My mother died on a Tuesday. One moment, the world was a place where I had a parent, and the next, it wasn’t. I remember feeling like something elemental was wrong, like I’d woken up and found the sky green and the grass blue, and was expected to pretend this was normal. She was cremated, and Kieran and I took a boat out to the Isles of Shoals. We scattered her ashes on the sea, and I like to think the tide swam her back to Ireland.
