I know that the mother of the girl whose apartment I’m staying in died, and I know she’s now at her father’s wedding to another woman. A very young woman, the same age as the daughter, the event organiser told me. Meanwhile, Jonás, Marina and their father are travelling around Spain. I don’t think Jonás’ father will marry again. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that he could. When he talks about his wife, it sounds like she was the first, and will be the last and only, woman in his life.

Looking closely at someone else’s apartment is a way of putting on someone else’s shoes. Here you can feel the loss in every corner. She lives alone. There’s a magnet from a hospital on the fridge, and photos of her mother at different ages in the living room. In the bedroom there’s an affectionate message of condolence, tacked to a noticeboard with colourful pins. Next to the wardrobe there’s a little black-and-white photo of her mother. Jonás has a photo of his mother in the study we share. A big photo, in black and white, of his mother as a young woman in the seventies, when she was studying chemistry at university. Jonás wanted to put it in the bedroom, and I suggested putting it in the study. ‘Help me choose a place for it in the study,’ Jonás said. Now I wonder if we should have put the photo of his mother in the bedroom.

Suddenly I’m afraid of my mother dying. It’s a fear I’ve had on and off since I was a girl. It doesn’t change, it feels the same as it did when I was seven. Nevertheless, when I turned thirty it settled in a different place. Last year, when the two nurses opened the door to the room and the first thing I saw was the relief on my mother’s face, I realised the story had to be the other way around. In other words, the story goes like this: a child doesn’t want to cause their parents that amount of pain. When the time comes, the child has to bury the parents, not the other way round. It’s the desirable order.

How similar are the desirable and the ideal?