I had written in the past about the colours of mourning – black in Britain, white in Hong Kong, yellow in Brittany, mauve for ‘half’ mourning as you begin to emerge from the first hard frost of grief.* But now I understood mourning clothes for the first time. I needed an armband, a ribbon, any kind of sign that would be understood by strangers and friends to say I couldn’t be relied on, that I was to be treated carefully, that I was not, for a while, in this world.
