“For your friends, this will last 10 minutes. For you, it’ll be a lifetime.” I’ll never forget the words of my housemistress, crouched over me in her office, as she held off the people trying to find and comfort me. I’d just been told my dad had died, on a cold day on a crowded platform at Liverpool Street Station. It was the worst day of my life—and the beginning of a totally new one.
Now, 15 years and a carousel of therapists (and types of therapy) later, I can speak about it with some rationality: it wasn’t my fault and I couldn’t have done anything differently to save him. From Louis Tomlinson’s recent interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast, it seems he’s reached the same conclusion.
“I felt utterly guilty and I felt powerless,” he shares, when asked about the death of his sister, Félicité, in 2019. “To lose my sister in the manner that we did, even though I knew that it wasn’t fair on myself… I felt like I’d let my sister and I’d let my mum down, really.”
Félicité died as the result of an accidental overdose on a combination of drugs, and Tomlinson describes her as being “fragile” in the time leading up to it. His mother, Johannah Deakin, died in 2016 from acute leukaemia, and his friend and One Direction bandmate Liam Payne after falling from a hotel roof in 2024.
“I felt that I’d failed her,” Tomlinson says of Deakin, referring to the time of his sister’s death, “and I know if she was here now she would say that you didn’t. But it doesn’t change the feeling.”
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The words of people like Tomlinson, or like Andrew Garfield, who open up so candidly about their experience of grief—from the disbelief in the horrific early days and wrestling with what more you could have done, through to reaching some form of acceptance—are so important. Death happens. It will touch all of us at some point. Avoiding that reality won’t make it go away.
What both men have done is, through a process of private reflection—and what I’m assuming is a commitment to some form of trauma or bereavement therapy—show that you will ultimately come to understand what’s within your control and what isn’t. Their open admissions illustrate how certain human experiences, loss included, are universal, regardless of how many platinum albums or blockbuster franchises you have on your CV.
On World Mental Health Day, I couldn’t be more grateful to Louis for his honesty about what it’s like to lose the people you love—and the strength to be gained as you slowly heal.