There’s no grief without love.

When we’re grieving we sometimes enjoy happy memories of times spent with those we’ve lost. These happy memories can become the most painful, because they remind us of the gaping size of our loss.

As the grieving process continues, we can learn to enjoy these memories again. They’ll always be tinged with sadness, but they remind us of what we value, what we hold dear. They remind us how to cherish what we have.

There’s no grief without love.

Find ‘Bittersweet’ on your favourite streaming platform.

When we lose someone, part of them stays with us.

At first, what stays with us is mainly pain; the pain of their loss.

But over time, we slowly become aware of the good things that stay — we recognise their behaviour in our own, we notice how we do things that they used to do, we begin to sense how they have shaped us to become the person we are now. This process is also often painful, but it's a different kind of pain, and we can learn a great deal from it.

'You’re In Everything I Do' explores that paradoxical experience.

It's one of the darker pieces of this album, but it has a certain beauty. I'm always looking for the beauty in painful moments — I refuse to accept that pain is purposeless.

Grief is the ultimate reminder of what matters. It tears out attention away from all the frivolous stuff we normally waste time on, forcing us to confront our basic need for connection. 

My new single ‘What Matters’ is one of the liveliest and most upbeat on my forthcoming album Life Through Loss. It’s a depiction of the happy times, the times that make life worth living, and grief worth enduring. 

Earlier this month my family and I commemorated the tenth anniversary of my Mum’s death. Those of you who know the story know that her death wasn’t an easy time, nor was it an ‘easy’ death (if there is such a thing).

It would be very easy to focus on the negatives, but it is precisely for that reason that it’s important for me to emphasise the positive sides of my Mum’s life — her kindness, her sense of humour. I loved that about her, and I love it when those parts of her show up in my personality even now.

‘What Matters’ is about that: it’s about focusing on the positives we take from those we’ve lost. That’s why I have embedded her initials in the music. You may not be able to hear it, but she’s everywhere in this music, brightening it. 

Like a moment slipping away before you’re ready.

“Never Enough Time” is sweet and simple, like your happiest memories—yet just as fleeting. Every musical phrase seems to end a little too soon, leaving you wanting more. The song uses an unusual rhythm (11 beats per measure), which gives it a restless, urgent feel, and disappears before you’re ready to let go.

This is what longing feels like.

"Beautiful Ache" is a tender piano piece that reflects the subtle tension between yearning and gentle release, capturing the profound beauty that emerges when we allow ourselves to feel both love and loss.

Slowly awoken by the sun, you feel at peace, until you remember what you have lost.

This gentle piano piece captures the fleeting peace of waking before the memory of loss rushes in.

This is for the low moments, for the times when you can no longer see the light.

"Mourn" weaves swirling minor-key arpeggios into a poignant journey of sorrow.

We lay our loved ones to rest in strange capsules. We visit them, but we only see the container in which they lie.

‘Concrete Bunks’ is the first single from Garreth Broke’s new album, Life Through Loss. Informed by the Oxford-educated composer’s work as a grief companion, this beautifully strange piano piece drifts through eerie harmonies that somehow offer solace, reflecting on the solemn spaces we build to visit our lost loved ones.