Grief feels like a thin, lead blanket you can’t set aside. Not too much weight to walk up the stairs or check email or twitter or add tasks to deal with the day after. You can move around the surface of things.

Sit down to work? Not yet. You can’t.

You have the sharp, sudden eruptions of grief — those feel good and right and awful, the whole of you scrunched up in your face — but the heavy spaces between stop you doing more than the first step, the first if-this-than-that thought.

Remember to eat, you say. Remember to eat. And again, remember to eat. You think you can manage that. Sleep, though, is lost. Maybe it’s over there, on the day after the day after.