It had taken years for her to understand that her mother’s way of coping with the big things in life was to focus on the small things. By the time you’d made beds, peeled potatoes, cleaned, dusted, shopped and ironed, there was no room for reflection. And if you made a list, you didn’t ever find yourself with a terrifying moment of emptiness. The longer the list, the less likely you were to find yourself with a gap in activities. A gap, she’d discovered, was a grief trap ready to snap its jaws closed.
