Two months since mummy died. It is so heavy my heart has pooled in my socks, or so it feels. I can’t read. Is what I wrote twelve plus twelve hours ago (and some), in a notebook I had dragged with me to the park, where I sat in the…

Looking at the sinking branches of a weeping willow, I am reminded of Barthes, who wrote of the grief he bore after his own mother’s death: “it comes over me when our love for each other is torn apart once again. The most painful point at the most abstract moment.” …

the call of the cult of grief compels me to tug my little boat to the grainy shore and row back across the muddy waters to the day that refuses to settle. Back beyond the waterways we’ve already crossed to the deep daylight of this year’s first morning of April. …

Walking with my father I notice that the trees are playing dress up with exploding puffs of blossom slipped on to spite the retreating winter. The light bows out of respect and the horizon blushes at nature’s sudden frivolity. We like it. On a walk in a hazy morning, I…

Some things I wrote down before my mother’s funeral I stand where the sky unravels like unspooled thread between the clouds and shrink myself to the size of a blade of grass. Distilled, I can appreciate the stillness of the dried earth as I run my hands across the grooves…

Love love and love forever As I write, I feel keenly the unreal proportions of living. I am looking at my mother, who lies on a beige, many limbed bed in the centre of a plastic-coated room in a South London hospice. The light comes grey and veiny from the…

Five weeks ago, a palliative care doctor told me that my mother probably wouldn’t live for three weeks longer. She said that each night carried the possibility of death. Her eyes were large and wet with the prognosis; I remember that I did not know what to do with my…

Or to lose in plain sight When you were first ill, when Spring was playing its final (muted) crescendo, I would place my phone beneath the dinner table and press a little red button to record all our supper voices. We were all together then, both by law and by…

midnight transcript Tuesday Looking at you, I was called by sea’s easy metaphor. I was the castaway who cannot swim, you, sinking driftwood from the shattered hull slipping beneath the indigo horizon. Thursday I reach out to touch you. Perhaps I rearranged the folds of your cardigan, or adjusted the…