The carved pumpkin on the doorstep is already softening to flaccid mush, its comic-grotesque face collapsing. The rituals of Samhain have long helped us to keep those who are gone present, or at least a little closer than gone. On the night when the veil between here and what follows was considered thin enough to pass through, you’d leave the door on the latch so that anyone who needed could walk back through it and come home.

The loss of a person who feels essential to us is a pain that alters us forever after. And yet amid all its size and loudness, grief conceals a subtler horror which is also, punishingly, its great gift – the realisation that we can actually live without someone whose loss feels like the end of us too.

At first, the grief is total and paralysing. Then, slowly – sometimes so slowly you think it can never happen – it recedes whether or not you give it permission to. You laugh suddenly – naturally and without thought – at something funny and feel monstrous.

It occurs to you one day a few years in that you have passed an entire morning without thinking of them, and you are light, and you are heavy. You forget their voice. Their face returns only in partial memory, a movement of the mouth, a look in the eyes, the shape of their hands. We lose parts........

© The Irish Times