I know the girls are doing this to make sure I’m not on my own, and to keep an eye on me and see how I’ve been doing. Well, I’m as they left me, I guess. I’ve not been back to work – my usual employers have told me to take as long as I need – and the visitors and callers have slowly stopped. I’ve come to realize that grief generates a morbid curiosity in others, creating a huge urge to get in touch and almost claim part of the loss from me. Part of me has enjoyed hearing the tales of Pia I’d not heard before or had perhaps forgotten, but alongside that is the endless list of offers. Offers we all know are empty.

‘You will call if you need anything, right,’ offers a ‘friend’ I’ve not seen since our wedding day.

‘Of course,’ I reply, knowing full well I won’t.

Empty noise, but words that have to be said by them and me regardless. It’s part of the act and the roles we must play, because just like every other part of life death comes with a guilt, and an expectation of how to behave. It’s never enough to say you’re sorry for the loss without feeling like you have to remove the pain or sorrow somehow. The truth is we all know we can’t. That empty void of loss cannot be filled, no matter how many well-meaning gestures are thrown into it.

I don’t know.

My mind runs through circles and thinks different things daily. All I know is that after the initial shock of death, the wanting to share the pain or ‘fix the problem’, things go silent. People are waiting for me to start ‘moving on’. Whatever that means.

Because of the lull, it’s mostly been me in the flat.

Our flat.

Isolation, which I guess is what this has become, has been a cathartic experience. I sit. Sometimes thinking, sometimes not. Then I’ll get waves of having to do things.

I wish there was more of her stuff to sort. With her clothes gone I continued with Pia’s Rules of Death (I do wish she’d come up with a softer name for it, but I guess it is what it says on the tin) and started tackling the bookshelves, her bills and receipts – transactions for silly things like coffee, salads or our weekly shop, but I devoured every single one. Willing them to trigger a memory and give me something more, bring me back some piece of her no matter how trivial.