Hardly anyone sees the good in death, Dr Logan, I understand that. But how can we appreciate joy if we don’t know sorrow? And think of the good done in the name of those who die early. The charities and foundations that people set up. The vows they make to themselves. And if bereavement takes you to the edge of something, Dr Logan, maybe that’s somewhere you needed to go, for your own sake, to forge a happier or more purposeful life. I don’t know, Dr Logan, you tell me. Has your daughter’s death changed you for the better?

‌Meditation

Since he lodged his report on April, his days have more hours in them. He slips into meditation as a newly built vessel slips from its launch into the water. Not deliberately: not by plumping a cushion in a hushed room, lighting a candle, selecting – so beloved of Rachel at the time of Flora’s conception – ambient music sprinkled with Himalayan bells. But accidentally, several times a day, he finds he has dissolved into a state of simply being.

At his desk, he comes to a standstill, his hands rested on the laptop’s keyboard like a pianist waiting for the crowd to hush. He falls into stillness, a limitless ocean of nothing: no land, no weather. Sometimes, in the quiet, an idea will arise like some great leviathan, coming up from the depths, and he knows it is not a thing he thought into being but rather something that inhabits those depths, making itself known. The resonant flesh and slippery skin and unblinking eye of it only turn into words as it breaks the surface. What unpeels first is language.

He takes his journal from behind the row of Jung and writes: