Early in life I learned that we lose everyone we love. In a matter of months my mother became unwell, I lost two of my closest relatives and my extended family became irreconcilably estranged. What had been a medium-sized family shrunk to a barely recognisable party of two – that is, if my mother pulled though.
During this time I came to understand something that I had been shielded from as a child: relationships were inherently unstable, love would invariably turn to grief and loss was an undeniable fact of life. Indeed, loving and losing were fundamental terms of the human contract to which I was an unknowing signatory.
