Tell Me How This Ends

by Jo Leevers

Jokes, in her experience, feel like a ball thrown at great speed: hard to catch; even trickier to keep a rally going. And Henrietta has never been a games person.

That’s the problem with Annie’s memories: for every nice one she wants to talk about, a worse one zips in right behind it, whispering about the bad times.

‘The funny thing is . . .’ Here, Annie pauses to drink her tea. ‘When you look back, you don’t see your own life in an orderly way. It’s more like snapshots – like in a photo album. And sometimes it’s hard to remember the bits in between, like what happened the moment before the photo was taken or just after. Do you know what I mean?’

Here it comes again, thinks Henrietta, that old feeling of being on the fringes of a club, discovering that everyone else has been a fully paid-up member for ages while she’s still trying to figure out the rules.

At first, you’ll feel as if a huge hole has opened up in front of you. But slowly the edges will soften and the hole will start to fill up. As time goes on, you won’t fall into it quite so often and eventually you’ll be able to stand on the edge and look into it.

Remember, grief is the price we pay for love. Be kind to yourselves – the first year will be the hardest – and love yourselves as much as I love you.

the gaps in conversation, the moments when people fall silent, are just as important as the words they say.

‘Some people say it gets easier, but I think you just adapt. The grief doesn’t go; you just mould yourself around it.

Hen, I reckon chronology is overrated. If I’ve learned anything from the past few years, it’s this: what matters most is the here and now, not what happened before.’

Henrietta’s sad story about her brother was a reminder of what happens when you bottle something up: it doesn’t go away, it just seeps into everything, taints your whole life.