There is a particular cruelty in the way the world insists on continuing. Even before my youngest aunt’s bier was out of the house, tea arrangements were being made for everyone. People would need tea after the cremation. My brother was driving me, my mother and her septuagenarian brother, the widower who was totally unprepared to cremate his much younger wife, to the middle-of-the-city crematorium. All of us complained about the potholes on the road. And I thought: This is the part they leave out. The tea and the potholes.

Grief, as it is sold to us in elegies, in the long third acts of prestige dramas, in the memoirs that win prizes and generate profiles, is a grand and annihilating weather. It’s like a storm. It descends. It levels. It sometimes makes the bereaved luminous with suffering. Those left behind are rendered interesting in their ruin. We are given widows who wander. We are given fathers who drink themselves into a useful metaphor. What we are not given, with any real frequency, is the dusting. The bathrooms are always wet because there are too many people in the house now. The specific horror of realising, four days after the cremation,........

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