“It wasn’t so very long after that picture was taken that he died,” she says. “A year. Maybe two.”

“Oh,” I say, shocked. He looks so alive in the picture. “I’m sorry.”

“Cancer. He smoked like a chimney of course. We all did back then; didn’t know it was bad for you.”

I wonder suddenly if that’s what she cries about. “Does it get easier?” The words are out before I’ve even really thought them.

She looks at me; thinks about it. “When someone you love first dies, they’re all you can see, aren’t they? All you can hear? Blotting everything else out.”

I nod, hardly breathing.

“That changes,” she says. “They get quieter over the years. They still whisper to you sometimes, but the world gets louder. You can see it and hear it again. There’s a gap in it, where they used to be. But you get used to the gap; so used to it that you hardly see it.” She takes my hand in her fragile, old one. “And then some days, out of nowhere, you’re making the tea or hanging out the washing or sitting on the bus and it’s there again: that aching, empty space that will never be filled.”

—Clare Furniss, The Year of the Rat, p 135

Photo by The Jaan on Flickr