When your parent dies young, your perception of time is thrown off kilter. Sorry, you don’t die in your bed when you’re 86? Don’t delicately close your eyes and fall asleep, like people do in films? Don’t get to see your child go to university, let alone finish their GCSEs?

It’s hard not to feel robbed when someone you love’s time runs out, especially when you’re only a teenager and your super-fit, daily-runner dad dies at 46.

When I was 15, time wasn’t something I contemplated. Rarely did I think about life milestones in any depth. Sure, I’d get married, have a house, have kids and a job, or something to that effect – like any millennial, right? But that was all far off in the future, and I was just relishing in the hormone-fuelled ride of being a teenager. Until my dad was diagnosed with a stage four brain tumour, a rare glioblastoma – or as one website I stumbled upon described it, “the terminator”.

Suddenly, the clock was ticking. Time was now a currency, one that our family didn’t have much of to spare, and so I spent every waking minute outside of school with my dad, mum, and brother. Ten months have never gone so quickly, nor been so intricately etched in my mind. It was both a heartache and a luxury to wake up every day knowing that my dad’s death was approaching: being given the gift of time to say goodbye, while simultaneously twisting the knife that each day was a day closer to the end. All the while, I was conscious of the fact that these few months would never be enough.

So the seed was sown, in Inception-like fashion – time is ending, make the most of it. Time became like water; it slipped through my fingers no matter how much I tried to savour every drop. I never wanted to make the mistake of taking the open-ended timeline ahead of me for granted.

Today, my relationship with time manifests itself in a sense of pressure. Pressure to get where I want to be in life, faster – to not gently plod from step to step, but leap bounds ahead as swiftly as possible. Every failure feels like a setback and time I can’t afford to lose. It means I often don’t start things – even projects I really want to come to fruition – as I don’t know if I will have the time to complete them. Or I worry that I’ll feel like I’ve just wasted more of my precious hours and minutes if a venture doesn’t work out the way I’d planned. In the past, this sense of time pressure has caused me to stay in unhealthy relationships too long or become impatient if my efforts in my career don’t lead where I want them to.

Part of this intense pressure (which is more of a hindrance than a help) comes down to the fact that I still, in some ways, feel as though I need to catch up; as though I lost out on years of fun, dating, travelling and growth when I was deep in the pits of my grief-fuelled depression. My head bobbed back up above the water around two years after my dad died, when I was 18 and at university. I had the distinct sensation that I was not only alive but living again, for the first time in a while. I danced until 3am, sobbed freely, laughed heavily – the kind of belly-shaking cackle that only happens with true friends. 

It was during this period that I stumbled across a lesser-known gem by director Richard Curtis, the time-travelling romcom About Time. The Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson-led film features a cast like no other (Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander and Lindsay Duncan to name a few), and delves into the paradoxical sense of time that I’d grappled with since my dad’s death. It explores the joy of being alive and relishing time spent with people you love, alongside the sheer pain of it ending when someone you love dies.

As the song How Long Will I Love You? blared out of my MacBook speakers, over a montage of Mary (McAdams) and Tim’s (Gleeson) memories grounded in a Tube station, I was sobbing. Reflected back at me was the conundrum I had been far too young, in hindsight, to truly understand when I lost my dad. How was I meant to move forward and journey with an open heart into the uncertain future, for however long I’m given – while accepting that part of embracing the future meant letting go of the hold grief had over me, which tied me to the past and to my dad?

In About Time, Tim has the benefit of borrowed time: after his father’s death, he can travel back to relive some of his favourite childhood memories and seek his dad’s advice when he needs it. Yet time travel comes with a complex set of rules (so we’re told). Tim cannot go back to before the birth of his own children, so after his second child arrives he can no longer travel into the past to see his dad. “It was the toughest decision of my life,” Gleeson’s character says. “Saying ‘yes’ to the future meant saying ‘goodbye’ to my dad forever.”

It’s rare for a film to provide an accurate, poignant and timeless view of grief – and its spectrum of contrasting emotions – and also somehow throw Il Mondo and The Luckiest into the soundtrack and make it work. But it does work, beautifully. Eventually, Tim stops travelling in time altogether, and instead tries “to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life”.

A decade after my dad’s death – and ironically, the film’s release – my perception of time has evolved. I can’t comprehend having spent 10 years without my dad when he’s so vivid in rich colour, laughter and warmth in my memories. Growing up has also meant coming to terms with the childish sense of my future I’d imagined (and dreaded) at 16, and not beating myself up – a curse of my generation – because my achievements in my 20s look extremely different to those of my parents.

My timeline does look different to my friends’, still. With weddings on the horizon, and my first stint as a maid of honour ticked off, I’m still in the realm of Bumble and Hinge dates. Feeling behind or ahead is all relative; the scale slips and the balance changes in every area of our life consistently.

Rather than hold so tightly onto time or overwhelm myself with the pressure that comes with it, I try to use it as fuel to stop putting things off. In February, I went on the trip of a lifetime, the one I’d been telling my friends for years I wanted to go on. The 10-year anniversary was looming, staring me straight in the face as a massive reminder of how much time had passed. And so I went to New Zealand for three weeks, solo. 

When I booked the trip, it was to prove to myself I’d done something monumental with the 10 years since my dad’s death; ticked something off the big life list. Yet it was so much more than that. Once again, I was living. But I didn’t feel like I had just started living to honour my dad’s memory (I was doing that already). Nor was I simply going through the motions of school, university and daily life. I wasn’t even pushing myself to keep going because of a fear that time was running out. 

Instead, I was living for myself. I jumped out of a plane just because I felt like it. The sun was shining, the sky clear, and the landscape calling me, so why not? I swam in the sea, flew over a glacier in a helicopter, and squeezed the life out of every single minute of my time in the most beautiful country in the world.

Whether I have 60 years, 40 years or only 20 more years left (as my dad did when he was my age), it’s all relative; it’s ultimately how you spend your time that matters. As Tim says: “We’re all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.” 

This article is part of Generation Tick Tock, a series exploring our complex relationship with time. You can read the full series here.