It's harder now, a month on, when the dust has had a chance to settle and it begins to dawn on us that she's not away on holiday or that she's not hiding away somewhere else. At first it was an almost relief, knowing that she wasn't feeling pain anymore or that we didn't have to be there to watch her all the time, that when she'd cough we wouldn't have to run and see that she was still as we'd left her, rather than lying on the floor as we'd found her so many times before, neck all bent up and uncomfortable because she couldn't find the strength to move. It was easier to know that she couldn't feel that shame anymore, to know that now she wouldn't worry or that she wouldn't have to feel that guilt for being a burden. Maybe now she feels nothing, but maybe nothing's better than that. Cancer took her long before death did. You see so many films and read so many books and it's all cancer. The big C. The silent hush. The sad story with the predictable endings. Don't listen to what they tell you. Sometimes it's not as difficult. Sometimes it's not as easy. I felt anger so many times just because she was so sick and so much in the way, and that causes me more guilt than I can say, but we're all human and we all have only so much strength and so much capacity to be good, helpful souls. You know, I sat in the room with her the day before she died, just the two of us, and she was long gone. We don't know if she could hear, but I held her hand and I missed her already, and sometimes I wasn't really sure if she was still alive or if she had already died. I fell asleep that night, the first time I had in the longest while, and she passed right then, when everybody else was in the kitchen drinking tea. It wasn't the lack of movement in her chest as she refused to breathe or it wasn't the dog collapsing in the hall and hiding under the bed. It was the total change. The yellow, plastic skin. It made it so difficult to look and to really see. It made the dirty, plastic bracelet around her wrist seem so much less poignant. It was difficult to understand how three children so alive could come from something so dead. Everybody said that she hadn't looked as well in a long time. Truth is, I don't know if they mean it or if they're just saying it, and everybody knows it's a lie but it feels better to try to pick something positive out from underneath all the sadness. To me, she just looked dead. The furthest thing from life and living that anybody could ever imagine.