Grief is a strange, terrible, necessary thing. It allows us to process our loss and the change from what life was to what life is now, without them.

I’ve been a Doctor Who fan now for forty several years and witnessed every Doctor’s ‘death’ and regeneration since Tom Baker’s, live and in ‘real-time’. But none has rocked me to my core like the 13th Doctors. Which to many may seem strange. My childhood Doctor, Peter Davison’s traumatic regeneration whilst saving Peri cut me deep, that hurt but the next Doctor was right along, and despite a rocky start I loved him straight away. His regeneration just left me numb and cold given the circumstances behind the scenes that led to it. By the time the seventh Doctor was mown down in a hail of gunfire I was 19, bitter and cynical and losing interest. Plus, he hadn’t been onscreen really for a long time (other than various tv spots and Dimensions in Time) so I wasn’t actually sad to see him go.

Now, being the age I am and with the history I have of avidly collecting VHS releases, poring over coffee table books and celebrations I’ve always had a classic Doctor Who bias. That was, until our first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker hit our screens with a burst of energy, joy, enthusiasm and optimism. Suddenly I was watching the Doctor I’ve always believed lived below each incarnations various personalities and quirks. Here was ‘The Doctor’. The definitive article writ large before my eyes. I’m not going into the stupid and pointless cyclical arguments about changing genders, casting, scripts ‘oh… The writing is sooo baaaddd…’ yawn. I don’t care about that. I’m too burned out with years of the same debates trolling up and down social media, YouTube and various websites. I don’t really care what ‘you’ think about Doctor Who, I care about what ‘I’ think about Doctor Who at this point. Selfish? Ignorant? Maybe, but Doctor Who has a deep, personal meaning for each of us, so that’s how we all see it (hence the arguments).

Suffice to say, Jodie Whittaker became ‘MY’ Doctor. My escape, my hope and my hero. Her era is one that brings me nothing but joy, visually, aurally, stylistically… In every way it resonates with me and my long held understanding of what ‘Doctor Who’ is and should be and more importantly WHO the Doctor is, and should be.

So, for the first time, when the inevitable happened and the Doctor fell once again to their foes the effect was immediate and profound. I’ve been there countless times before but this one… This one hurt and actually still hurts.

It was in chatting to a couple of friends over the last few weeks that I’ve realised this is grief. I can’t lift myself out of the doldrums, I can’t get excited for what is to come because I’m still mourning what has gone. Maybe in writing this and admitting it to myself that I’ve actually been so deeply affected by a fiction, a character’s ‘death’ or, I suppose more precisely, departure, has hit me as hard as the friends and family I’ve lost along the way. Maybe it was that my family and my wife were going through the hardest of times at the time of Jodie’s run that it’s impacted me, all those pent up emotions from reality safely distributed into fantasy.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a massive nerd and Doctor Who has always been my escape from the misery of reality, my safe place. And with the 13th Doctor that was like a womb of safety. That was the pure embodiment of all my hope and wonder at the universe. My inspiration, my essence.

Now, six months on I think I’m ready to revisit the headstone, let go of the grief and instead revel in the fact that I have had something that left me with this grief. Maybe I’m ready to look forward to what is yet to come. Just like every time before, just like each regeneration, each production team change. It’s time to dust off the scarf, grab a fresh stick of celery, stroke my cat badge for luck, shout Alons-y and Geronimo at the Universe and accept that Doctor Who, in all it’s wonderful shapes, forms and guises is my home, my safety, my happiest of happy places regardless and get back in the TARDIS, setting course for the future!

Oh, brilliant!!