Guardian readers on the poems that help them remember the loved ones they’ve lost

This week we launched our Poems to remember video series, with actors including Helena Bonham Carter and Stephen Mangan performing poetry that reminds them of someone they’ve lost, to mark tomorrow’s “Celebration Day”, a new initiative to honour the lives of loved ones no longer with us.

With that in mind, for today’s newsletter I asked our readers to write in with the poems that remind them of loved ones they have lost – have your tissues at the ready. And broadcaster and author Naga Munchetty shares her reading recommendation.

Guardian reader Alan came across When I Have Fears by Noël Coward by accident, “on a piece of paper inside a book in a charity shop”. It captured what he was feeling at the time, having retired in order to look after his partner, who had terminal cancer. “I read it at his funeral,” Alan says. “We had 24 glorious years together and he is still very much with me in my heart, in the house and garden we bought years ago.” The poem’s ending – “How happy they are I cannot know, / But happy I am who loved them so.” – was hard to read aloud, he says, “but I got there, just”.

Meanwhile another reader, Mary, told us about her father, a miner, who “insisted on the importance of education and instilled that belief in his four children”.

A poem he loved to quote was Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, she says, “especially the lines ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air’. I know that when he quoted them he was thinking of the many men and women who never got the chance of that precious start in life, something which we ourselves should never take for granted.”

Tricia wrote in to tell us about her brother, who died when he was three and she was four. Reading Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break, about the loss of his own younger brother, “brings [her] back to that time so suddenly,” she says. The poem “captures the shuffling, awkward, desperately shadowed-by-grief period afterwards,” she adds. “I only read it when I’m feeling up to it.”

Jon told us The Listeners by Walter de la Mare reminds him of his mother. “I can hear her very vividly saying ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door’,” he says. “She loved poetry and playing the piano and she died in front of me, rather unexpectedly in 1983. For years that was the only memory, the horrible death, but now things like this poem are coming back.”

“Most poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins remind me of my son, Christopher, whom we lost in 2017,” says another reader, Georgia. “Especially the poem Pied Beauty,” which “resonates with Christopher’s wit and ability to perceive beauty in all things counter, original, spare, strange”.

Prue reads Atlas by UA Fanthorpe as a “thank you” to her husband, Tone. “He was a 6’5” big man, with a big voice, a big personality and an even bigger heart. In spite of the size of his presence he was someone who would quietly help anyone and was my ‘Atlas’ in a way that allowed me to be ‘me’.”

And Maureen remembers her friend Aileen by reading Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNeice, a poem she had loved. “MacNeice was born in Belfast as was I, Aileen in Downpatrick,” Maureen says. “We shared a love of art and connected through our shared cultural heritage.”

Suswati told us about her late grandfather, who fled Bangladesh during the partition, “hidden inside a milk barrel with absolutely nothing”. Thinking of him, she is reminded of Benjamin Zephaniah’s words in We Refugees:

We all came from refugees
Nobody simply just appeared,
Nobody’s here without a struggle,
And why should we live in fear
Of the weather or the troubles?
We all came here from somewhere.

It’s really easy to see A Little Life by Hanya Yanagiharaas a story of trauma, tragedy, abuse, neglect and misery. It isn’t. It’s a love story between four boys who are challenged in ways that are sometimes inhumane, almost unbelievable, but whose emotions are very real. When you see young men who grow into mature men support each other and forgive and love without judgment, it’s a wonderful thing. The fact that it’s written by a woman has always surprised me because she depicts men’s emotions and fears with such intimacy. The book was adapted into a play starring James Norton, which focuses a lot on the misery. Though it was brilliant, I thought that was unfortunate when I went to see it, because I’ve always come away from reading A Little Life thinking that love can conquer all, and I’m not a romantic by any means. For me, this is a book I’d give to friends because they need to read it, and every person I’ve given it to has loved it.

• It’s Probably Nothing: Critical Conversations on the Women’s Health Crisis (and How to Thrive Despite It) by Naga Munchetty is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.