I’m wearing a pair of my grandad’s thick woollen socks and I think my teeth have finally stopped chattering.

They know Joe’s funeral was this morning, but neither of them are in good enough health that they could attend. My grandfather is now entirely immobile. His days are spent being hoisted by carers from his adapted bed to his hospital-issue bed and back again. He is a prisoner in his own house and, increasingly, a prisoner in his own mind. There are days when he doesn’t so much as utter a word, Granny tells me. Other days he gets agitated wondering when ‘his Natalie’ will come to visit.

Today, he is staring at me through cloudy eyes, his jaw slack. He is trying to place me. To remember who I am and what I am to him, and I’m reminded once more of just how cruel life can be.

Granny does her best to be positive, but she is broken. She has been broken since the day my mother died. I do as much as I can to help them, but over the last few weeks that has been very little. Still, they never make me feel guilty. I think they carry their own guilt at not being able to take care of me after Mammy died. We, all of us, are weighed down by guilt.

When I arrived at their door I was barely coherent. My grandmother didn’t ask questions. She just pulled me in through the door and set about making me feel better, looking after me as if I was still that scrappy little girl who had clung to her legs on the day my mother was buried. I don’t know how I’m going to tell her about Mammy’s grave. I don’t know how she will react. I decide just to blurt it out.

‘Granny,’ I start. ‘I’m really sorry, but I have some bad news. They put him in Mammy’s grave with her.’

I start to cry and I can’t even bring myself to look at my grandmother’s face. I hear a sharp intake of breath and a whispered ‘Jesus, Mary and St Joseph’ and that tells me what I need to know.

I lift my head. ‘I don’t know how it happened. I know you were both to be buried with her. I don’t know if Ciara did it to spite us all, but she says she didn’t and I’m just so sorry …’ I crumple.

‘Hush, pet.’

My grandmother’s voice is soft. I feel the gentle pat of her hand on my knee.

‘I don’t want you getting upset over it. I suppose he’d every right to be buried with her.’

She is trying to soothe me, but I can’t help but notice the defeated tone in her voice. Her hands are shaking just ever so slightly, enough to give it away that she is struggling. As if her life isn’t hard enough already.

I know that I will never, ever tell her just why he had no right to ever be near to my mother again. Why he should never, even in death, be allowed near another person again. It would kill her.