He had now lived without her for nearly a year and it didn’t seem to feel any better these days than it did in the early ones. He tried to think of what she would tell him. She would say: This is happening to your body, it is not happening to you. Was death the same? Was this grief the same? Because it felt so physical to him. There was no way to ask her, which felt like suffocation. The only thing that had changed this year was that he went from being someone who was sad that his mother hadn’t lived long enough to see him get well to being someone who knew he never was going to.
