken before they could talk, a sudden accident at 5 years old hands down wins over a still birth at 38 weeks.
It's ridiculous. It's absurd. It traps you within yourself just as you trap others with the hand you hold.
I want to clear my slate here. I want to say losing a child, however it happens, whenever it happens, leaves the same pitiless ache, the same gaping emptiness.
There are selfish reasons for constructing a logic around this. I want to convince myself of the equality of death to give myself the genuine permission to talk about my boys whenever I feel like talking, whenever I feel like remembering, whenever I need them in my life.
I miss you Fred. I miss you John. I always will. That's what dads do.
- Stuff