And I began making sense of how much losing my grandparents had affected me. I realised that I hadn’t wholeheartedly grieved my fun, kind, wise grandma because I had converted that sadness into love for my newly-widowed grandpa. When he died, it felt like two losses at once.

By reminding myself that losing grandparents is just part of life, I didn’t give myself permission to mourn the balmy days spent in their garden with my sisters while Grandma plied us with ice lollies; Jewish festivals sitting around their dining table; the hour-long phone-calls because I loved speaking to them so much. Their world was my world for the most formative years of my life, and then it was gone. With them, it felt like my childhood had officially ended. There were two fewer people in the world who loved me unconditionally, and the weight of that recognition was crushing. It’s just like how Ann Napolitano puts it in her novel, Hello Beautiful: “I didn’t know that you can lose someone, and that meant you lost so much else.”

“I thought I had moved past the grief of losing two people I loved... then I had a mental breakdown”