For my part my father had died three years earlier, when I was fourteen, and I was still emerging from that dark tunnel. He'd been in Bosnia, and although I was vaguely aware of the danger he encountered there on a daily basis, nothing could prepare me for the shock of it actually happening. There were moments when I thought I'd never survive. The initial shock, the impact, took weeks to sink in, for Mum too. It was as if we'd both been blasted into the sky by the landmine ourselves, and the pain didn't show any sign of abating.

We'd clutched each other for days, and then un-clutched and avoided each other, before clutching back again, like magnets. We literally didn't know what to do with ourselves. If we were together, we needed to be apart. If we were apart, a walk along the cliffs alone, we needed to fly back to each other's side. I remember running over two miles once, through Hogan's meadows, down the Bolithos’ track, hands trembling to open the back garden gate and race down the lawn. I remember going upstairs, weeks after, into my bedroom. Then Mum's. Then down again to the kitchen. Then outside. Then shrieking up at the sky. "I don't even know where to be!" I'd raged. "I don't know how to be!" Mum had run out and held me and we'd sobbed and held on tight. But tears like that were rare. Mostly we were numb. I hesitate to say this, but a terrible lingering disease at least gives some warning. This was a whole chapter, the best chapter, ripped violently from a book.

And we were such a happy band of brothers, we three. Mum hadn't been able to have any more after me, and though they'd briefly thought about adopting, they later told me they realized they were actually terribly happy, and lucky, so they didn't. I think because they were so in love, one was enough.

"We're a tripod," Dad would say, when I was little. Or, "a three-legged stool,” or "a three-legged race.”

“That's two people," I'd point out.

“So it is. Well, you're the funny leg in the middle," he'd say, making me squeal with indignation.

When I was even younger, he'd read me Aesop's Fables at bedtime. Our favorite was the one about the nasty vixen mother with all her fox cubs, who taunts the lioness, who's only got one. Together, Dad and I would widen our eyes and chant the last line: "Yes, but mine is a lion!" We'd roar and flex our claws. As he snapped the book shut and got up to go, I'd employ delaying tactics: "Ess! I'm a lioness!"

"Of course you are." He'd smile from the doorway. "And, as we know, those are far more dangerous."