I have a fond memory from a Monday a month or so after my mum died. My friend Deb’s son, then three years old, was playing hide and seek with my daughter of the same age. He picked a delightfully impressive hiding place, wedging himself into the bottom of my floor-to-ceiling shelves.
He was wearing camouflage print and against the usual domestic detritus on our shelves proved genuinely difficult to find. Quite a feat. I properly laughed, for which I was truly grateful.
It had been quite a while since I had laughed like that. Deb was there to deliver dinner for us all; something she had promised to do a few days earlier. A family meal, every Monday, for the next few weeks.
“That is beyond nice of you, but way too much of an ask,” I said. “OK, but you’re not asking, I’m just doing it,” she replied. “Just accept and enjoy while you get through the grey.
” Grief can come in many shades. For me, there was the glowing red panic of my mum’s cancer prognosis that was falling off a cliff so fast we could barely keep up. Then there was the searing white heat of her actual death, and the blinding fame that comes with being the bereaved at the centre of a tragic circus.
And then came the grey. That point when I was due to get to back to normal life, except everything was entirely abnormal because how could it possibly be anything else? A meteor had struck and left a gaping abyss in my world which I was somehow meant to avoid falling into. Deb intuited Mondays were my g.
