Justin Myers’ piece was deeply moving and made me think about grief that falls outside expected patterns, like family, or, in my case, one’s immediate social circle (‘It was a bad dream – but I never woke up’: what it is like to lose your best friend, 18 September). I supervised Dan Milner’s PhD thesis on Irish American folk song. Taking on a student in his 70s who was struggling to write felt like a chore. But then Dan stepped into my office and sang one of the songs he was writing about. We found a way to combine his lifetime’s knowledge of folk song with my sense of how to structure a thesis, and he graduated and published his research.
