In 1937, even though banned by the Nazis from producing her work, the artist Käthe Kollwitz secretly made one of her last major pieces. Just 40cm high, it is a sculpture of the draped figure of a mother, sharing a silhouette while cradling her grown son.

Twenty-three years after her son Peter’s death, at the age of eighteen, in the first world war, Kollwitz wrote in her diary, ‘It has now become something of a pietà. It is no longer pain but reflection.’

As the 29th anniversary of my late partner Lawrence’s death on 10th July 1995 approaches, I think I know something of what Kollwitz meant. Grief is unending but its form and resonance evolve constantly. It may become less preoccupying. Yet it is scarcely less intense when it finds you. And it does.

Lawrence died in a plague rather than a war. Both great ruptures, both global. Both replete with monumental loss. And yet in amidst the numbers, there are deeply personal stories which will only ever be truly known and felt by the bereaved and those who perished.

In the first few months after Lawrence’s death, grief was a literal howl. In the early years which followed, its impact was all too real — an inability to build new relationships, a volatility which spilled over into big life decisions. And ultimately, seven years later, a massive mental breakdown which culminated in a failed suicide attempt.

Of course, grief is compound and cumulative. It does not exist in a vacuum and its impact becomes entangled with losses and trauma which came before it. To borrow a metaphor from my late friend Tim, whose death from AIDS came 18 months before Lawrence’s, it seeps into life’s already tatty carpet.

Yet despite the indelible mark left on my life by Lawrence’s death, my memorialising of it remained a largely private affair for two decades. Each year on 10th July I would find a quiet place to delve into my memories. Mine and mine alone.

On the first anniversary there was a small flurry of messages, just a fraction of the deluge which had come in the days after his death. In succeeding years that small flurry diminished to barely a handful, for the most part just an exchange between Lawrence’s mum and me.

We had been together with him at the end and the bond born out of that shared moment lived on pretty much until she died last year. I knew it wasn’t that others didn’t remember him or wouldn’t be doing so on the anniversary. It was just that their grief had taken a different course.

The first time I ventured into the public sphere with my grief was in 2012. It was an outburst from the late Archbishop Philip Tartaglia about the death of the Labour MP, David Cairns, from pancreatitis which provoked me to take up blogging. And in doing so I drew parallels between the stigma which clung to his and Lawrence’s deaths — just because they were gay.

It would be three more years, and the 20th anniversary of Lawrence’s death, before I used the blog to try to articulate something about the meaning of the grief I continued to experience. I think by then, to draw on Kollwitz’s diary entry, the pain of grief in a habitual, everyday sense had subsided. I finally had the space and distance to reflect.

Reflection isn’t about the absence of pain. Its intermittent presence can be as acute as ever; I still howl sometimes. But it is enabled by perspective which is nigh on impossible in the immediate throes of grief.

It is not so much that time heals but distance does enhance understanding. And in doing so it also allows happiness to transcend sadness in the mind’s eye. As Virgina Woolf said in her diary:

‘At the moment I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.’

For the longest time after he died, I could not look at a photograph of Lawrence and me at Pride taken by friends just two weeks before his death. Pain defied reflection. I’m not sure my emotions will ever be complete, but I can see the beauty in that photograph now.

Since that first articulation on the 20th anniversary, I have revisited our lives together, his death and the plague which took him, many times. My storytelling has been aided and abetted by the arrival of another plague and in the midst of it the telling of the one we had already endured by Russell T Davies in It’s A Sin.

Every journey through grief is unique. Its contours and features are as many and varied as those we have lost. One of the things I only came to understand fully with the passage of time was that for Lawrence and me, grief began when we met 10 years before he died, and he told me he was HIV positive.

There was no cure. No knowing how much time he had. Even in its most joyful moments — and there were many — ours was a relationship framed by grief. It was part of the contract we entered into when I didn’t walk away.

For me, memorialisation has become something of a vocation. It doesn’t have to, and I didn’t plan it that way. Sometimes I wonder if I bang on about the epidemic too much. I said as much to a nurse who cared for Lawrence back then when we exchanged messages on World AIDS Day last year.

She had born witness to the tidal wave of grief which the epidemic brought. Her reply came hard and fast — ‘don’t ever stop talking about it.’

For the time being at least I will heed her words. But even if I stop, grief’s journey will go on. Sometimes loudly, mostly quietly, always present. Grief is not the price we pay for love. It is love. And it does not leave.

With thanks to John Kampfner whose reference to Käthe Kollwitz’s diary in his book In Search of Berlin provided the inspiration for this piece