When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn’t return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

I felt caged with loneliness.

I’m only just discovering that how someone behaves in everyday life gives no clue how they’ll be when it counts.

I reminded you I studied literature, didn’t I? I’ve had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they had always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than providing an uplifting literary score to it.

Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because your were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthod – was that to replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now.

For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn’t want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult.

Bubonic plague is ‘natural,’ I snapped back. Doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too – yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

Already you were going into the past. People think it’s reassuring to say “life carries on”; don’t they understand that it’s the fact your life carries on, while the person you love’s does not, that is one of the acute anguishes of grief?

She pans life for gold and finds it daily.