My mother’s house looks exactly as she left it.

Two novels sit by the armchair, their pages neatly marked for book group. Pinned to the noticeboard is a shopping list in only slightly shaky writing, with “FRUIT!” in urgent capitals, and “make soup” underlined. The sole outward signs of something missing are her cats twining needily around me – loneliness having finally overcome their innate horror of visitors – and the one thing I can’t bear to look at, which is the empty hospital bed marooned bleakly in the sitting room. Delivered by social services when it was deemed she could no longer manage stairs, it is now stripped bare, awaiting collection. Another family will be needing it.

This is not my childhood home – my parents moved here only a few years ago – but it’s the one, I suppose, where childhood formally ended. Washing up at her kitchen sink a fortnight ago, looking out at the same scarlet fuchsia I remember blazing in the garden when my father died, it struck me for the first time that soon I would no longer be anyone’s daughter. What I didn’t know then was that the loss of both parents would feel less like the end of a relationship and more like its transition to a new stage, of finally being able to see them clearly as people in their own right.

I thought I’d nailed that years ago, but of course I was wrong. When news spread of her diagnosis – an aggressively fast-moving cancer, erupting from nowhere to overwhelm her in six weeks – my mother’s friends descended in hordes, bringing soup and cake and clove-scented sweet peas from their gardens. But they also brought stories I hadn’t heard before. Though my father was the outwardly gregarious one and my mother more........

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